runsforcelery wrote:
Many years ago, when I was young and foolish (i.e., in my late 20s), I had a lovely but very shy little tortoise shell cat. She disappeared one day and I didn't find her for three days. When I did, she'd obviously been tortured by someone for sick kicks. I rushed her to the vet, but it was too late to save her.
I went home. The next day, a young male person (I refuse to call him a young man) who was about 18 or 19 and living with his grandparents because he had no idea who his father was, his mother was in jail, and (I later discovered) he'd been convicted for half a dozen petty crimes of his own, wandered by while I was working on my truck. I don't have much use for stereotypes, but he was, alas, the epitome of what has upon occasion been described as "poor white trash," with all of the negative implications appended thereunto. He had his boom box with him and stood there grinning at me for a minute or two. I ignored him, and after a few more moments he grinned even more broadly than before and said "Did ja find yer kitty?" I looked up at him, and he smirked a little more. "Sure did squeal," he said.
I broke the boom box over his head and bounced his face off the side of my pickup truck half a dozen times. Then I dragged him back to his grandparents by the collar of his shirt, kicked him up the four steps to their front porch, and invited them to call the police if I seemed to have been out of line. His grandfather (who, despite the nature of his grandson was a man who'd worked hard all his life and paid his debts) looked fairly shocked by his grandson's state, but I don't really think he was all that surprised by it --- probably because he'd seen something like it coming for quite a while. He asked me what the hell I thought I was doing, and I explained the circumstances to him. He looked at me for a minute, then turned to the young jackal I'd dragged home and asked him if it was true. The idiot actually bragged that it was. At which point his grandfather asked me to let go of him, apologized deeply and sincerely for the murder of my cat, and assured me there would be no repercussions.
The next day, the kid had been remanded back to the juvenile authorities from whom his grandparents had tried to rescue him. They became good friends of mine over the next year or so, before I moved away.
These days, I'm older and wiser, with a lot more responsibilities which would be . . . negatively impacted by jail time. I'm also a lot less agile and a Methodist lay speaker. Having said all of that, I have no regrets to this day for my actions, although I doubt very much that anything short of a full frontal lobotomy could actually modify the behavior of anyone who would do that to a sweet and gentle cat like Mocha just for the sick jollies of it.
Sounds like a budding little serial killer. I shudder to think what other crimes he moved on to once released from juvie. One bright spot is that he is so stupid that he'd have been caught quickly and so hopefully the authorities were able to lock him up for life early on in his adult criminal career.
