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money to pay utility bills. She acts in these and a hundred other ways to relieve the distress of innocent participants in the criminal justice system.
It takes commitment to leave a comfortable home, husband and teenage daughter, and go rushing to the scene of a crime in the middle of the night. It takes commitment to face the violence of murder, the heartbreak of child abuse, the pain of rape. The sustaining force behind Irene Wodell’s commitment is belief in the rightness of what she’s doing, the rightness and the desperate need for a program like hers.
Twice Victims
“Why should victims be victimized twice—first by the criminal and then by the system?” she questions. “There’s always somebody to take care of that defendant. It’s guaranteed. But what about the victim? Too often, the victims are left alone.”
Last year, the Victim Witness Program (VWP) in Loudoun County was involved in 1,861 cases. This year, as of August, well over 2,000 cases have been handled, according to WodelL Each case means at least one victim. That works out to more than 25 per day,
82.1%