You may remember an Asheville event a few years back when, in a public park, a street-dweller stabbed a family pet to death. 

He did the deed in front of the owner and her kids and it was the killer, not the dog, who initiated the contact.

The gentleman in question was committed to a psychiatric hospital and sometime later released into the wild.

Three predators cut from similar cloth subsequently shot him to death.

I happened to catch an interview with an attorney who had represented the person in question. “He was a human being with persistent severe mental illness,” he said. “I knew he was someone who was always struggling. He wasn’t a monster.”

Yes, he was.

He most certainly was.

Amidst various dictionary definitions of “monster” you’ll find this one— “A powerful person or thing that cannot be controlled and that causes many problems. An extremely cruel or evil person.”

 According to the folks who interviewed his attorney, the man in question checks those boxes and then some.

“News 13 reviewed Henry’s criminal history, which spans decades and includes numerous misdemeanor charges, a number of which were resolved through guilty pleas. Court records include offenses such as communicating threats, second-degree trespassing, drug possession and intoxicated and disruptive behavior.”

And when you factor in the things that weren’t reported or otherwise addressed, that’s just the tip of his iceberg.

The legal system in our community is an extraordinarily expensive, inefficient and dysfunctional mess.

Part of the reason tracks to relentless role confusion.

Behavior is what marks the man – everything else is just bling.

Instead of administering lawful justice, our courts and attorneys like to play God and water down behavioral considerations with repeated mulligans, background considerations, racial filters and the unstated fact that consequences require inconvenient effort by the system. 

On that last one, dismissals, reduced sentences for time served, community service pretense, and no bail practices are easy-peasy for the courts and the criminals – devastating for current and future victims.

Permissive judges are like permissive parents — their enabling creates little monsters that over time become big monsters.

Predictably, our judicial system forgives bad actors until they cross some line of offense that finally triggers a judge’s sensibilities into recognizing he/she isn’t God and they’d better do some man-made stuff before somebody gets killed. 

Actually, too often that point of judicial engagement is after someone gets killed.

Remember Charlotte’s poor Ukrainian girl? 

That killer was an echo of our dog killer. Decades of getting by with on-the-job monster training until he became an expert and crossed the invisible line.

AI notes traits common to “monsters” — lack of empathy, no remorse, chronic manipulation, cruelty and meanness, and playing the victim. 

Sound familiar? 

That’s the script for the revolving door that characterizes Asheville’s criminal justice system, our toxic homelessness reality, rampant drug culture, racially segmented violence ethos, and unsupervised training opportunities for membership in Monsters Inc.

Taking things a bit further, have we perhaps been a bit hard – per his troubled childhood, unaddressed anxiety disorder, and horrific WWI combat-related PTSD – on poor old Adolf Hitler? 

Surely sometime soon, the compassionate left will give him a mulligan, too? Besides, for a growing body of liberals, his murder of six-million Jews was an incomplete mission.

I guess it takes a while to overcome the conscience triggers of the additional sixty-five to eighty-million deaths that came out of this monster’s war-stained hands. 

But don’t worry Adolf, your status, per the left-minded’s approach to erasing accountability and consequence as a filter for bad behavior, must surely be under appeal.

If you’re wondering why Asheville seems particularly vulnerable to this nonsense, note our city houses 700 attorneys. Last time I checked, less than 3 percent were Republicans.

Nothing like a hyper-monopoly to ensure that fallacy becomes policy. 

Nothing is going to change anytime soon. Our boy, girls, and others on the left are too busy polishing their fantasies to address our realities.

What are the rest of us to do?

It might be useful to remember that behind every misunderstood, damaged childhood, trauma-suffering mental health victim stands a force of darkness that dependably exploits the weak, misguided, and troubled as surely as the rest of us.

As for our black-robed judges, almost universally miserable attorneys, and the local political place holders who refuse to challenge them, responsibly fund them, or otherwise do anything to reform them. please stop confusing enabling with love.

Doing the easy thing is almost always the former.

Ask any mom or dad who knows what they’re doing.