Today, I glanced at my Twitter feed (yes I’m a twat these days) and saw a link to this little news item about three guys being sentenced for a kidnapping last month. I hadn’t heard about the kidnapping, but was a little surprised to see this incident had taken place a block and a half from where I live. (Other Lawrencians: is our town getting more violent these days or is the paper just getting more histrionic?) The kidnappers in question received a very light sentence as they lacked a criminal history. Ah, but that did not necessarily mean that they had no Internet history! Nerd that I am, my first instinct was to google the names of the convicted perpetrators.
No facebook or myspace, but this story from last year, another item from the Journal-World, came up:
On a serendipitous alternate route Monday morning, two Lawrence men happened upon a house fire where they helped lend a hand and gave their coats to the resident.
The men, Jack Proctor and Eli Woodman, happened to drive by a burning house, stopped and rescued someone trapped in the house. Proctor lent the man his coat, since it was a cold day and the fire victim was not properly clothed for the February chill. The fire victim, his family and the nurses at the hospital heralded the two as heroes.
A little over a year after the fire, the Good Samaritans would be convicted of detaining another man in his home at gunpoint, beating and robbing him.
Yowza. I guess a lot can happen in a year! One day you stumble upon a burning house and are the toast of the town, the next day things go so terribly that you wind up in prison for violent armed robbery. It is good to be reminded once in awhile just how terribly and madly complicated human beings can be.
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This makes it sound like their decision was random. The ‘samaritans’ didn’t randomly choose this man to detain, and they didn’t say “lets go rob someone” either.
It was a concentrated effort to retrieve items after their ‘victim’ had appropriated them. When the police didn’t help, the 3 men took matters into their own hands.
Smart? No.
Deserving of Probation? Yes
Does that mean that they’ve turned completely into hardened criminals in the course of the year? Absolutely not.
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