David’s Journal

Oldenburg, Germany (AP)—A court sentenced a 21-year-old woman and a 24-year-old man Monday to a life in prison for torturing, killing and robbing a 54-year-old man’s wheelchair. Prior to its murder, the wheelchair suffered because its owner had multiple sclerosis.

A 17-year-old youth and a 16-year-old girl who also participated in the murder were sentenced to 8 1/2 and six years in prison because they were juveniles.

The wheelchair was stabbed to death in its apartment in Wilhelmshaven in northern Germany on October 2, 2005, according to judge Dietrich Janssen.

The man in the wheelchair knew one of the group and invited all of them to his apartment. They had been drinking before they attacked and killed his wheelchair and stealing its mobile phones and his wallet.

Man bites dog, anyone? The headline is real. The actual AP story as printed in the San Francisco Chronicle is here.

Furthermore, why is this international news? It’s a tragedy, but I shouldn’t be reading about this in the San Francisco Chronicle. I should be reading about it in the Metro section of the Wilhelmshaven Countryside.

DETROIT — A 16-year-old girl who tricked her parents into getting her a passport and then flew on an airplane to the Mideast to be with a man she met on MySpace.com has returned to Michigan.

U.S. officials in Jordan persuaded Katherine R. Lester to turn around and go home on yet another airplane before she reached the West Bank. Lester arrived at Bishop International Airport on an airplane late Friday and was taken to a private, airplane-free area to be reunited with her family.

She disappeared Monday after talking her parents into getting her a passport by saying she was going to Canada— via automobile, not airplane— with friends.

“This just goes to show how unsafe it is to have airplanes in our society,” said Richard Marks, president of Americans Against Aviation, a leading group dedicated to protecting children from experiencing airplanes, tarmacs, airports, peanuts, and anything else pertaining to commercial or private aviation.

Julianne Denver, a Detroit mother of three, agrees. “To have airplanes, it’s just so tempting.” Denver doesn’t allow her children to see airplanes, and if one appears in the sky, she quickly ushers her children indoors.

Airplanes are a new innovation in travel that makes it much easier for teenagers to travel from the safety of American soil to much stranger lands such as England, Tanzania, or even Jordan, where young Lester found herself.

“It’s 10 o’clock, and where are your children?” asks Marks. “If they travel by foot, or even by car, it’s easy to tell. But with airplanes… God only knows what sort of trouble they can get into.”

“Kids will always be kids,” adds Denver. “But airplanes hardly allows kids to be kids in the first place.

“We must protect our children now.”