Blair Hornstine is, of course, national news, but those of you outside the mid-Atlantic region might not have heard of Jasmine Karo. She's an 18-year-old New Jersey resident who made headlines last month when she stabbed her abusive father to death inside their Camden County home. Her home life had been so hellish, and her attempts at dealing with that life so awe-inspiring, that she's been treated gently, both by the media and the state, ever since the killing.
Her bail was paid by a NJ Assemblyman's office. A grand jury failed to indict her for the the killing, which is widely considered to have been in self-defense. Support from other abuse survivors has poured in, and an anonymous donor is going to pay for her college education. Her first public interview since the grand jury meeting, which summarizes much of the case, was featured yesterday in the Philly Inquirer.
So what does Jasmine have to do with Blair? Well, local reporters feel there's some yin/yang symbolism in their dissimilar yet simultaneous stories (including the fact that Jasmine felt compelled to skip her graduation ceremony too), and this Philadelphia Inquirer article by Monica Yant Kinney is actually the second article I've seen that compares and contrasts the Girl Who Had Everything with the Girl Who Had Nothing:
The gods must want Blair Hornstine and Jasmine Karo to meet. How else to explain why the teenage twosome keeps landing on the front page and TV at the same time?
In May, Gloucester City residents welcomed Jasmine home from jail with hugs and hot meals...At the same time, almost 20 miles away in Moorestown, someone egged Blair's house...Talk about crime and punishment. A month later, both young women wound up skipping their graduations.
Jasmine...worked her way through high school, supporting her unemployed, alcoholic parents. That she even made it to graduation, given the abuse and neglect she endured, showed plucky perseverance.
For Blair, graduation symbolized the end of a valiant, if misguided, fight to be the one and only Queen of the Quakers at Moorestown High...
The article then notes that both women have recently returned to the spotlight, and that the fathers in both cases have had a profound impact on the young women and on the public's perception of them. While Jasmine continues to defend her dysfunctional family, including the father she stabbed, Blair's been mum on the topic of her dad, who the article describes as a "scholastic Svengali," and perhaps the one truly to blame for Blair being tossed out of Harvard.
Final graf:
This fall, Jasmine Karo will begin studies at Camden County College.
Who knows? Given the way things are going, Blair Hornstine might wind up sitting next to her.
Posted by kswygert at July 15, 2003 01:05 PM