IT WAS WRITTEN IN THE STARS. PART4

It was about 13 months earlier that this current phase of madness had enveloped the young man and his family.

It erupted on 28th October 2009, late in the evening, when the young man, just several day short of his 20th birthday, entered the living room of the family’s home and uttered the fateful and devastating words:Dad, it has been confirmed. 

By which he meant that the ID photos which had been taken of him at the Police Station in BoT on 26th October, had been identified by most of the witnesses who have testified that they saw him attacking another person. 

The young man then went on to give his father more information which he has just received in a telephone call from his solicitor, earlier. 

He told of how the Police has bailed him to return to the Station on Friday 6th November, when, he has been advised, he would be kept in custody until 7th November. 

At which point he would be put before a Magistrate with a request for him to be Remanded in Custody until the case is heard. 

Without his parents having had time to psychologically processed what they had just been told, their son went on to give them cause for further alarm. 

He now informed them that, as he has now been involved in 3 similar offences against a person, he could find himself having to serve up to 6 years in Prison. 

Before being released, and that he could even be monitored indefinitely.

Still only 19 years the young man was, it seemed certain, destined to spend, not only his 20th birthday incarcerated, but several others, with his remand in Brinds Prison, being the beginning of his incarceration career.

How do any caring parents respond to their son, when he had just given them such emotionally and psychologically shattering news?  

When the information he has given them put them in such a state of shock and anticipatory grief?

A situation not dissimilar from how they had felt, just under 9 years earlier, when they heard the news that his favourite paternal uncle had died? They felt numb.

They begin to imagine their son, who, notwithstanding his presentation, his impetuosity, his quick temperedness and tendency to respond emotionally to real and/or imagined attacks on him, to be no more than an immature and irrational teenager in many senses, being incarcerated 3-6 years.

How is he going to survive that? How would it impact on him? Will he resort to his past drug habit? Will he be attacked by other inmates and guards? 

Would he end up in further trouble, which could result in him spending more time in Prison? Would he become depressed and harm himself?

There were, it seemed, at the time, no end to the difficult questions the young man’s parents quietly contemplated, as they embarked on the nightmarish journey ahead of them.

Of course, what the young man's parents were feeling in their darkest hour was not unique, even though, for them, it was unknown territory. 

What they were feeling, thinking and dreading was what numerous parents and other humans had experienced before, and were still experiencing.

The tens of thousands of 'ordinary humans' and not so ordinary humans who comprised the prison population, and the relatives they left behind are testimony to that.

To be continued.