Looks like they caught the little shit who went for a shoot on the interstate last weekend.
Unfortunately he didn’t come out shooting so it wasn’t possible to put him out of our misery without an undoubtedly expensive and protracted court fight. The prosecutor doesn’t know if he’ll ask for the death penalty. WTF is the death penalty for, then, Mr. Prosecutor?
The kid has had run-ins with police before, apparently:
Sheridan, the sheriff, said Blanton had previous brushes with the law for “crimes of sex and of theft,” but did not elaborate.
What a shock. Then, the usual “he’s a good boy, he’s just misunderstood” comments from family and friends:
Blanton’s great-aunt told The Star Press of Muncie that she was shocked by the allegations against him.
“I can’t imagine that he would be involved,” Denise Blanton said.
Oh, of course not. One’s relatives are never capable of murder and mayhem.
Gaston resident Kenneth Shipley, 59, said he knows Blanton’s grandfather and that the teen had been a rider on the school bus he once drove.
“This isn’t the Zach I knew,” he said. “I took this real hard. Zach just needed some attention, someone to talk to.”
So, did you offer him any attention?
I’m never impressed by these after-the-fact comments by people who knew the perp. If you knew the kid had problems, why did you leave it to somebody else to do something about them?
The human race is really fucking depressing.
UPDATE: Aw, jeez. The kid had a history of being bullied.
[F]riends knew him as a gentle young man with a shyness that they said grew out of an emotional childhood and teen insecurities.
Friends say he was sometimes teased about his size. He attended Wes-Del High School and played on the offensive line for the football team. The roster lists him as 6-foot-4 and weighing more than 300 pounds.
Dragged into the occasional fight at school, he would try to avoid coming to blows. Friends said he was too shy to fight and simply walked away.
Fsck me. If I’d been that big in high school, I know of any number of shitheads I would have pounded…and they would have deserved it. I didn’t like to fight, either, but I never shot anybody from an interstate overpass in some kind of misguided payback to the world.
Bottom line: I still wish he’d come out shooting when they tried to arrest him. Would have saved a lot of trouble.