Posted on 05/08/2005 5:48:09 AM PDT by rw4site
May 7, 2005, 11:18PM
After hearing from Rambo wannabes that I should have blown away the tattooed, drug-addled man who crashed into my house at 11 o'clock one night in February, the e-mail from Syble Asaf was arresting.
It's not every day a mother thanks you for not shooting her son.
"I was reading an article Wednesday evening and realized it is my son you were writing about," she wrote. "I am very sorry for what he did to your family. As equally I am grateful you did not shoot him."
Police records mistakenly listed him as José Calzada, a name that led some readers to jump to conclusions.
I hope they deport him, wrote one.
I had, after wrestling him out of my house, no desire to meet Calzada. I'm not Pope John Paul II, who befriended his would-be assassin.
But I couldn't resist the urge to meet his mother, the author of the warm and intriguing e-mail.
His name is Joe, not José, Mrs. Asaf told me.
Not only are both his parents native-born citizens, but Calzada, 26, grew up in the pleasant suburbs of The Woodlands and Spring and went to the good schools of Klein Independent School District.
"We're middle-class white American people trying to make it in the world," said Mrs. Asaf.
Joe's dad, who had a problem with the bottle, according to her, left when Joey was 1 year old. A couple of years later, she married her current husband, who is retired after years of owning and running an Exxon station.
Joey was, said his mother, a straight-A student through fifth grade. He played Little League and was in the Boy Scouts.
Then, with puberty, came anger and rebellion. At 11, he started disappearing for a week at a time. By 13, his parents padlocked their bedroom door to keep him from stealing for drugs. His stepfather sold his hunting shotguns.
At 14, he shaved his scalp and joined a white-supremacist skinhead group.
"He was always small, and believed he had to be seen as tough and scary to make up for it," Mrs. Asaf said.
When one of the bigger skinheads came to her house looking for red suspenders (a gang symbol) he had loaned Joey, Mrs. Asaf retrieved the suspenders, and told the skinhead her son didn't belong in their gang.
"I told him Joey's part Hispanic," she said. "Joey got angry. They wouldn't let him in after that."
"They'd keep him for 30 days until the insurance ran out and then say he was cured," she said. "It was a revolving door."
But Asaf lays little blame. She describes his teachers and some of his psychiatric professionals as being wonderful.
She worries that she herself didn't do enough, but she doesn't know what she could have done differently.
Then she pushes across the table a copy of the Houston Chronicle's defunct Texas Magazine.
In a "small world" thunderclap, there's the guy who broke into my house, on the magazine cover with his wife, Jennifer. The story, published five years ago, is headlined: "After drifting in a haze of drugs, violence and homelessness on Houston's streets, Joe and Jennifer may have found A Way Out."
And romance so mindlessly desperate that Jennifer knew Joey was HIV-positive, and had unprotected sex with him in hopes both of becoming pregnant and contracting HIV herself so she could die and be with him.
He had been HIV-positive since he was 16. His mom found out by being the one who gave him the test.
Jennifer left him while he was in prison in 2003. Afterwards he hooked up with and impregnated a woman. A middle-aged couple adopted the baby boy.
Miraculously, neither of the two women nor the baby became HIV-positive.
He calls his mother and sister occasionally. A talented artist, he's making money sketching tattoos (including those that cover his body) under the sponsorship of some friends in the Fifth Ward.
"Joey has a guardian angel," said his mother.
Still, she believes the only way he will survive, if not be happy, is in prison.
You can write to Rick Casey at P.O. Box 4260, Houston, TX 77210, or e-mail him at rick.casey@chron.com.
Yeah can you just imagine what he would do if he was a bleeding heart liberal
So if a burglar just tried to steal something as opposed to harming you, your dog would love him?
This home owner had no clue what the guys intentions were, and just by saying "don't hurt me, I need help" doesn't mean that's true. He could be saying that after he knocked the homeowner out and while he's raping the women of the house.
LOL!!
Any thief who breaks into your home with you in it is capable of a violent crime, in fact I consider this a violent crime, since no longer will you ever feel safe in your own home.
