PaulPallazola
March 16, 1983. Gloucester, Massachusetts.
My former high school friend Jon Russell was having a bad year. He got busted for making obscene phone calls to local women. It must have been fun listening to conversation Jon and his preacher had at the next holy roller meeting. The Addison Gilbert Hospital decided it didn’t want perverts working in their laundry department. Jon was out of a job and had a public reputation that diminished his prospects of finding one.
Finally he got a minimum wage plus tips gig delivering pizza in town. Jon had been on the job only a few weeks when one night he got called to deliver a cheese pizza to a house near the end of Derby Street. At the end of the street six men were waiting. The Gloucester Times said Jon Russell was robbed but it seems unlikely. It was common knowledge in Gloucester that pizza delivery guys never carried more than twenty dollars on them in case they were robbed. Six men jumping a hapless delivery guy would only get $3.00 each for their efforts. Jon Russell, known as “Bird” to many who went to high school with, was not well liked before his arrest for making obscene phone calls. His newly acquired status as a convicted sex offender certainly had not enhanced his popularity.
Each of the women he intimidated and harassed had someone, a brother, cousin, father, friend, or partner who had witnessed their anguish and humiliation. Some of these folks were not satisfied with the probation and mandatory counseling ordered by a local judge. Jon Russell had two black eyes, two broken ribs and a swollen cheekbone. Sounds like the men who jumped her where motivated more by anger than the $20.00 he was carrying.
When I think of all the people who do nothing wrong and get mugged, it is hard to feel too sorry for your friend. What he did was wrong, he knew better, It sounds to me like if he had had an opportunity to do more serious crimes against women he would have. Preying upon developmentally disabled women is also a crime. Do you think he was developmental disabled himself?
He wasn’t brilliant, but got fair grades in high school and was intelligent enough to have a home business tracing genealogy/family trees for people. I think he was socially awkward and his anger about his social deficits ultimately led him to scapegoat others, first women, later gays, Jews, & Muslims as he embraced a form of “Christianity” that somehow left out the “love your neighbor” commandment and most of the sermon on the mount and replaced it with a narrow definition of who was “saved”.
While I have to agree with Alex a bit on this one, I also remember the 80’s very well… A harassing phone call is NOTHING in comparison to what some VERY YOUNG girls went through during this time. Personally, I don’t feel a harassing phone call justifies a registered sex offender status… Picking up the telephone to hear nothing but heavy breathing on the other end was common stance during the 80’s. In my world, we just hung up on them. In my opinion, using the sex offender status for such a thing is going a bit overboard. Especially considering that many REAL offenders, who actually did REAL harm to young women during this time weren’t even ever arrested…
Verbal tormenting was more Jon Russell’s style. He had been picked on as the obese awkward kid in high school and instead of developing a sympathy for the underdog, he had a festering anger- much of it pointed at women who he felt should have been more sympathetic to him. His one girlfriend during high school was, in retrospect most likely on the borderline of being mentally challenged. Years later the woman he married was clinically diagnosed as developmentally disabled. Her parents mistrusted Jon, suspecting he was looking for a chance to dominate their daughter and live off her social security. They weren’t too far from the mark.
Ewww… That type of guy 🙁 Sounds like an ex of mine… We’ll leave him there 😉
He put that pain and suffering out in the world, and then he got it back. Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind…
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