Thursday, April 26, 2007

She can forget a Mother's Day card

There is an unwritten Guy Code that spells out certain things any real man really should do for himself. Shaving is one. So is hooking up new electronic equipment. Sending hate mail to a former elementary school classmate you haven't seen in more than a decade? That's definitely on the list.
That last one should probably be self-explanatory, but some people have to learn the hard way.
Anthony Perone did. According to a March 16 story in the Hartford Courant, the 20-year-old Faribault resident wrote two letters to a girl he'd gone to school with in third and fourth grade. He wrote things like, "Your gonna learn about suffering and having nothing. Pain you will feel. Fear, Being alive," and filled the letters with drawings of tombstones and rifles and hearts with chunks bitten out of them. He signed them "Love, Death Stalker."
Then, he left the letters for his mom to mail.
This is where is plan starts to fall apart. Because Perone's mom, presumably thinking she was being helpful, put her son's name and return address on the envelopes and put them in the mail.
This might have been the easiest stalking case Connecticut police have ever solved.
Clearly mothers are nothing but trouble. Sometimes they put return addresses on letters that threaten death to people who are practically strangers. Sometimes they give their son's phone number to strange women they meet in book stores, just because the woman says she likes biking.
Not that I know any mothers who would do anything like that.
Imagine how much easier it would be to solve crimes, though, if every criminal was so dependent on his mother. The Unabomber would have been caught within days, although I imagine it would have taken some time to track down a return address for "crazy person's shack in the woods."
The anthrax scares that happened after 9/11 probably would have been over before they started because the mailer's mom would have been just certain her boy would never have meant to send such messy packages. And shouldn't he come out of that lab for just a little while? At least go sit in the yard. It's such a nice day.
Obviously Peron has some problems. Aside from bad grammar and a pushy mother, I mean. Police found an assault rifle and ammunition in his bedroom, along with a machete and evidence he planned to travel to Connecticut. He'd been obsessing over a girl who he'd last seen when both were in elementary school. And he wanted to go to Connecticut.
Still, there's no excuse for this kind of mistake. Does Peron ask his mother to soap him up when he showers? Does she clip his toenails? I'm guessing she doesn't. And he really shouldn't ask her to mail his anonymous, venom-filled letters. Hate mail is a very personal thing, after all.
According to the Courant, Peron has pleaded guilty to two counts against him and could face up to 10 years in prison and fines of up to $500,000 when he is sentenced June 5.
It is not clear whether he would write his mom from jail.

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