The problem with the solution as to how Elliott Smith died, as to why the case is still not ruled a suicide, is not that the story is six years old, not even that people close to him won’t go on the record. The problem is that every question leads to a quantum amunt of answers. It is so quantum catsie. Put Smith in his home on October 21st. Open the door once: he killed himself. Open it again: he was murdered. Open it a third: Chiba is plunging the knife in his stomach. A fourth time and she is pulling it out while trying to save him. There are as many answers as there are amount of times we want to revisit that horrific afternoon. There are so many variations it is terrifying.
Have you ever had an argument with someone and then an hour later revisited what happened? It is all “I didn’t say that, that never happened”. The truth disappears before you can grasp it.
What you are left with is character. What you are left with is Jennifer Chiba.
When I started writing this somebody claimed I was being sensationalistic. Yesterday, somebody else claimed I was writing hearsay. Neither claim is remotely true. I am (for now, at a later date I will try and piece together the various pieces of hearsay into a cogent whole) only dealing with what I can document.
So let me start again with the question of character. In my life I have been betrayed -very, very badly, three times and all three times were by people I considered the closest to me. It taught me some things:
1) Anybody is capable of doing anything to any one and justifying it to themselves.
2) Just because somebody is terrible towards you does not mean they are terrible towards everybody
3) People are not black and white, they are, for the most part, not goodies and baddies: they are shades of gray.
Back to the day of Smith’s death and let’s accept Chiba’s own testimony as to what happened.
Smith and Chiba had a terrible fight.
Chiba locked herself in the bathroom till she heard Smith scream.
Elliot wrote a suicide note on a post it.
Smith stabbed himself in the stomach.
Smith removed the knife from his stomach and screamed
Smith stabbed himself again and left it there for approximately 45 seconds.
Chiba heard the scream and went to the kitchen.
Chiba removed the knife (a terrible mistake) and called 911.
Chiba performed CPR.
The ambulance arrived and Chiba went with Smith to the hospital where he was pronouced dead.
Later that night The next day she went to the the Solutions wall – mural on Sunset blvd which has become a memorial wall since it was used for the cover of his Figure 8 album and where fans were mourning. Chiba went there with Robin Peringer ( a band mate from her punk rock group the Happy Endings a member of Elliot’s band) and gave out free CDs to the mourning fans (the definition of stupid but…)
We all react to grief differently. If I had just pulled a knife out of my lovers body and watched them die I might have gone straight home and cried my fucking eyes out. But that’s me.
HOWEVER: one thing is clear, Chiba is a very, very strong woman. Whatever she represented to the rest of the world notwithstanding, she took a devastating hit and didn’t even wobble.
Therein lies the biggest question mark hanging over this story. Who is this woman?
I said I would post hearsay but this is hearsay and I am including it because it paints Chiba in a positive light and though the person who sent it to me questions the posters memory, and whether Smith could’ve been conscious, it sounds like the truth in ways Chiba’s testimony doesn’t sould like the truth. And it is of the time and seems to all but exonerate. I am not out to get Chiba or any one else: I am out to get to the truth. Accidents do happen:
“I haven’t heard anything about her at all since Elliott Smith died, she seems to have disappeared completely, not saying anything at all about what happened that last day at their place.
“He stabbed himself in the chest while arguing with her, according to a neighbor she’d stormed out of the house briefly after a loud screaming match, but then she turned around and went inside and found Elliott all bleeding. Did she drive him to the hospital? I want to think I remember it that way. He survived for a short while before the bleeding was too much. Did she kill him personally? With her own hands? If she did, Elliott didn’t say so, and he had at least some opportunity to explain such a thing.
“Someone found an epilogue in an old printing of Sorrows of Young Werther where Goethe says that stabbing himself in the heart felt like the only honorable way to take his own life, and that he would practice with a knife near his bedstand for a long period before the desire to die finally went away.
Well that’s weird.
Don’
t do that.
Dave”
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