Millennials have no morals: What I learned from the murder of Phil Masterson

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.

Georgeanne Masterson’s favorite picture of her son.

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…