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Dan Levey: Private Pain, Public Crusade

Private Pain, Public Crusade
The Jewish Week
Gabrielle Birkner

Each week, from the comfort of their living rooms, tens of millions of people watch hardened detectives investigate grisly murders on crime dramas like "Law & Order" and "CSI."

But for Dan Levey, a genial man with an unimposing frame, homicide is not an hour of entertainment that ends with a click of the remote control.

Nine years ago, Levey's brother, Howard, a 40-year-old married father of two, was carjacked in the parking lot of a Phoenix elementary school, a stone's throw from the family's synagogue, Temple Beth Chai. The assailant, now serving a life sentence, fired two shots: The first bullet shattered the car window, and the second bullet, the one that proved fatal, shattered Howard's spine.

Since then, Levey, a Reform Jew, has channeled his private pain, the survivors' pain so often omitted from television storylines, into a public crusade to help the families and friends of the approximately 18,000 Americans murdered each year.

He is the president of Parents of Murdered Children (www.pomc.org), an advocacy group whose 19th annual conference, held last weekend in Kansas City, Mo., attracted about 330 people. Break-out sessions at the three-day symposium included "Ask The Medical Examiner," "A Walk Through The Aftermath of Murder" and "When Left Childless."

Levey welcomed the conference-goers with a brief speech in which he quoted Elie Wiesel, the prominent Holocaust survivor and author Levey calls his "hero." "We must take sides," Wiesel said when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. "Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."

Levey went on to urge audience members never to remain silent when seeking justice on behalf of homicide victims.

He said that the Wiesel quote, along with one attributed to King Solomon, "Justice will only be achieved when those who are not injured by crime feel as indignant as those who are", are fastened to the wall of his office at the Arizona state capital, where he serves as the governor's adviser on crime victims.

At the time of his brother's murder, Levey was 34 and was working as a claims adjustor for a national insurance company. He was forced to quit his job, however, after the company threatened to fire him for taking off time during the police investigation and, subsequently, to attend court hearings.


The situation was emblematic of the obstacles crime victims face, not only in the workplace but also in the police station, at the courthouse, and elsewhere, said Levey, who is married and has two sons, 9-year-old Sammy and 7-year-old Benji.

"We're quick to send aid to tsunami victims, to compensate 9-11 victims, and we should, but it's important to remember that on the day our loved one was murdered, we each had our own 9-11 and, in some cases, there was no support," Levey said.

Not long after Levey left his job, he was hired by Janet Napolitano, then the Arizona attorney general, to educate the public about the state's Crime Victims Bill of Rights. He continued to advise Napolitano after she was elected governor in 2002. Since becoming an advocate, Levey crafted legislation allowing crime victims to take unpaid leave to attend court proceedings without fear of being fired, demoted, or harassed; and lobbied law enforcement agencies to provide police reports at no charge to victims of violent crime.

At the POMC conference, attendees could visit the "Murder Wall," a series of wood-mounted plaques, each containing the name of 100 murder victims. The "Murder Wall" is accompanied by notebooks chronicling the victims' lives and their chilling and brutal deaths: the young man bludgeoned for the few dollars he had in his pocket, the woman hacked to death by her estranged husband, the toddler suffocated at a hospital by the nurse who had been caring for him. Also on display were giant photo collages featuring the once-smiling faces of murder victims like Javier David Cisneros, Jennifer Yee, Gil Simon Epstein, and E. LaTraun Parker.

And while bullets don't discriminate, Levey said that among Jewish community and its leaders, there's a sense that murder and other violent crimes are simply not "Jewish issues."

"Murder is a problem that transcends ethnicity, race, religion" and socioeconomic background, Levey said. "Here, at the conference, we see that."

The author's father and stepmother, Larry and Ruth Birkner, were murdered during a robbery in February 2004. She attended the 2005 POMC Conference.

The author is also a victim. In 2004, her father and stepmother, Larry and Ruth Birkner, were murdered during a robbery at their home in Sedona. The killer was convicted and is serving time in the Arizona Department of Corrections.

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