Category: Let's talk
Here's a news story I found a while ago, and I wanted to share it. As an aside, I'm sure the writer meant to use the word publicly in the first sentence.
Courage unites court in tears: Family finds forgiveness for con who shot girl
By Laurel J. Sweet
Friday, April 14, 2006 - Updated: 12:46 PM EST
From the Boston Harold.
An angelic little girl yesterday pubicly forgave the hardened convict who put
her in a wheelchair for life, reducing even veteran court officers to tears
in a moment of high courtroom drama.
“I forgive Anthony Warren,” 5-year-old Kai Leigh Harriott told Suffolk
Superior Court Judge Margot Botsford.
“What (he) did to me was wrong, but I still forgive him,” Kai Leigh said.
The bubbly Kai Leigh, who’d waited two years to show Warren what his temper
one steamy summer night in Dorchester had cost her, sobbed.
It was the punch to the gut that caused the child’s mother, Tonya David, to
crumble in astonishment.
“This is the most that Kai has ever cried in this whole case,” David, a
mother of five, told Warren, unable to hold back her own tears. “My children
have never had anything bad to say about you because I’d never allow it to
happen.”
The emotional exchange came after Warren, 29, pleaded guilty, rather than
force the case to trial.
“I’m sorry. I take responsibility for myself,” he told Kai Leigh, towering
over the kindergartner, after admitting to accidentally shooting her in the
back on July 1, 2003.
Botsford sentenced him to 13 to 15 years in state prison on assault and
weapon charges.
As Warren was being led away from his own distraught family, David reached
out to shake his shackled hand, then drew him into an embrace.
Botsford, who chastised Warren for his “senseless, reckless, thoughtless,
but deliberate” decision to resolve a fight with a firearm, called
yesterday’s
proceedings “the most moving that I have ever heard in my career.”
Warren’s defense attorney, Robert Zanello, said even he wasn’t privy to
everything his client wanted Kai Leigh to know.
“It wasn’t rehearsed,” he said outside the courthouse. “It wasn’t written
down. It was from the heart.”
Kai Leigh, then only 3, was sitting on the third-floor porch of a Bowdoin
Street triple-decker with her sister, Aja David, now 17, when Warren turned
up in the street below to finish off a beef between his brother Cedric Warren
and two sisters and their brother on the first floor.
Prosecutor David Fredette said one of at least three warning shots Warren
popped off from a .38-caliber revolver - gunfire that was recorded on a 911
call to police - “shattered” Kai Leigh’s spine.
“She’s permanently paralyzed from the chest down,” Fredette said.
He said Warren, who has three children of his own, including a daughter not
much younger than Kai Leigh, then dumped the gun in a girlfriend’s car.
When she discovered it and confronted him, he told her, “ ‘Put it up,’ meaning
to hide the gun,” Fredette said.
But yesterday, the mother who can still hear the “pitter-patter” of Kai
Leigh’s feet running through her head at long last heard what can put those
memories to rest: the heart-searching shame of the man who nearly killed her
baby girl.
“We’re not victims here,” Tonya David said, “we’re victorious.”
Kai Leigh Harriott was paralyzed by a stray bullet in 2003. (Staff photo by
David Goldman)
couldn't forgive the kind of creature who could do this, though she probably feels she has no option..its better than living consumed by bitterness.
awwww, poor thing...soooo sad.
I agree. I thought that story was so sad when I read it. I guess, though, forgiveness is really the best way for this beautiful person to get on with her life and the unfairness of it all, without bitterness.
Anyway, sorry, I'm just ranting.
Perhaps there's a poem in there somewhere--I wish I were a poet.
Bob
No I don't think your ranting just talking sense, and with the advances in stem cell research concerning spinal injuries, one never knows.