“I didn't make the laws, but they make sense to my ass.” — Slick Rick
“The DA can play this motherfucking tape in court…I'ma kill you.” — 50 Cent
A friend once watched in wonderment as I tooled two of my daughters along the boardwalk in a stroller at San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf. Beyond wonderment he had had questions because he was…confused.
“I just don’t understand kids.”
“Kids? What’s to understand?” I laughed. But he wasn’t laughing.
“Not kids so much. More, I mean, about having them.”
Watching two of my daughters, who I loved enough to later have two more, babble to each other and point out stuff on the wharf with a certain amount of excitement and new-eyed wonder, I said that I didn’t understand.
“Well, it’s like having a super expensive car,” he finally said having hit on it. “A super expensive car that you have to check on every second. It seems like that.”
“If you’re a good parent, yes.”
“That’s part of it,” he agreed. “But, you know, people still do steal cars.”
And there it was. The not-so-lurking truism that was spelled out in stark letters later by my former father-in-law in explaining why he had four kids: “I just didn’t think that they all would make it.”
Cain was special because Cain and Cain’s world was so…interior.
Which makes sense if you’re a cattle rancher, which he was. It’s dangerous work. Makes a little less sense if you’re just…a guy. Because how much can you believe what you read in the papers about strangers, and danger? And surely, the world is not as dangerous as it seems when spelled out by people who are trying to sell you the news, right?
So what happens then is that we collectively decide that everything is going to be OK, and maybe some of the time it is.
But just this past week it was not. Former UFC Heavyweight Champion Cain Velasquez chased a man who was released from jail for molesting an unnamed family member of Cain’s. Velasquez rammed the vehicle carrying the man before shooting into the vehicle that carried the alleged molester, along with the molester’s mother and stepfather.
Apparently the mother ran an in-home daycare center where the Velasquez relative, a child, was molested over 100 times. The day of the shooting the District Attorney believed it was OK to release the molester, a one Mr. Harry Eugene Goularte, 43-years-old. He had been heading home, presumably the home where the molestation occurred, to have an in-home monitoring device placed on him. A condition of his release.
Goularte’s stepfather was shot. Goularte, himself, who pleads innocent, escaped further injury and remains free.
Cain Velasquez has been and remains jailed.
“He locked himself in his room. He didn’t come out for almost two weeks. Spoke to no one. Never talked about it.” His mother, Isabel Velasquez, who called me for years, well after the initial round of interviews I did with her for an article I wrote about her son, was talking about how Cain had handled a loss earlier in his career.
Indeed, that quiet intensity she alluded to is what marked his tenure as a UFC Heavyweight champion. Not a lot of florid, fevered and overheated trash talk. Velasquez typically let his fists do the talking with a punishing fight style that fully embraced an unofficial team slogan: embrace the suck.
My time with him was short and in short order involved him beating the holy hell out of me. An event still one of the high points of my life. To be clear my book FIGHT was largely about other fights with other fighters, but the one with Cain was special because Cain and Cain’s world was so…interior.
From Isabel glimpses would be given into a Cain beyond the headlines, and it was all hard driving aspirational stuff but beyond that even was just the portrait of a gentle guy who had become a fighter to protect the gentle guy he was.
And when you become a father, as another gentle guy had come quickly to understand, you desire to protect those you’ve fathered so maybe they don’t have to fight to protect their gentle selves.
But the only kids that go to daycare are kids that are too young to go to school. And while the West has done marginally better in the age of #MeToo with the whole concept of believing women, it seems that courtesy is not so readily extended to children.
I took some small amount of heat for vigilantism. Claims were made that if I was wrong what kind of thug would that have made me. The pro-rape contingent showed up…
While the child connected to Cain conveyed that the molestation had occurred over 100 times, this was not enough for a District Attorney to believe that the molester represented a present threat to the community. A judgement that makes you wonder if someone had robbed 100 banks if they’d be allowed to wander home, or wherever, and wait for justice to work its way with them.
Writer Peter Sotos was right in detailing that America’s relationship with its children is aggressively dishonest. And Sotos wrote almost exclusively about child killing.
So when Goularte was released it makes a lot of sense that Cain would take umbrage. Extreme umbrage at that release.
And while we’ve probably been in agreement up until right here I’m fairly certain the road will now fork for some. This I know because I’ve been a gentle man who acted out. I wrote about it.
In the comments I took some small amount of heat for vigilantism. Claims were made that if I was wrong what kind of thug would that have made me. The pro-rape contingent then showed up in full force to suggest maybe the woman I knew who had been sexually assaulted was drunk, or high, as though this would make a difference.
I didn’t care and publicly made the claim that given the extremely low conviction rate for rape and sexual assault if there needed to be a court of final appeal I was OK with that being on the business end of a bat. Or a boot. Or whatever corrective measure seemed to do what the criminal justice system was loathe to do.
And this was with adult women. But with me and children, I am incapable of any measure of reasonable sanity. Talk about diminished capacity — if I were Cain’s attorney, precisely what I’d be thinking about pleading — kids or kids coming to harm causes me to abandon all reason.
Yes, I understand the relatively recent pleas of “non-offending pedophiles” who claim that they’re being unfairly stigmatized. I also understand that I don’t care.
Nature has natively understood warning signs, and it doesn’t take much to figure out if you threaten the young of a Mama Bear, you’re taking your life in your hands. If you’re not taking this threat seriously as a human when it comes to humans you either lack a self-preserving impulse control or you understand that the system and its penalties are not severe enough to cause you to alter your course of action.
Upending the system is precisely the kind of corrective that maybe juices the system in just the right way. Which/what is the right way? Let’s try maybe not releasing sex offenders back to the streets to be shot at by people who have all the right in the world to shoot at them.
Drawbacks? Sure: Cain is in jail now. Goularte remains free. And nothing will undo what was done to the child connected to Cain.
But here’s something for anyone who understands the compulsive nature of human sexuality: if Goularte molested one kid over 100 times do you honestly believe it was his first kid? Do you honestly believe it will be his last kid?
And finally do you think I should have boldfaced and all-capped the word IF above?
While the system doesn’t work if everyone shoots their way to some sort of solvency, it’s pretty clear that the system is not working anyway. So, maybe, let’s protect the kids first, understand that out of the things kids might lie about, being raped by a caregiver is probably not one of them, and treat sex offenders with some degree of seriousness when it comes to judicial punishments.
OR…not. And if not, when nature runs its course keep your tears and outrage. The kids deserve at least this much.
I’ve asked - myself and others, many times - how is it that more people don’t go after people who have assailed their family members? My most recent mental exercise led me to this: the cops get to them first, and hold them long enough that the potential vigilante has time to reflect upon what else they and their family have to lose, plus the attorneys convince them that justice is on the way. And by the time (months or a year later) they are found not-guilty, the person has sufficiently processed the loss, such that they won’t do anything “crazy”.
I agree with you 100% that letting him out was not only morally wrong but impractical, and thus you get…what we got, which is even more danger and loss.
The other thing I learned is, if you’re going to risk your whole life this way, you have to plan better. Granted, that is hard to do in that state of mind. Very sad all around.