Years ago, back in the 60s, I knew this kid from Boy Scouts.
He was a little twisted, but not outrageously so. Had this weird sense of
humor, tossed an occasional grasshopper on the charcoal grill, and taught me
that virtually any forest twig can be smoked like a cigarette. He hung around
with my clique in junior high and seemed like an ok fellah. Around 1968 he
moved away somewhere. I thought New Jersey, but now have discovered it was
elsewhere. Why did I just discover this?
I’d been searching for him on Google, entering various
search terms; his name followed by variations on “killed parents.” You see, back around 1970, word got around my
high school that the guy had shot his parents and that maybe it had something
to do with drugs or abuse. None of my friends seemed to know anything.
Around 1971 or 1972, he showed up again in my high school. “That’s
strange,” I thought.
I didn’t talk to him. He didn’t talk to me. We didn’t
acknowledge each other at all. I think only kids in school have the ability to
do this – to see old friends from years back and walk by them like they don’t
exist. I can understand his reluctance to talk, but not my own.
What had happened and how did he end up back in my high
school after having supposedly done this awful deed? Since the dawn of the
Internet, I would occasionally Google his name, maybe once every couple of
years. Nothing showed up until yesterday—a very brief and vague mention on some
community chat page about “whatever happened to …?”
More Googling. I found some newspaper articles. Here’s what
I learned.
Around the summer of 1970, police were called to his house.
Both his parents had been shot. He claimed a prowler had come in and done the
deed, a possibility quickly dismissed by the police. He was arrested and tried as an adult the
following year.
At that time, he testified that he saw his mother shoot his
father, and then he shot her. Eventually he was convicted of manslaughter for
having done so; but exonerated for the death of his father.
Placed in the custody of his grandparents while awaiting
sentencing, he returned to my high school, one year behind where he would have
been if none of this had happened. I graduated in 1972. He would have graduated
in 1973, but for the fact that the judge ruled he would have to report to
prison in January of that year. The prosecutor maintained that this young man
had “hoodwinked” the jury.
That’s all I know right now. I wonder how where he is and
how he’s doing. I hope he’s alright.
