I remember the idyllic
days of my late teens. Like most teens, I dreamed of success, getting married, and living a carefree life
happily ever after. In those dreams, it never once entered my mind that there would be hard times and even
tragedy. I mean, c’mon! Who of us ever wants to clutter up a perfectly good dream
with reality?
I have been very fortunate.
I’m in my 30th year of being happily married to a girl that I’ve known since I was in grade
school. We have a beautiful daughter who contributes to our happiness just by being in our life.
While I haven’t achieved the incredible success that I dreamed about in my teens, and despite some ups and downs,
I enjoy a decent career and we’re not struggling financially. All in all, things are going well.
However, that wasn’t the case for a couple of kids that I went to high school with.
Greg West and Cindy (whose last name
will be withheld for her protection) were high school sweethearts. I knew both of them. We
weren’t friends but acquaintances. I had a class or two with both of them and I remember having chatted
with Greg a few times over our four years of high school. He was a good kid. In fact,
both of them were.
As a lot of kids do, they were married not to terribly long after they graduated from high
school. Greg went to work for a coin dealer and, as luck would have it, Cindy got a job a couple of doors
down at a travel agency. How cool was that?
They’re humble, newlywed life was as perfect as a young, middle-class
couple could expect. That is, until tragedy struck on November 3, 1983. On that day,
a man – no, he doesn’t deserve to be called a man – a inhumane, demented monster shot and killed Greg in
cold blood while holding up the coin store that he worked in. Little did Cindy know that the shots she
heard two doors down had ended the hopes and dreams that she and her young groom had planned together.
Three shots and it was all gone. No appeal process. No second, third or fourth chances.
No civil rights organizations to plead for his life. No, Greg, and the dreams he had with Cindy,
were sentenced to near-instant death.
The details of this despicable act are brilliantly chronicled in Paul Rubin’s December
2, 2008, article in The Phoenix New Times. Mr. Rubin also lays out the facts of the murderer’s
fight to be removed from Arizona’s Death Row. As his piece details for us,
for some inexplicable reason, there are a lot of otherwise very intelligent people who believe this guy should live . . .
for “humane” reasons. The reason? They claim he’s mentally
incompetent because he’s got to live to the ripe, old age of 93. I wish that I was kidding but I’m
not.
To add painful insult
to horrendous injury, this steaming pile of human debris is being heralded by these same “intelligent” people
as some sort of death row rock star because of the fact that he is the oldest living death row inmate in the U.S.
Sorry, folks, but my applause
machine is in the shop.
I’m glad that these bleeding hearts are so happy. I wonder how happy they would
feel if they witnessed the grief that is still being felt by those who loved and cared for Greg. At our
20 Year High School reunion in 1997, I had the honor and privilege of talking with Cindy. During
our chat, I shared with her my belated condolences for her loss. It was clearly evident that the pain of
her loss was still very real and raw. One couldn’t help but cry along with her . . . unless, of course,
you have a poster of a death row maggot hanging on your office wall.
It’s highly unlikely that true justice will be served by actually
exterminating this vermin. That lack of justice is a crime in, and of, itself. So,
if the maggot groupies are going to get their way, I think it would only be fair to make the prison scum watch a continuous
video loop of Cindy grieving because Greg will never see the age of 93.
Oh yeah. That would deemed
“cruel and usual punishment”.
I rest my case.
