Last week I got a call from the victim advocate down in FL who has been assigned my cases. Her job is to contact me on behalf of the prosecutor and set me up with any services I may need to recover from this break-in. She called to ask how I felt about reducing one of the charges against Troy so that he could go back to attending school. I had no warning that she was going to ask me that, so no time to come up with a calculated response. She said the prosecutor was inclined to reduce the charge and I agreed. Troy is 17. He belongs in school and somehow trying to find a path out of crime. Honestly, I don’t want any of these four to end up as career criminals. They are all 16 and 17. Too young to make the best decisions but also old enough to know right from wrong.
She also told me that Troy wrote me an apology letter. I waited eagerly for it to come because I wanted to see what he said. I was curious to know what he could possibly say. Basically he is sorry and wants to make amends not just to me, but also to his family. I’m not sure if these are thoughts that originated in his head or something he’s been hearing from the adults around him and in the juvenile system. Either way, I hope it’s sinking in for real.
I want good things for these kids. I can see how much harder it is now to grow up in this world, than the disconnected, no-phone in your hand 24/7 world I grew up in. There’s so much more pressure. Add in a worldwide pandemic in your first years of high school or middle school and it’s even worse. I don’t think these kids have had an easy time of it and many adults have dismissed how difficult it was for these kids to do the life they were stuck with doing the great COVID lockdown. While we adults may have initially been excited about the prospect of work meetings in pajamas, it was quickly evident to kids that they were losing all of their social contact.
So what turned these kids into criminal trespassers and burglars for those bizarre 7 minutes? Boredom? Apathy? The excitement of doing something forbidden and thinking you might get away with it? A deep desire to be a criminal? Everything I’m seeing is that some of these kids were on a downward trajectory prior to that moment they broke into my house.
But what I remember is being a young adult in my very early 20s and making repeated bad decisions, like buying things I didn’t need on credit and taking stupid, unnecessary risks while driving to show off. I joined the Air Force because I didn’t know what else to do after a bad breakup. In the end it worked out for me, but it was slightly impulsive. And remembering that person helps me to understand that four high school boys, all 16 and 17 years old may have really struggled to stop themselves even though they felt like it was wrong at some level. If no one is strong enough to back out, then they all are going through with it because no one wants to be the wuss who couldn’t do it. Peer pressure is a real bitch at that age.
Tory said he was raised in the church and grew up as a band kid. While church kids can turn out to be criminal and band kids aren’t always perfect either, these are generally kids who are well-supervised and not in a position to get themselves into much trouble. But once they start driving and getting a bit of freedom, the chances of finding trouble seem to go up exponentially. And then you find yourself with a few felonies under your belt. A quick fall from grace and the church/band kid life.
But what if it’s not the freedom, but the company you keep? The kids who don’t know right from wrong and don’t try to stay out of trouble? How many good kids can one bad kid turn at once? Are kids just wired to be trouble, like in Lord of the Flies? Was that one bad kid who turned all but three kids bad? Or was it some sort of primitive internal messaging that it was time to be feral without adult supervision? I admit that I was a feral kid a lot when I was out on my own. At what point did that instinct disappear and I started thinking through the consequences? Luckily the few fires I set in the woods never turned into anything big and no one really got hurt, but it could’ve gone that direction. I could’ve caused some serious harm with that and other feral activities I enjoyed.
Troy wants me to be able to one day forgive him. Forgiveness on my part is easy. Done, Troy, you are forgiven. I understand the lack of impulse control more than you realize and I know that you turned feral in a group of peers who simultaneously lost all brain functioning and made a very poor choice. But the real work (if he’s sincere about his guilt) will come with forgiving himself and letting himself off the hook in 20 years. He will have to come to an understanding that what seems like an easy decision now that the consequences are exposed, it wasn’t so easy at the moment they did it. All too often I’ve accidentally said something I meant to keep a secret and I’ve gone behind someone’s back when I really didn’t mean to. Even now. My impulse control is lacking and I have only recently learned to see ahead when I’m about to say something I don’t want to say. It makes me feel like a different person when that happens. Like HOLY CRAP, I can actually stop myself from revealing someone else’s secret to a third party. Or I don’t have to start running my mouth about that other soccer coach being a jerk. So I get it. Teenagers don’t have perfect impulse control. And I don’t either.
Forgiveness is also easy for me because I don’t have any ill will towards these kids anymore. Thinking grown criminals are in my house vs four stupid kids is a completely different thing. Adults breaking in and stealing is terrifying. Kids…well, it’s just kids. The juvenile system is designed to help them not become grown criminals and to hold them accountable for their actions while also not punishing them for life. And I want all of these kids to move on to become productive citizens and not commit any additional crimes. This is the last chance for these 17 year olds. If this happened next year, I’m sure it would have looked a lot different for them. But they get this chance at rehabilitation. That’s a good thing and I think they deserve it, particularly if this is their first time doing something like this.
I think I want to write back to Troy. I want to believe that he’s sincere and that I can actually reach him and ensure he understands what “hurt you and your family” means to someone with PTSD like me, who needs medication for nightmares and panic. I would like him to also understand that every time the Ring alerts me at that house, I have a bad day, even when I can see that it’s just weather somehow creating enough movement to activate the Ring. I hate the way that panic feels and I hate that I have to live with yet another trigger. But maybe that will help him understand that abandoned house does not equal free-for-all and no one will be harmed. I have been harmed, not just in seeing people in my house, but in that this is an ongoing nuisance for me. I don’t know how long I will continue to panic when I see Ring motion alerts. It could be forever or it could eventually go away. I just don’t know.
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