inside, babe, and later when youâre there youâll hate every extra day for not doing what I say, but okay, Iâm only trying to help, and lots of luck,â and the man stands and he stands and hugs him.
Police and medics come, driverâs treated on the street and taken away in an ambulance, guyâs put in a bag and left there in a special medical van with the back doors open while the police ask him what happened though say he doesnât have to answer or can wait till he has a lawyer and he says âI was getting back at them, if I didnât nothing ever would have happened to them, like finding them, except by accident, itâs all written down somewhere what they did to my kid that day on the Interstate, youâll see theyâll fit the descriptions I gave minus the mustaches and thereâll be nothing about their height for I never saw them out of their van till today.â
The two have records, now wanted for this and that in other states, police photos showing them with mustaches, he refuses to hire a lawyer so is assigned one, his daughter canât be a witness for him since she canât even say what age around or color the men were that first time on the Interstate and thought there were three or four of them in the van, heâs convicted and given ten to twelve years for killing an unarmed man and permanently damaging the brain of another, judge says at sentencing âIf you had shown one iota of remorse or expressed some understanding of the wrong youâve done I would have sentenced you to a few years or less, given what youâve gone through over your daughterâs death and that youâve never been charged with a serious crime before and the men you attacked had a history of felonious activity and were wanted for robbery and murder though not of your child and who now ironically canât be tried for these other crimes since one is dead and the other will be a vegetable for life, but what youâve done, sir, and how youâve acted since sends the wrong message to others similarly victimized and bereft who might want to take barbarous revenge the way you did and then the streets would even be more menacing than they are today, so I must conclude that youâre nearly as dangerous and perhaps even as ruthless as the men you call without proof your daughterâs brutalizers,â and he says âYou could think that, Iâm not going to take issue with you, though nobodyâs going to convince me I didnât get the right guys, but personally I feel a hell of a lot better for what I did, and to me, though itâll be a long time before I can enjoy them, the streets have to be a little safer now, and for sure the Interstate is, not with me off them but those guys, even if thatâs not at all why I did it.â
Some prisoners say they admire him for what he did for his kid and proofâs in the eye and those guys deserved it, but most others say he shouldnât have gone so far as to try and kill them, for look what he lost: wife, other kid and his freedom, and also he couldnât have been sure it was them after almost a year and maybe he still didnât get the right men who might even be in this prison wanting to kill him before he finds out his mistake and tries to get them and besides, you want someone killed you get a pro to do it but you donât try it yourself in what always for an amateur turns out to be a sloppy job or total bungle, like with his braining for life that poor slob, and where you usually end up dead yourself or in prison for years if not gassed by the state for having killed some innocent bystander or the wrong guy or even the right one. He usually says he had no time or money to hire a hit man, not that he ever would have for he didnât want anyone doing it except himself because only he had a reason to and money for killing no matter how much someone would pay can never be a reason, and some say