Orlando is not always what it seems to be.
The sunny family vacation haven is home to Snow White and Harry Potter but also has its dark side. Orlando this year was named the third most dangerous city in the United States (tied with Birmingham, Alabama), according to FBI crime statistics. Nightly TV news in Orlando features a steady diet of stories about murder, drugs, sexual assault and gang violence. It’s enough to make Mickey Mouse start packing heat.
No one symbolizes Orlando’s schizophrenic personality better than Casey Anthony.
The 25-year old Orlando resident presents a pert, pixie appearance, with dark eyes, pointy ears and jet black hair. Diminutive Casey looks like a cast member straight out of a Disney World parade. That’s one reason it’s so jarring that this young woman –dubbed “tot mom” -- is charged with killing her infant daughter, Caylee, in 2008.
Casey Anthony’s ongoing murder trial has turned into Orlando’s biggest attraction since the Magic Kingdom. It’s an ongoing show with plot twists, family secrets and legal machinations – sort of “Perry Mason” meets “CSI.”
While court testimony includes such stomach churning details as decomposing body odor, skeletal remains, bugs eating flesh and a dead child found in a garbage bag – the people in Orlando can’t get enough of it. The whole city has been transfixed into following the daily legal grind of Casey’s case.
Orlando’s TV stations offer gavel to gavel Casey coverage, with analysis and public reaction. Each day, crowds descend on Orlando’s Orange County Courthouse, hoping for a seat.
Sometimes the action in the waiting line is hotter than the courtroom. Last week, a series of scuffles broke out among those battling for seats. It looked like a scene of crazed fans fighting for tickets to a Justin Bieber concert. So the court had to devise a ticket distribution system that would allow the public to sign-in for seats the day before they get in.
It’s all part of the Orlando vibe that to me has become an underlying theme of the Casey Anthony trial. This is a city built on selling illusions but it is no refuge from reality.
In the Orlando of Disney and Universal theme parks, nothing seems real. Out on the city’s mean streets, however, there is no magical escape. Orlando has a violent crime rate of 19.33 per one-thousand residents, according to FBI statistics. That’s nearly 400 percent higher than the national medium.
The dichotomy of Orlando is the dichotomy of Casey Anthony. No one understands that better than Jose Baez, Casey’s defense attorney. “Something’s just not right,” Baez repeated during his opening statement at her trial. He might as well have been talking about Orlando as well as Casey.
Everything about the Anthony household seemed straight out of an Orlando, middle-class fantasy. George Anthony, Casey’s father, and his wife, Cindy, lived at Hopespring Drive, along with Casey and her brother, Lee.
“You can see, it looks like the All-American home,” Baez told the jury as he showed them a picture of the Anthony house. “But,” Baez added “…you never know what goes on behind closed doors. And you never know what secrets lie within.”
The secrets, Baez said, included sexual abuse of Casey by her father, which George Anthony denied in court testimony. There were other tawdry charges as Baez painted a picture of a, “family that is incredibly dysfunctional.” That dysfunction led Casey Anthony to create her own Fantasyland, Baez indicated. Casey invented an imaginary nanny for Caylee, whom Casey called Zanny. When the child was missing, Casey told her family the baby was with Zanny. Casey also spent two years telling her family she worked at the Universal Studios, when she had no job there.
“Casey Anthony was raised to lie," said Baez, who told the jury Caylee wasn’t murdered but drowned in the family swimming pool.
The stress of real life put Casey in her own Twilight Zone, where nothing is real, if you believe Baez. After the death of Caylee, Baez said Casey, “did what she’s been doing all her life: hiding her pain...She went back to that ugly place -- denial. She forced herself to live in a world she wanted to – not the one she was thrust in.”
The prosecution doesn’t see Casey as a victim. They claim Casey is a manipulative liar and cold-blooded killer who mercilessly murdered her two-year old daughter and didn’t even report her missing for 31 days. Like so many others in Orlando, Casey, the prosecution suggested, wanted to party and live the good life.
“Casey Anthony had access to all the pieces of evidence in this case...no one else lied to their friends, to their family, to investigators, no one else benefited from the death of Caylee Marie Anthony. Caylee's death allowed Casey Anthony to live the good life at least for those 31 days," said Prosecutor Linda Drane-Burdick.
