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Sunday, April 13, 2008
Victim’s mercy toward youths unusual
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Their son was shaken up the most.
He heard his mom’s screams coming from the driveway. Rebecca Baltich had been shot in the stomach with a BB gun.
The incident ended with the arrest of an All-America basketball player and two of his teammates. Norcross High hoops star Al-Farouq Aminu, Prince Kent and Quintin Square have been charged with felony aggravated assault and misdemeanor trespass. They allegedly shot Baltich March 14 in front of her Norcross home. They spent a night in jail and may be indicted.
Something stood out when I read the initial story about the incident. It wasn’t the fact that Aminu, a Wake Forest signee and a Parade Magazine and McDonald’s All-American, may have been involved. After all, no one’s perfect, and if you think you’re remotely close you’re either fooling yourself or have a selective memory.
What resonated with me was the attitude of the Baltichs, Rebecca and Branden. Go easy on the boys, the couple has said. They have their whole lives ahead of them.
“We think this is the right thing to do,” Branden told me during a three-way telephone call with his wife and me. “Life is precious, too short to be caught up being angry.”
So often we see spiteful, vindictive responses and reactions to most any and every thing. The eye-for-an-eye and tooth-for-a-tooth adages get taken to the extreme. Unless, of course, you’re a celebrity.
Without question, some crimes deserve swift prosecution. Think Gary Michael Hilton, the drifter who has admitted killing and decapitating Meredith Emerson, a 24-year-old Bufordite. Or Brian Nichols, the multiple-murder defendant whose death-penalty trial has been bogged down over defense funding.
Sometimes, though, we’re too hard-core, too quick to throw down the gauntlet. We view issues in black and white, and conveniently ignore slivers of gray that distort our cozy picture of justice and order, right and wrong.
Forget compassion and forgiveness. Vindictiveness rules, though it’s not altogether effective. Same for retribution. Getting even. By any means necessary. The new American way.
The Baltichs stepped back and thought things through, despite being victims in what had to be a highly emotional situation. They aren’t being suckers. They are simply showing compassion that they don’t have to exhibit. They could have talked this ordeal up in the press and made it out to be worse than it really was. And it would have been more egregious if one of the couple’s three children had been the victim or Rebecca had lost an eye.
“It’s basically just a welt,” said Rebecca Baltich, who prefers that her husband, a corporate attorney, speak to reporters.
Branden Baltich told me he’d like the criminal case resolved quickly and out of the press. He said he’d never been taken to jail, and couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for the boys to be locked up.
“That had to be scary,” he said.
Just as scary as shots raining down on your driveway.
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