TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Hernando Today

The impact of October

ADVERTISEMENT

By RON RAE

The Rae Way

Published: October 20, 2009

Common denominators of this column are two vacations taken two years apart and two deaths, each of which was of major global impact. Although years apart, both were murders committed in the month of October.

In the fall of 2006, while sister Sue and brother-in-law Mike were vacationing in Florida, I joined them at his family's getaway home in a well-maintained retirement community of manufactured homes in Bradenton.

I found myself trudging along the sidewalks at the Centre Shops of Longboat Key as Sue looked for bargains, with Mike dutifully in tow, while I lagged outside on park benches people-watching. I had no business with merchants whose wares went above my financial comfort zone of Walmart, or even upscale merchandise at Penney's.

One store that caught my interest was a craft shop that sold original creations of art rather than mass-market productions. Still, not much tempted me to pull out the plastic until I came upon, of all things imaginable, a rock.

Now, I already had a small collection of rocks. A well-rounded specimen of basalt rock, smooth from the pounding waves along the shore of Lake Superior. The white granite rock pilfered from Yosemite National Forest is a favored possession. A lava rock from the Hawaiian island of Kauai is most unique. (The one taken from the Big Island was shipped back when, after four months of really, really bad luck, I realized the curse said to befall anyone who takes a lava rock off the island of Hawaii was indeed true.)

So, before leaving Long Boat Key, a 60-pound, $60 rock engraved with the word "Imagine" was purchased on Oct. 7, one day prior to the murder of John Lennon in 1980, and two days shy of his 40th birthday, Oct. 9. Perhaps a timely coincidence. Nonetheless, this faithful admirer cherishes the chiseled piece of stone that pays tribute to the genius of a man who brought momentous social awareness to music. The assassin, David Chapman, was sentenced to 20 years to life.

A year ago this month, I was vacationing in Rapid City, S.D. After a most glorious week of unseasonably warm 80-degree temperatures, with day after day and hours upon hours spent experiencing nearly every possible real world wonder of the region — Mt. Rushmore; Jewel Cave; Needles Highway in Custer State Park with free-roaming buffalo, donkeys, prairie dogs and other native creatures; Mammoth Site; Sylvan Lake; waterfalls accented by the fall colors of leaves — I paid a modest $40 for a good chunk of petrified log, pound for pound a much better deal than souvenir T-shirts.

One of my last jaunts was to Devil's Tower just across the border into Wyoming. It was Oct. 10, a day of a seemingly timeless walk around the base of another natural wonder of time's making among acres of skyward-reaching pine trees.

These awesome sights brought to me visions of a terribly awful act of torture that began d uring the early morning hours of Oct. 7, 1998, when a victim of a hate crime was left in a coma from fractures to the back of the head and in front of the right ear. Repeatedly pistol-whipped by Aaron McKinney, and witnessed by but supposedly not involved in the beating, Russell Henderson. Each received two life sentences for the murder of 21-year-old Matthew Sheppard, a gay student in Laramie, Wyo.

During the trial, the girlfriends of McKinney and Henderson both testified that the two had planned to rob a gay man in advance. At the Fireside Lounge on the University of Wyoming campus, Sheppard proved to be an easy target as he was handily convinced the two were sympathetic to gay rights and offered him a ride home.

Instead, he was robbed of his wallet containing $20, plus his shoes, and left to die tied to a wooden split-rail fence, bleeding in near freezing temperatures. A cyclist happened by 18 hours later and the horrors of the previous night were soon exposed to the world. Matthew Shepard passed away on Oct. 12, 1998.

For nearly a decade, attempts have been made to bring into law The Matthew Shepard Act to: "Expand the law to authorize the Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute certain bias-motivated crimes based on the victim's actual or perceived sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or disability. Current law only includes race, color, religion or national origin."

On Oct. 8, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act by a vote of 281-146. It's now up to the Senate to vote on the legislation before it becomes the law

No, there's no funereal stone that commemorates the hate crime of that cold October night 11 years ago, but in my mind there remain horrors that "I can't imagine."

Ron Rae, a regular columnist for Hernando Today, lives in Spring Hill. He can be contacted at hernandoron@yahoo.com.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT