Pumpkin Killing Is Sad Tale

It’s a sad story, this tale of the pumpkin killing, without a single redeeming quality or good guy.

A group of teenagers somehow thinks it would be fun to drive around otherwise peaceful suburban streets stealing Halloween decorations from one neighbor after another. And an otherwise peaceable suburbanite somehow thinks drawing a gun is a reasonable response to thoughtless kids and their dumb mischief, grabbing a plastic pumpkin off his lawn.

Now two families’ lives are in ruins. The family of Pete Tavita Solomona has lost financial security, its home and for several years its patriarch, who paid to defend himself against murder charges and was sentenced to six years in prison for voluntary manslaughter.

But at least the Solomona family will reunite one day. Brandon Ketsdever’s parents would probably give up money, house and a few years to see their 17-year-old son again. That won’t happen.

After a hung jury and a tossed-out conviction, a third jury came up with a verdict that fit the crime. The judge delivered an appropriate sentence for a man who should have known that chasing petty thieves with a gun was an outrageous and potentially fatal decision, but who probably will never want to see a gun again in his life.

That would be a nice lesson for the rest of us too. For every story of householders who have successfully defended themselves from evil with a handgun, there’s a matching story of the inadvertent or a heat-of-the-moment shooting of a child, a neighbor, a spouse.

Solomona deserved probation, not prison, his lawyer argued, because he was using the gun only “to get attention, not in a threatening manner.” Once drawn, however, there is no nonthreatening way to use a gun, no way to avoid the potential for deadly violence.

If there are to be good guys for this story, they will have to be the people who learn that a gun can be a terrifying item to have in a home, especially a loaded gun easily accessible in times of outrage or fear. They will be the parents who warn their kids that vandalism and petty theft aren’t just mean and dishonest, but deadly dangerous. You never know when the person you enrage could have a far meaner and more unlawful reaction.