Unbelievably Strange

About a month ago one of the top ten emailed stories according to Yahoo was that of a man who sodomized Thelma in January of 2005. Apparently he had become a nuisance to the owner of a township farm. Fearing the man to be a stalker, she had to chase him off of her property when a herd of sheep alarmed her to the presence of the intruder. To the man's surprise, this woman also happened to be an off-duty police officer.

When a responding police officer surprised him as he stepped out from behind some trees behind the property, the man explained that he had gone into the woods to take a dump. The officer confronted him about his story, asking if he would find excrement if he were to take a K-9 back into the woods with his flashlight. The man, by now obviously growing uneasy, explained instead that he had stopped to pet the woman's sheep.

As the officer conducted his investigation, he noted that one of the sheep appeared particularly distressed. Unable to detect the presence of bodily fluids on the ground, a swab was taken of the animal's anal cavity and forensic testing later confirmed the presence of human sperm cells.

This man was sentenced to prison and ordered to register as a sex offender. Today he showed up for classification. He broke down in a colleague's office as, during the course of her interview, she reminded him that the blood of Jesus had taken care of his sin. The man tried to explain that he had been prescribed prozac and had no recollection of anything that took place on that cold evening in January of last year. He related how he had become so depressed over his situation that he overdosed on his prescribed medication.

Since his arrival at the reception center for processing, he has had to endure the sophomoric taunts of everyone around him mimicking the baaaaah's of sheep and a host of ewe-referenced jokes. Visit this online discussion to the story on the web and you'll begin to appreciate the carnival-like atmosphere surrounding this offender's presence in prison. Having served the maximum prison term on four prior incarcerations, I hunch he's going to find himself behind bars haunted by this nightmare not for the 2 1/2 year minimum, but for the 20 year maximum of his sentence.

In my view, the behavior of people (including corrections professionals) in reaction to this man's presence is reminiscent of a couple of prepubescent boys thumbing through the pages of a dictionary to find and laugh at dirty words. Sigh. We humans are a strange sort indeed.