https://youtu.be/FOBULsEUwn8
I am supposed to be trying to post more, but I don’t seem to be achieving much in that area. I do have a few problems dealing with the holidays. Always have had, or at least the last thirty years or so. I have been listening to Christmas music with Lisa for the past couple of weeks, and it is helping, but occasionally I start to think about the people I will no longer see, the ones I can no longer talk to, with whom I can no longer correspond, trade music and ideas. I depend greatly on my new friends, and the few who remain of my old ones. Even with the addition of the new ones, my ranks of friends have substantially diminished over the years, so the load and my dependence on each is greater. Now another terrible loss has reared its horrible, ugly head. Monday evening there was a senseless murder, a totally heartless act which I will never be able to comprehend.
A young man was contacted by a “friend” who had a “friend” who wanted to procure some marijuana. Of course in Indiana that is still illegal, so it was to be a clandestine transaction in the parking lot of a bar. The young man agreed to the meeting, and then talked a friend of his into riding along. The aforementioned “friend of the friend” approached the young man’s vehicle, a discussion ensued, and then “the friend of the friend” drew a weapon, demanded that the marijuana be handed over, and when the young man objected “the friend of the friend” immediately and for no apparent reason opened fire, wounding both young men in the vehicle. At this point “the friend of the friend” pulled the young man from his car to lie bleeding in the parking lot from a neck wound, then jumped in the car with the other wounded young man still inside and left the scene.
The young man who owned the car was discovered lying in the parking lot outside the bar by patrons who had heard the shots fired, and transported to the emergency room. He was able to give his version of the story, and it appears he will survive. An APB was put out on the stolen vehicle and the search began. The vehicle was found Tuesday morning sitting abandoned in an apartment complex parking lot, with the other young man, the ride along passenger, dead from multiple gunshot wounds, still slumped in the passenger’s seat. It was the totally senseless killing of a twenty year old with his entire life ahead of him who had done nothing but go on a ride with a friend, a young man who was not armed, had no intent, nor the means, of causing injury to his assailant. It was a cold blooded murder, and the young man was my canoeing buddy Clark’s nephew: the nephew he had intended to have join us on some of our excursions this coming year.
I have nothing else to say other than this: If the state of Indiana, a backward place indeed, had legalized the sale and taxation of marijuana at authorized and licensed businesses as more enlightened states have done, this need not have happened, and if they had not paroled an inmate formerly convicted of and incarcerated for armed robbery on multiple occasions, a violent criminal act, released likely because of prison overcrowding due to the number of non-violent offenders incarcerated for relatively minor infractions which should not be illegal at all, well… The penalties for victimless crimes need to be revisited, and senseless laws need to be smitten from our rolls. That’s all I have to say, and I have been saying it for a very long time.