TOOL TIME IN BAD AXE, MICHIGAN

I had to get away, simply had to, so I dropped everything I was doing (which wasn’t much) and made the 2-hour trek to my grandmother’s house. It seemed like the most logical thing to do, to go visit someone on house arrest due to an oxygen producing machine and hose. Not that she can’t get out—she had just finished cutting her grass before my arrival—only her portable canisters limit her to eight hour increments maximum.

We had a nice visit. I learned that my dad had been over a day earlier picking cherries, and a pie most certainly awaited me at my parent’s retirement home some fifteen minutes down the road. On the way out, I noticed the Huron Daily Tribune on my grandmother’s kitchen table, particularly an article in the lower right corner. I told her that the parolee arrested in Bad Axe came from the facility where I worked. She, in turn, told me that she knew the family. Wonderful, I thought. Let me recap the article for you as briefly as possible.

The parolee was originally doing time under the "650 Drug-Lifer Law." After a substantial amount of time in prison he was granted a parole. On July 15th of last year he was caught naked as a jay bird in a Holiday Inn Express watching a pornographic video while his partying teenage friends did God-knows-what in an adjacent room. His new charges included: accosting a child for immoral purposes, 3 counts of indecent exposure, 3 counts of selling/furnishing alcohol to a minor, and 1 count of malicious destruction of property.

Well, guess what? After 8 months in the Huron County Jail, our dear troop leader, sorry Boy Scouts of America, had been dismissed of all charges and handed over to the Michigan Department of Corrections for possible parole violations. However, prior to this, while sitting in the hoosegow, our dear friend gained valuable information on a man accused of repeatedly suffocating his blind/diabetic wife. Prosecutors in that case, found his testimony very very helpful. Wonderful. Not only does the MDOC have to deal with an obvious parole violator; they also need to figure out how to protect him. Yee-haw. Perhaps he needs more oxygen to the brain; he's certainly a real tool. Ain’t that right, Mr. Tim-the-Tool-Man-Taylor?