commentary by Patrick H. Moore
The big question for singles is how best to meet members of the opposite sex (or the same sex if that is your inclination). Are you simply looking for a brief “hook-up” or are you inclined toward something more permanent? Are you open to meeting lots of different people and then narrowing them down to Ms. or Mr. Right, or do you have specific requirements? Good luck if you do — I’ve always chuckled at the personal ads where The Searcher spells out a long list of very specific (and perhaps impossible to find) desired characteristics in a prospective partner.
No matter how you go about it, The Search can be frustrating and fraught with disappointment. And then, especially if you’re a woman, there’s always the danger issue. In a world fraught with peril, the last thing you want to do is find yourself in a compromising position with Mr. Right only to discover that he’s a stoned killer with a Mother Complex and he’s about to take your life.
One common way to try to narrow down the possibilities is to go out with someone who you believe shares common interests. This is seemingly what 26-year-old Vernicia Woodard, who reportedly has family members in law enforcement, did when she met she met up with Atlanta Police Officer Tahreem Zeus Rana last week for what she probably assumed would be a “getting to know you” evening with the pleasing possibility of romance.
Police believe that Woodward, who recently moved to Atlanta from New York, and has an 8-year-old child, met Officer Tahreem Zeus Rana on Craigslist.
Steve Visser of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution writes:
Investigators linked the gruesome homicide to APD Officer Tahreem Zeus Rana through the woman’s phone records, Hapeville Police Chief Richard Glavosek said Thursday. (Hapeville is a Fulton County community of slightly over 6,000 adjacent to Atlanta.)
Glavosek told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that Vernicia Woodard’s phone records led to Rana. Detectives then located Woodard’s posting on Backpage.com, a classified and hook-up website, where investigators believe the couple met, Glavosek said.
The crime was discovered when a Hapeville city worker found Woodard’s body burning along Elm Street. The authorities have stated that the 23-year-old Rana first shot Ms. Woodard multiple times and then set her body on fire in hopes of destroying the evidence.
Rana was in the process of attempting to flee the country when he was arrested on Thursday. According to Channel 2 Action News, officers apprehended him bright and early at around 8:30 a.m. at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. Rana, who had been placed on the no-fly list, was reportedly headed to Monterrey, Mexico, which may have been a stop on the way to India.
After his arrest, Hapeville police booked him into the Fulton County jail Thursday on charges of murder, arson, kidnapping and tampering with evidence.
Rana waived his first court appearance Friday afternoon and will remain in jail without bond until his preliminary hearing, which is scheduled for Sept. 12 in Fulton Superior Court.
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Local law enforcement personnel is genuinely shocked that the 23-year-old Rana is the prime (and at this point apparently only) suspect in the case, not only because he was a lawman, but because some officers remember him as a kid growing up in Hapeville, Chief of Police Richard Glavosek said.
“They remember him walking to school with his mother,” said the Chief.
Stephen Cushing is the lead Hapeville detective on the case. He “told Channel 2 Action News that investigating Rana was almost surreal because of the young man’s long ambition to become a cop.”
“I’ve been a police officer in the city of Hapeville for 15 years and actually saw this young man grow up and heard him say, ‘When I grow up, I want to be a police officer.”
Rana appears to have gone through the normal channels to achieve his goal. According to his APD personnel file, he earned an associate degree in criminal justice at Atlanta Metropolitan State College, in addition to earning a dual degree with honors in 2011.
During his three years on the force, his evaluations rated him as effective to highly effective in performance of his duties. He did, however, get in three traffic accidents during his time on the job, according to his internal affairs file which was obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Rana had been exonerated in one of the accidents and admonished in a second. An incident from July of this year remains unresolved.
Although the media seems to be discounting the seriousness of these three accidents, in my mind that many wrecks in a relatively short period of time could be seen as an indicator that this young man was, perhaps, a bit of a loose cannon. Still, his lousy driving hardly suggests that he was a “murderer-in-waiting”
Atlanta police department spokesman Carlos Campos described the department as “shocked and saddened.”
“We must allow the justice system to run its course,” Campos said. “But these clearly are very disturbing allegations.”
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My take on this is fairly simple. Placing an ad on Craigslist suggesting that you are interested in romantic encounters is a very bad idea. It’s seems odd that Ms. Woodard would take this foolish step, given that she has at least one family member in law enforcement, but she undoubtedly did not consult with them before “putting herself out there”.
In a more general sense, this young woman’s tragic death hammers home the fact that folks need to be extremely careful in how they meet potential romantic partners. Society is unfortunately full of “nutjobs” and some of them are not only “cracked” but “murderers-waiting-to-happen”.