Almost every day we are confronted with news about murders that are totally senseless. Now we are learning about the shooting of a Mahnomen Country Deputy—26 years old, newly married, whose life was nearly ended when he went to investigate a report of a drunken driver leaving the Shooting Star Casino. The trail led to a home in Mahnomen where the young Deputy was shot in the head and abdomen after he knocked on the door to question 2 men who were inside. Now his life is forever changed—-if he survives. He has a severe brain injury in addition to abdominal gunshots that are serious enough,in themselves…but a severe brain injury? Who knows if he will ever recover completely….and all because he did his duty as he was asked to do.
The senseless crime in Mahnomen is directly linked to the use of alcohol, as so many violent crimes are. Much of what we learn, as these senseless crimes unfold and the criminals go to trial, is that the perpetrators were drunk when they committed the crimes.
There are many comments already, on today’s FORUM site regarding the shootings in Mahnomen. They are worth reading because some exhibit wisdom and some are blatant blather but you get a wide angle shot of people’s reactions to this particular senseless crime.
The other senseless crime reported in just the recent days is the killing of a woman in Connecticut by an enraged "tame" adult male Chimpanzee who had been kept as a "pet" by a woman who was a friend of the victim of the attack. The details that are coming out are so gruesome that they are hard to read about….the frenzied male Chimp literally ripped off the woman’s face in the attack and she has also lost both her hands. Can you imagine living through that and having to recover from it???? Of course, it is not yet being treated as a crime, but as an accident. But is the woman who kept this male Chimpanzee as her companion and substitute "child" worthy of being called a criminal???? This incident brought to my mind the brutal attack and killing of a woman somewhere in California a few years back by attacking dogs who lived in the same apartment building as the victim. These dangerous attack dogs went after the woman as she was unlocking her own door and trying to carry bags of groceries into her home. The owners of the dogs, at that time, defended their "pets" but were eventually prosecuted and convicted for their "pets’ " killing the neighbor.
Will the Chimp’s owner be charged also? She should be. Anyone who keeps a wild animal—especially an adult animal, as a pet, is asking for it. The owner herself could have been attacked eventually. There are people in our area…not too close—but near enough, that have kept an adult Siberian tiger in a caged compound for several years. It was highly controversial at the time the tiger was brought to a rural area to be kept caged in what the owner said was a fail-proof enclosure. But the near-neighbors were not convinced , and I do not blame them. The adult male tiger is still kept and is treated like a "pet". One wonders what will eventually happen to either the owners or to others if this Big Cat ever escapes. Some of the owners of wild animals say they are doing this to protect endangered species but how kind is it to keep an animal in a relatively small enclosure and alone—with no companionship from its own kind. This is neither normal nor is it natural. It seems that Zoos are the entities best equipped to keep wild animals in captivity and there are plenty of people who oppose any sort of captivity for wild animals.
Both recent attacks—on in northern rural Minnesota, close to us, and the Chimpanzee attack in Connecticut are examples of totally senseless crimes. Those who commit them should receive the full penalty of the law and in the one case in Mahnomen, I am sorry that the death penalty is not an option in Minnesota. When I think of the destruction of the young life of that deputy, it seems that an "eye for an eye" ought to be applied.
