Millennials have no morals: What I learned from the murder of Phil Masterson
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In the fall of 2011, my friend’s body was found in a wooded area on a Lake Erie island, covered in a tarp and missing his clothes. But what happened to him was no mystery.
I’ll never forget the phone call I answered, mid-morning on a weekday, in the fall of 2011. It was the day after Labor Day, and I’d spent the weekend trying to ignore my looming sense of dread. I blamed my pregnant brain — I was eight months along — and got back to the daily grind. Until I got the call.
“There’s an article in the Plain Dealer this morning — Phil Masterson? Weren’t you friends with him?”
I remember hearing a sudden burst of static, the kind that happens in old-school horror movies before the killer cuts the victim’s phone line. Looking back, I know that was probably my imagination. But the next words I heard were not.
“He was killed on Put-in-Bay this weekend.”
What do you mean, killed? How? By a drunk driver? I hung up the phone and found out I was late to the media circus — everyone else had found out two days earlier, when I was still at a cabin in Northern Michigan with virtually no cell phone service. Phil Masterson was killed in a “senseless beating,” and a suspect, Zachary Brody, had already been named. Since I was the last to know, I silently promised I’d also be one of the last to forget.
And I didn’t forget, not for a day. I did, however, keep my feelings private for many years. I was married and raising a baby. I was supposed to mutter “what a tragedy” and move on, at least publicly.
But it was that word that stuck in my head: senseless.
That was the word I kept hearing, ad nauseum, to describe Phil’s killing.
Phil Masterson’s lifeless body was discovered in a wooded area on Put-in-Bay Island in Lake Erie, a popular long-weekend destination for Ohioans like us. Phil was found wrapped in a grill tarp and missing his clothes, save for a pair of mesh shorts. He had been savagely beaten, his body covered in bruises. The judge would eventually call it “the worst beating” he had ever seen “inflicted without a weapon.” But an autopsy found that Phil had actually survived the initial assault. The official…
