The murder of a popular schoolteacher in Massachusetts a few months ago by a 14 year old male student got me thinking about the current but obsolete legal practice of not publishing the names of juvenile offenders. The horrific slaying of this 24-year old woman with a box cutter defies description. What could she have possibly done to warrant such a fate? What is just as startling is the reaction of fellow students, who described the 14 year old suspect as a very polite, nice guy.
In this case, perhaps the alleged killer’s friends weren’t looking at their classmate hard enough. You can even classify them as lousy observers because they failed to look beyond the superficial: If somebody smiles and says good morning, the tendency is to assume that they “are nice.” But even Charles Manson had his lighter moments, and I’m sure that Ira Einhorn, the infamous West Philly Unicorn Killer, had his own brand of winning (cuddly) charisma. And Lucifer, don’t forget, was once known as “the brightest” of God’s angels. Still waters run deep, as they say, which can mean that a savage streak sometimes lurks beneath a Teddy Bear smile.
As with most juvenile cases, when the Massachusetts murder was first publicized the name of the alleged killer was withheld because of his age, but because of the gruesomeness of the killing, authorities later changed their mind and published his name and picture anyway. This was a common sense move if only because “minors” in today’s world aren’t what they were thirty or even forty years ago. Today’s culture has pushed kids into a fast maturity track where they adopt adult behaviors, both good and bad, at a much earlier age. The law in this case has a lot of catching up to do. A child at 14 is not always a fragile and vulnerable “little” human being, although years ago that was almost always the case.
At sixteen, I did a number of stupid things but one of the biggest was what happened when I hung out one night with my best friend. Our plan was to walk to the local department store in our Chester County town after walking through a nearby golf course. My friend, eager for a bit of juicy juvenile delinquency, shared a flask of vodka with me as we walked over golf greens to the department store in question. In a mile high giddy ‘flask’ mood, we proceeded to ‘window shop’ but when we came to the new spring jacket rack we selected two and tried them on and then conveniently forgot to take them off before putting our real jackets on over them. As we attempted to leave the store, a plainclothes security guard grabbed our arms and took us into the manager’s office. After removing the prized spring jackets, the manager took our information and called the police to escort us home.
It being a weeknight, I knew my parents were already in bed but I still held out hope that the police would drop us off like a taxi, so that we could go into our respective homes without anyone knowing. That naïve hope vanished when the officer accompanying me walked me to the front door, rang the bell, and spoke to my father, who emerged from the darkness in his pajamas, sleep still in his eyes.
“Your son, Thomas F. was picked up, with a friend, for shoplifting. We are releasing him to you,” the officer said. Since I was the “quiet” son who never got into much trouble, the look on my father’s face showed bewilderment and confusion. Once the officer left to take my friend home, I had a heart-to-heart pajama conference with both my parents, which of course was followed up with the announcement that I was grounded for a month. The next day I was shocked to read a tiny news item in The Daily Local News: Two Youths, 16 and 15, charged with Shoplifting. Although our names were not published, and nothing much in the way of a police record ever materialized, seeing yourself being referred to in print that way was unforgettable.
Most juvenile crime in those days was relatively minor: drag racing, drinking beer, suspension from school because of smoking, and truancy. Nobody at 14 killed their parents, shot up school assemblies, killed friends or teachers (or themselves), experimented with drugs (or even thought about drugs). To be “bad,” if you were a girl, was to tease and hairspray your hair into an enormous bleached blond beehive, wear dangling shark tooth earrings, crack your gum, and say Yes to any boy who asked you that question. So-called “bad” boys cut class, smoked cigarettes, bought cheap cars without mufflers, got tattoos, and asked every girl they met that question.
It was not the job of my parents to protect me from bad influences, although they had their say on a number of occasions. Generally, I was free to make my own friends and even to make my own mistakes, within reason of course. I was rarely interrogated as to who I was hanging out with, probably because the “bad influences” in those days were, in comparison to childhood influences today, pretty superficial and benign.
An example of the kinds of things that influence kids in today’s world is the time I visited a discount store in the Port Richmond shopping center, and saw a row of guns on the wall behind the cashier. They were BB guns of various sizes, some small, some in the shape of machine guns. I had never seen guns for sale in a discount store that also sold men’s underwear and small area rugs.
“Are they really guns?” I asked the cashier, thinking perhaps that they were a clever kind of water pistol.
“They are real guns,” she said. “But they are BB guns, and I think some 22 rifles.”
When I asked her who buys the guns, she told me that parents come in with their children, some as young as six. She shook her head in disgust and added, “You know, what parent would buy their six year old a BB gun?”
The rapid maturity of kids in today’s world has made some parents want to overprotect them. Kids are sent to private schools miles away from their home neighborhoods, or they are driven to and from school so as to keep them away from unpredictable rowdiness on school buses. Sometimes they are told not to play or associate with other kids in the neighborhood, especially if that neighborhood has a reputation for hooliganism and drug use. The fear is that that one rogue kid with a “flask” of drugs, rather than vodka, might set their kid down the wrong path. Overprotection is understandable, I suppose, but I think it should be balanced with common sense.
Whether it is drugs, violence, bad companions, or sexual promiscuity, overprotective parents who seek to protect kids from “life” ultimately shield them from an essential part of growing up. To forbid a kid from ever riding his bike, alone, on the streets of his own neighborhood, or even having a friend or two from “the common houses nearby,” is to thwart many of the classic experiences of childhood. A kid must be able to make his own mistakes, or get into a scrape or two with a neighborhood bully. These are good grounding experiences and they prepare a kid for the real world, once the artificial ‘bubble’ of the prep school is no longer there.
Let me offer this example of what can happen if you overprotect a kid. In my home town of Frazer in Chester County, there was once a problem with kids in cars riding around destroying mailboxes at the end of driveways. Who would do such a thing? Many were shocked to discover that the culprits were not the guys who smoked, drank and drove cars without mufflers, but the quiet prep school “good” boys who lived in highly restrictive “bubble” environments.
