The Butterfly Effect in Silver Spring. Reflection on the impact of one man's death.

Most everybody has heard of "the house" located in the Woodside neighborhood of Silver Spring. Certainly everybody who practices real estate in Silver Spring is aware of it. When I first got married my wife and I lived in the North Woodside neighborhood, near Snider's supermarket. We loved the area. At the time, the Hecht Company and JC Penny were still located in downtown Silver Spring and it was a nice walk from our house. Woodside is a great place to live and Woodside Park features some of the most upscale homes to be found in close-in Silver Spring. But then there is "the house." A home unfortunate to have two totally unrelated murders take place inside of it. The two crime took place about a decade apart and the victims were on both occasions the owners of the home. As a Realtor I followed the eventual resale of the home out of a morbid professional curiosity more than anything else. You can imagine that a home where two brutal crimes took place is not going to be an easy sell.The last murder occurred in 2010 and the home eventually went to foreclosure and  was totally renovated. It now has new owners. They actually went and changed the street number of the home in an attempt to erase the stigma and bad mojo associated with the home.

I am a bit ashamed to to say that my thoughts were more with the home than the people that the tragedies affected. That changed today when I heard an excellent but sad report on NPR about Brian Betts, the last owner of the home and an up and coming school principal in the District of Columbia. Here is a link to the audio podcast of the story of Brian Betts and Shaw Middle School as reported by NPR. I hope that you will find time to listen to it.

 It got me thinking about one of my favorite childhood stories, Ray Bradbury's " A Sound of Thunder." Where a man is taken back in time to on a guided dinosaur hunt but accidentally changes the course of the future world when he steps on a butterfly that he was not supposed to step on. Thus the chaos theory called the Butterfly Effect.

After hearing this sad tale of a crime committed on one man and the eventual impact it had not just on him and his family but on an entire school and the community that relied on him, the plight of the house really does not seem as significant to me any more. I am glad the home has new owners and they did get a good deal on it. Time will erode the memory of the events that took place within the home. But Shaw Middle School and Brian Betts are gone forever. What a crime that is.