Maybe We Should Unconditionally Withdraw From Cleveland

Maybe We Should Unconditionally Withdraw From Cleveland

This story saddens and angers me:

Home from Iraq, wary Marine fatally wounded

Sun Jun 1, 9:44 PM EDT

CLEVELAND — On leave from the violence he had survived in the war in Iraq, a young Marine was so wary of crime on the streets of his own home town that he carried only $8 to avoid becoming a robbery target.

Despite his caution, Lance Cpl. Robert Crutchfield, 21, was shot point-blank in the neck during a robbery at a bus stop. Feeding and breathing tubes kept him alive 4 1/2 months, until he died of an infection on May 18.

Two men have been charged in the attack, and Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Bill Mason said Friday the case was under review to decide whether to seek the death penalty.

"It is an awful story," said Alberta Holt, the young Marine's aunt and his legal guardian when he was a teenager determined to flee a troubled Cleveland school for safer surroundings in the suburbs.

Crutchfield was attacked on Jan. 5 while he and his girlfriend were waiting for a bus. He had heeded the warnings of commanders that a Marine on leave might be seen as a prime robbery target with a pocketful of money, so he only carried $8, his military ID card and a bank card.

"They took it, turned his pockets inside out, took what he had and told him since he was a Marine and didn't have any money he didn't deserve to live. They put the gun to his neck and shot him," Holt told The Associated Press.

The two men charged in the attack were identified as Ean Farrow, 19, and Thomas Ray III, 20, both of Cleveland. Their attorneys did not respond to The Associated Press' requests for comment.

Read the whole thing. It only gets sadder.

Back when I wrote "(I)t's most important that all potential victims be as dangerous as they can", I quoted a piece from Grim's Hall on Social Harmony:

Very nearly all the violence that plagues, rather than protects, society is the work of young males between the ages of fourteen and thirty. A substantial amount of the violence that protects rather than plagues society is performed by other members of the same group. The reasons for this predisposition are generally rooted in biology, which is to say that they are not going anywhere, in spite of the current fashion that suggests doping half the young with Ritalin.

The question is how to move these young men from the first group (violent and predatory) into the second (violent, but protective). This is to ask: what is the difference between a street gang and the Marine Corps, or a thug and a policeman? In every case, we see that the good youths are guided and disciplined by old men. This is half the answer to the problem.

Lance Cpl. Crutchfield was 21. His assailants were 19 and 20. What do you want to bet that LCpl Crutchfield had a strong male mentor growing up, and that Ean Farrow and Thomas Ray III's fathers were absent or (more likely) in prison for the overwhelming majority of their lives?

I wish that LCpl Crutchfield had been able to disarm and disable his attackers, but that didn't happen. I'm sure he also "heeded the warnings of commanders" not to carry a weapon, too.

My suggestion: After the trial, just give the two murderers to the Marines at the nearest Naval base. I'm sure they can do something appropriate.

Maybe bayonet practice.