I am sure that we all want to see justice done to sex offenders. I have focused several storylines in my novels about those who commit such crimes and the wonderful efforts of law enforcement to get them off the streets.
As many of you know, Emily Stone is a featured character through a series of my books who operates as a vigilante in tracking these predators and collecting the evidence she knows the authorities will need to get a conviction. Unless called upon to defend herself, though, Emily was not one to exact violence on these men who had caused such pain to others. This is not the case with a man in Washington who recently took the law into his hands and left two dead.
Patrick Drum shot both his new roommate and another local acquaintance over the weekend because they were registered sex offenders, one following a conviction of third-degree rape as a teenager and the other for the first-degree rape of a child. Drum has admitted to the murders and, upon his capture following a manhunt in the forest of the Olympic Peninsula, he shared that he already had a third target in mind and intended to continue the killing until he was stopped. His only explanation for his acts was that these men were sex offenders.
Some are uncomfortably applauding what Drum did, stating that sex offenders deserve nothing better. Others point out that the two who were killed had served their time and were continuing to fulfill their punishment through placement on the national sex registry. Justice already had been done. And, what does yet another act of violence accomplish?
What do you think?
What possibly drove Drum to target sex offenders for death?
Perhaps he was a victim of such a crime himself. Perhaps he felt a calling to exact greater justice than the court system allowed. So goes the continued fascination with forensic psychology and the probe into why we do what we do.
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