Brothers

In the wake of the Shawn Hornbeck story—particularly after Bill O’Reilly’s frankly idiotic comments on the subject—I went looking for some information on the case of Steven Stayner, whose story (which I remembered from a long-ago TV movie) had eerie parallels with Hornbeck’s. I remembered vaguely that he’d had trouble readjusting to his homelife after his escape, and that he’d come to a bad end.

I was partly right. Steven Stayner grew to be a functional human being, a family man, ven (in a modest way) a crusader. Considering the specifics of his story, that’s a goddam miracle.

Then his motorcycle ended up in somebody’s blind spot at the wrong moment, and he was gone. That’s just bad luck.

But that’s not even the really creepy part.