The worst thing ever...

"As far as the perp is concerned, the dark corners of my mind would like to do to him what he did to the boy. But this is where I must remember my faith. And that is the hard part. Justice, not revenge."

We were out driving around yesterday when the news came over the radio. Neither my wife nor I could believe what we had just heard. An act so heinous, so heartless, so awful, how in the world could someone have done this? Yet someone did. A grown man, with a long rap sheet, grabbed a young boy and threw him off a ledge - to land on an unforgiving surface three levels below at the MOA.

This is where usually I have to temper my words. Was this a hate crime? Since the perp was black and the young boy was white, should it qualify as one? If the shoe were on the other foot, the press certainly would have been clamoring for this to be a hate crime. Or was it this more of the cancerous disregard for children's lives? We are seeing this with the recent trend for fourth term abortions. We are on the slippery slope of abortions turning into infanticide, and then turning into homicide. 

Or was this guy just high on khat or some other kind of drug? Was he mentally unbalanced? Or was he just the personification of evil? In any event, this perp is now behind bars, awaiting charging, and the boy is fighting for his life in a hospital. Could anything have been done to prevent this? Banning the perp from the MOA for his past misdeeds? And how does that work? With the number of people coming through the doors at the MOA, it would probably be easy for him to slip in. 

This is where the bad side of me starts to come out. The dark side. The part of me that wishes I had been there with a loaded gun. I am sure I am not the only one thinking that thought right now. Could I have taken a shot to save that young boy? I would like to think I could of, but I probably would have froze. I would have been too stunned by what I had just seen. 

Really, there is not much anyone could have done. Why? Nobody would have expected it. Not in a thousand years. Now we will. We will keep our kids and grand kids tethered tighter to us when in a crowd  or a strange location. We will look at strangers with a jaundiced eye instead of trust or benign indifference. A deed such as what happened yesterday will be indelibly printed on our memory for years to come. The evil which visited the MOA has caused a blot on our humanity which will remain for a long, long time.

All we can do now is pray for this young boy. Pray for complete recovery. The chances of lingering aftereffects due to a TBI are too horrible to think about. As far as the perp is concerned, the dark corners of my mind would like to do to him what he did to the boy. But this is where I must remember my faith. And that is the hard part. Justice, not revenge.