by Jan Yager, Ph.D.

Unfortunately, I know firsthand what secondary victims of homicide deal with since my 23-year-old brother, Seth Alan Barkas, died from the injuries caused by his stabbing during a mugging several days before by a teenage gang. I was 20 years old at the time and majoring in fine arts at Hofstra University.  I know it sounds naïve but back then before the Internet and social media, I thought violent crimes like that only happened to other families, not to my upper middle-class family with a dentist father and a kindergarten teacher mother. Seth was an aspiring playwright, film critic for Baltimore magazine, and a freelance theater critic for a major national theatre newspaper. It was on his way home from reviewing an off-off-Broadway play that the stabbing occurred in Manhattan’s East Village.

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