Jarod Lane Deserves the Maximum Penalty for Murdering Jessica Scholl

Dear Judge Yu,

I am emailing you because my friends Stephanie and Doug Scholl's daughter, Jessica, was murdered by Jarod Lane.

I grew up with Stephanie on the south end of Whidbey Island in the 80's. In that time, there were no fast food places and no stop lights. We knew how to get places by landmarks like lopsided barns or "the gravel road past Robin's house." Or because our families had been driving that little community for decades.

We didn't lock our doors and we knew everybody in the grocery store. In short, we were a very large family.

There were times when we didn't get along with our family members - hearts were broken, homecoming queens unseated, parents garnered eye-rolls. The police knew our cars and the preachers knew our parents. The teachers had taught our brothers and cousins, the bus driver was also the butcher, and the gym coach led the men's Bible Study.

Even when we hated each other we loved each other. There was no where else to go. We were stuck on a rock to fight and laugh and cry and reconcile and work together.

During high school most of us "couldn't wait to get off this rock!" Somewhere nobody knew us. Where our laundry may have been dirty, but it was ours.

We deluded ourselves that we’d still be best friends; raise our children together over neighboring fences, work on each others’ cars, feed each others’ pets if we went on vacation.

Stephanie met her husband Doug and somehow she and I ended up in the same community of Renton, Washington. We didn’t plan it. We weren’t “besties.” But we were still, by some unwritten law, family.

Stephanie had one child: a girl who was articulate, beautiful, silly and genuine. Jessica. And since Jessica was Stephanie’s child, and we were family, that made Jessica my child too.

Even as a teen, when natural inclination meant arm-folding and door-slamming, Jessica still enjoyed vacations with her family. Some of them included her boyfriend, Jarod.

The Scholls did what they knew how to do: Welcome someone like they were part of the family. When you were in their house, you were family. Jarod was family.

And then one day he wasn’t.

One day Jarod came to the Scholl’s house and murdered their daughter and set fire to their home. He murdered a member of my family and set fire to my home that day too. Because we are family, their hurts are my hurts.

I hope to never know what it feels like to lose my only child, a daughter named Eva. I certainly don’t claim to hurt as deeply or to have lost as profoundly as the Scholl family has. But if the maximum sentence for murdering a child who belongs to each of the people below is not severe, the ripple effect will never end.

He killed too many of us.

Sincerely,

Kristin Loehrmann
Renton, WA