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ome years back I was sitting quietly at home when a strange
car pulled into my driveway. And when I say pulled into my driveway I don’t
mean that it came up the driveway in a normal way—no, I mean it came through
the hedge separating my driveway from the parking lot next door, taking out a
small tree, crossed over my driveway, and finally came to rest at an angle
across my front yard. It was about three in the morning.
Now I could have taken a gun, gone outside, and shot the
driver. To judge from today’s reports that would be, apparently, a fairly
reasonable thing for a frightened elderly person to do. At least, that’s what
one Philip Sailors did, with considerably less reason than I had to be
frightened, when a strange car pulled into his driveway in a normal fashion.
And while the justice system didn’t exactly give him a medal for it, it did
allow him to plead guilty to involuntary manslaughter—a mere $500.00 fine and a
suspended sentence. Apparently it was important to keep this crazed loon out of
jail for some reason.
According to news accounts it was about ten in the evening
when the car pulled up into Sailors’ driveway. Inside were four young people,
three of them high school students. Sailors looked out the window and saw the
car.
Did he do what a sane person would do—go down and ask what the
kids wanted, or whether they were lost or something? No. He did not. Did he do
what a frightened elderly person would do, and call 911? Again, no. Not at all.
No, he did what a psycho-killer in a bad movie might do—grabbed his gun, went
outside, and started shooting as the car took off down the driveway in a futile
attempt to escape. Then, to add to the deranged quality of it all, after killing
the driver Sailors held the three high-school kids at gunpoint. According to
one of them Sailors made no attempt to help the dying man.
The police arrived in response to two 911 calls, one from one
of the kids in the car and another from a neighbor who had heard gunshots.
Sailors claimed that he believed the high-school kids were home invaders and
that the fleeing car was about to run him down. As a former missionary to Panama
he ought to have been able to tell high-school kids out ice-skating from
dangerous criminals. As a Vietnam veteran he should have been able to
distinguish a car fleeing from a car approaching—you’d think. But no.
When the police arrived it came out that the driver had come
to pick up another student at a nearby address. The car’s GPS system
misdirected him to Sailors’ driveway. And Sailors was arrested for murder.
Sailors was reported to be grief-stricken—but he offered no
apology when he accepted the plea deal that let him off with manslaughter. A
news report says “Sailors did not want to comment after the hearing. He was
surrounded by friends and family who came to the hearing as a show of support.”
It also reported that he paid the victim’s family an undisclosed sum of money
in settlement of a lawsuit. Nice.
Oh, yeah—for the record I did what a frightened elderly person
would do—called 911 and waited. It turned out that the guy driving the car was
not so much a crazed madman as a fellow who suffered a stroke, thus missing a
turn and ending up in my yard. Probably just as well I didn’t shoot him, then.
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