The Author had no way to shoot this kid so why thank him for not shooting. Facts are if he had shot the kid and killed him he would have done the mother a favor. No longer would she have to worry about where he is or who he is hurting. If she was so frightened of him she locked her bedroom door to keep him from robbing her she should have shot the little bastid herself and done the world a favor. But then the world needs more tattoo artists marking ignorant young womens bodies with blue ink and making them look like trash. Yes : I am against tattoos for anyone but its criminal to mark women with these things. To take a lovely body and splash some stupid barbed wire around their ankles or arms or to paint some silly rose on their ankle is idiocy, I dont even want to get into what they do on their breasts and other private parts.
"And the homeowner had this knowledge when the perp. was standing at the bottom of the stairs in a drug induced craze?"
Exactly! If I'm the homeowner and I turn the corner of my landing and an intruder is in my house, I could care less if he has been involved in any violent crime or not... I, however will immediately be involved in removing him from society...
If you have kids and they're in the house, how would you possibly live with yourself if you could have killed this guy, but instead you thought "Hey, maybe he hasn't been involved in any violebt crimes??? Maybe I can sit and have coffee with him in the kitchen and see exactly where society did him wrong..."
Then he knocks your ass out and kills your whole family before leaving.... Oh, by the way, you live......
I'm sure you'd live fulfilled that you gave the guy the chance to be a good boy...
HA!
I was just thinking, this Casey guy learns fast, huh? How you been, Oxen?
Although it sounds like this girl needs a nice rubber room too......
And romance so mindlessly desperate that Jennifer knew Joey was HIV-positive, and had unprotected sex with him in hopes both of becoming pregnant and contracting HIV herself so she could die and be with him.
I don't know about his politics but any change in his writings would have to be a move to the right. Of course writing for The Houston Chronicle may require a sharp turn to the left. I'll admit that I haven't read much of his leftist drivel but his subject matter and the articles I have read, including the two on this subject, certainly seem to support my observation.
Very nice, I hope you sent that to Casey.
Fair enough. Don't agree. But, fair enough.
You'll probably never like his politics, but check him out once in awhile. He really is much better than you may think now.
Glad you liked it.
In the process of sending it now actually.
I can't believe the Houston Chronicle let this grammatical error slip through. One does not use an apostrophe to denote a plural.
Most criminals are pathetic human beings with wretched childhoods; and many of them have organic brain damage of unknown cause that profoundly impairs their judgment and conduct, as I suspect Joey the burglar has. The writer is a fool though in offering a sympathetic portrait of a criminal without balancing it with the hard edged truth that locking up criminals -- and sometimes shooting them -- are the only reliably effective choices that we have to protect the weak, innocent, and law-abiding.
A vastly-experienced senior judge whom I once worked for was pro-death penalty and hard line about criminal law and sentencing -- but he also frequently visited state prisons and, deep in the prisons with minimal security, he talked to the inmates about his own struggles with alcohol and an often chaotic personal life. His message to the prisoners though was bracing: whatever wrongs anyone has done to you, you are almost all in prison because you chose to be a criminal, and if you want to ever be anything else, you have to be responsible for your own life and your decisions and stop thinking and acting like a criminal.
The judge noted that hearing this seemed a revelation to many of the prisoners, who were accustomed to sympathy and support from friends, family, defense lawyers, ministers, and counselors. Oddly, liberal judges seemed to seldom visited the prisons, and when they did, they insisted on distance from the prisoners and heavy security. The judges most inclined to favor and sympathize with criminals in their decisions carefully avoided getting to know them as individuals.
She is no rocket scientist thats for sure.
Ding ding ding........
The years between 11 and 15, when Joey left for a permanent life on the streets, were a blur of alternative school, counseling, Ritalin and stays in psychiatric hospitals.
From a west coast perspective: since no 'other offenders' had broken into the guy's home at that moment, and since a HIV infected druggie does represent a threat to me and mine in a situation such as this; you're dam* right he should be shot dead, 'simply' because he IS an immediate threat and if let go he'll do it again & again.
Eventually he'll get lucky one way or the other.
Now THAT is good reporting!
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