Alina PowellI'm trying to understand how the sister of depraved Washington State dad Josh Powell has spent days watching news footage that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that her brother murdered his two young sons -- her nephews, Charlie and Braden -- she can still be defending him. I'm trying really hard to put myself in Alina Powell's shoes today. And I think -- shockingly, even to myself -- I can.

True, when I first heard Alina Powell tell Good Morning America that Josh's decision to take a hatchet to the necks of his young sons, then explode their Washington home -- after he'd locked a social worker outside so she couldn't rescue them -- was a form of "protection," I was horrified. Police have said he murdered two children, and they suspect he was involved in the disappearance of his wife, Susan, two years ago. How do you defend that? 

But like I said, I've tried to put myself in her shoes. I watched it again:

I thought about my brother, my baby brother, one of only a handful of people in my life who I trust completely. We don't always agree. We don't always get along, and yet I've said many times before that I know he would lay down his life for my daughter. And then I wondered: what if someone told me that he had done something terrible, something evil, something that did not fit the picture I have in my head of the little boy who let me dress him up as the King of Siam in my old bathrobe when we were little, the little boy who would scratch my back while I read him bedtimes stories?

I don't believe my brother could hurt a fly (at least not on purpose). He has a pure heart. But my belief is so rock solid, that to have that shaken would turn my entire world upside down. 

And suddenly, I got it. If I were Alina Powell, I don't know that I could get on TV in the days immediately following the death of my nephews. But if I did, I also don't know if I could tell the entire world that my brother, my flesh and blood, my childhood companion in all adventures great and small, was a psychopathic killer. To do so would feel like a betrayal of all the good things I knew him to be.

And so I looked at her words again.

I think he must have just felt that there was only one way left to protect his sons from the pain from all the emotional and physical pain that they’ve been experiencing.

It sounds hopelessly naive. And yet, I understand why Alina Powell would want to believe it were true. Because if Josh Powell were "protecting" his boys, then he isn't the monster the police and media says he is. She doesn't have monster blood coursing through her veins. She didn't spend her childhood growing up with a monster.

I disagree with her mightily. But with her brother dead, her nephews dead, and police now naming her father as a new "person of interest" in the case of her missing sister-in-law, Alina Powell needs something good in this world to cling to.

Put yourself in Alina Powell's shoes. What do you think you'd be saying about your brother?

 

Image via ABCNews