Rainier ranger shot
In what is being described as an “assassination,” a park ranger at Mount Rainier was gunned down yesterday. The suspect who did the shooting is still at large, on foot in the park, and more than 100 personnel from a variety of law enforcement organizations are currently searching for him.
The ranger who was killed, Margaret Anderson, was a 34 year-old mother of two who had been working at Mount Rainier for the past four years. Her husband is also a ranger; the couple lived in Eatonville.
The suspected killer is a veteran with combat experience who is believed to have been involved in an incident near Renton earlier in the day that sent four people to the hospital, two of them with serious gunshot wounds. Benjamin Colton Barnes, 24, is described by authorities as a “person of interest,” and is believed to be well armed and very dangerous. Obviously.
While my heart goes out to the victim’s family and her co-workers, I can’t help but wonder how many more of these PTSD events (if indeed that’s what this turns out to be), we’re going to see here in this county, this state and this country. The cost of war goes much farther than the price of bombs and bullets and the impacts are felt thousands of miles from the battlefield.
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