Axe Murderer: My best friend.

Crime: A neighbor’s doorbell camera captured Ewen DeWitt brandishing an axe as nonchalant as a greasy bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Julie Minogue lay in a puddle of blood in her kitchen, a large axe was found on the stove, and their three-year-old son sat on her living room couch, “not crying nor responding to police presence.”

Data: You’ll walk past thirty-six murderers in your lifetime. A one-inch wooden door is the only object separating you from every murderer on Earth. 

Dipping: Addicted to stuffing his gums with Skoal Straight and spitting a putrid fusion of saliva and tobacco juice into a Snapple bottle or Coca-Cola can with the aluminum pop-top ruptured like the skull of his child’s mother, Ewen’s avaricious appetite for “lippers,” “uppers,” and “packing a fatty” led to a labyrinth of oral surgeries.

Fired: An officer of the Milford Police department neglected to follow up on a protective order violation request. “I don’t feel I should be subjected to this abuse any longer,” Julie Minogue wrote in an affidavit three weeks before her death, “I am scared for the safety of my children and I. Ewen has got himself into a lot of trouble with drugs and alcohol, and I’m scared he’s going to kill me.” 

Ice Hockey: A boarding school hockey goon who scored goals. A chunky sack of fat and muscle who played a physical game. Aggressively attacking goalies, blindsiding opponents, Ewen’s greatest moments were fueled by his pregame ritual of guzzling vodka from a Snapple bottle.

Kent School: A snobbish boarding school in western Connecticut where teenagers devolve into kleptomaniacs, drug fiends. Ewen DeWitt was a day student who passed out on our grimy carpet every weekend, during free periods, and Tuesday morning chapel, and those adolescent hangouts turned him into my friend.

Machine Gunner: Lance Corporal Ewen DeWitt was a machine gunner from the War in Afghanistan. Enlisted in Weapons Company, Battalion Landing Team 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit. Lance Corporal DeWitt loved killing humans, mounting an M-2 .50-caliber machine gun, blowing benevolent Muslims to smoldering hunks of shish kabob. Ewen served several tours in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and classified locations. The Marines metamorphosed him into a machine gunner, a fireman, and an axe murderer.

Murder Weapon: No weapon is more atavistic than an axe. The oldest tool in human history, the Acheulean hand axe is a prehistoric stone tool.

Sleepover: Ewen’s parents secretly squirted dish detergent into the bottle of vodka smuggled by his childhood friend. They spewed a furious sermon in the morning—scowled at me like a murderer on our way to church—their car a sweaty bubble of babbling souls.

Tahoe OG Kush: We chain-smoked an eighth of Tahoe OG Kush out of Ewen’s dormer window during the sleepover after his parents went to bed. 

Victim: Forty-year-old Milford mother Julie Minogue was slaughtered in her townhouse on a rainy Tuesday night. The Connecticut Office of the Chief Medical Examiner declared her cause of death, “Chop Wounds and Blunt Impact Injuries of Head, Torso, and Extremities (homicide).” The Milford Police observed “Multiple critical lacerations to her face and skull.”

Witness: Their three-year-old son witnessed the entire crime.

Witness (2): Minogue’s seventeen-year-old son called 9-1-1 to report his mother being assaulted with an axe. Woken by screams, the teen scrambled downstairs and heard DeWitt yelling “You didn’t believe me!” and brandishing a bloody axe over his mother who lay hemorrhaging on the floor. The seventeen-year-old bolted upstairs, locked his door, jammed a chair behind the doorknob, opened his window and punched a hole in the screen. Officers responded within minutes—but the teen jumped out the window fearing the “Milford PD” screams were DeWitt mimicking Milford Police. 

Xebec: A small three-masted Mediterranean sailing ship with lateen sails, formerly used by Algerian pirates. Whistling is shunned at sea because it can summon a storm and anger the gods. Happiness is the sweaty elusive explosion of bliss between the warm womb of a gun truck and an empty desert. A vulnerable god is ushering demons from foreign wars into the hallucinations of heroes, manmade monsters storming the doorways of our mothers and children.

Xoloitzcuintli: Also known as the “Mexican Hairless Dog.” The Dog of Xólotl was created from the Bone of Life by the Aztec god Xolotl—the god of fire, lightning, twilight, twins, lord of monsters, misfortune, sickness, and deformities. Xólotl guards the living and is a soul-dog of the dead during her journey through the Underworld.