The good life. That’s the ultimate Orlando attraction.
http://www.ibtimes.com/blog/pop-watch/casey-anthony-orlando-vibe_109.htm
The sunny family vacation haven is home to Snow White and Harry Potter but also has its dark side. Orlando this year was named the third most dangerous city in the United States (tied with Birmingham, Alabama), according to FBI crime statistics. Nightly TV news in Orlando features a steady diet of stories about murder, drugs, sexual assault and gang violence. It’s enough to make Mickey Mouse start packing heat.
No one symbolizes Orlando’s schizophrenic personality better than Casey Anthony.
The 25-year old Orlando resident presents a pert, pixie appearance, with dark eyes, pointy ears and jet black hair. Diminutive Casey looks like a cast member straight out of a Disney World parade. That’s one reason it’s so jarring that this young woman –dubbed “tot mom” -- is charged with killing her infant daughter, Caylee, in 2008.
Casey Anthony’s ongoing murder trial has turned into Orlando’s biggest attraction since the Magic Kingdom. It’s an ongoing show with plot twists, family secrets and legal machinations – sort of “Perry Mason” meets “CSI.”
While court testimony includes such stomach churning details as decomposing body odor, skeletal remains, bugs eating flesh and a dead child found in a garbage bag – the people in Orlando can’t get enough of it. The whole city has been transfixed into following the daily legal grind of Casey’s case.
Orlando’s TV stations offer gavel to gavel Casey coverage, with analysis and public reaction. Each day, crowds descend on Orlando’s Orange County Courthouse, hoping for a seat.
Sometimes the action in the waiting line is hotter than the courtroom. Last week, a series of scuffles broke out among those battling for seats. It looked like a scene of crazed fans fighting for tickets to a Justin Bieber concert. So the court had to devise a ticket distribution system that would allow the public to sign-in for seats the day before they get in.
It’s all part of the Orlando vibe that to me has become an underlying theme of the Casey Anthony trial. This is a city built on selling illusions but it is no refuge from reality.
In the Orlando of Disney and Universal theme parks, nothing seems real. Out on the city’s mean streets, however, there is no magical escape. Orlando has a violent crime rate of 19.33 per one-thousand residents, according to FBI statistics. That’s nearly 400 percent higher than the national medium.
The dichotomy of Orlando is the dichotomy of Casey Anthony. No one understands that better than Jose Baez, Casey’s defense attorney. “Something’s just not right,” Baez repeated during his opening statement at her trial. He might as well have been talking about Orlando as well as Casey.
Everything about the Anthony household seemed straight out of an Orlando, middle-class fantasy. George Anthony, Casey’s father, and his wife, Cindy, lived at Hopespring Drive, along with Casey and her brother, Lee.
“You can see, it looks like the All-American home,” Baez told the jury as he showed them a picture of the Anthony house. “But,” Baez added “…you never know what goes on behind closed doors. And you never know what secrets lie within.”
The secrets, Baez said, included sexual abuse of Casey by her father, which George Anthony denied in court testimony. There were other tawdry charges as Baez painted a picture of a, “family that is incredibly dysfunctional.” That dysfunction led Casey Anthony to create her own Fantasyland, Baez indicated. Casey invented an imaginary nanny for Caylee, whom Casey called Zanny. When the child was missing, Casey told her family the baby was with Zanny. Casey also spent two years telling her family she worked at the Universal Studios, when she had no job there.
“Casey Anthony was raised to lie," said Baez, who told the jury Caylee wasn’t murdered but drowned in the family swimming pool.
The stress of real life put Casey in her own Twilight Zone, where nothing is real, if you believe Baez. After the death of Caylee, Baez said Casey, “did what she’s been doing all her life: hiding her pain...She went back to that ugly place -- denial. She forced herself to live in a world she wanted to – not the one she was thrust in.”
The prosecution doesn’t see Casey as a victim. They claim Casey is a manipulative liar and cold-blooded killer who mercilessly murdered her two-year old daughter and didn’t even report her missing for 31 days. Like so many others in Orlando, Casey, the prosecution suggested, wanted to party and live the good life.
“Casey Anthony had access to all the pieces of evidence in this case...no one else lied to their friends, to their family, to investigators, no one else benefited from the death of Caylee Marie Anthony. Caylee's death allowed Casey Anthony to live the good life at least for those 31 days," said Prosecutor Linda Drane-Burdick.
The good life. That’s the ultimate Orlando attraction.
http://www.ibtimes.com/blog/pop-watch/casey-anthony-orlando-vibe_109.htm
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