There must be another way

Recently in Annapolis, Maryland's capitol city, a man turned himself in to police and is facing charges of first-degree assault and reckless endangerment, as well as weapons charges.

John Estep, 41, is accused of shooting a 14-year-old and a 10-year-old several weeks ago. Police said he had called 911 an hour before the shooting, complaining that a group of juveniles were banging on his door, but by the time police arrived the first time, the kids were gone.

Later that evening, another neighbor reported a crowd of juveniles banging on his door, and five minutes after that call, police got a report of shots being fired.

Estep is saying that someone kicked his door in and had come inside his home, which is when he fired at the alleged intruder, and then at a group at his side window. After that, he went outside and fired a shot into the ground.

The window of Estep's house

The 14-year-old is a male who was shot twice in the legs; the other victim was a 10-year-old girl, shot in the back. 

Annapolis police stated that “there was damage consistent with breaking and entering on the door” of Estep’s house.

It reminds me of a situation that occurred in Baltimore County's east side in 1980, when Roman Welzant, 68, tired of the years of antagonism with the neighborhood teens, confronted a bunch who had been lobbing snowballs at his house by firing a .22 pistol at them. He called it self-defense, but the state of Maryland called it  second-degree murder, as his four bullets killed Albert Raymond Kahl Jr., 18, and seriously wounded James F. Willey, 16.

It had gone on for years and years, both sides acknowledged, the kids tormenting Welzant and his family home with snowballs and eggs and stones and catcalls, and Welzant coming out of the house, hollering curses at the mob and taking their photographs (the kids called him "Cameraman.")

Mr Welzant had been a shoe salesman and a salesman for a kitchen equipment firm; his wife worked her way up to being head teller at a bank. They represented that generation who came of age during the Depression, worked hard, and found pride in their homes and, in his case, a boat moored at Miller's Island and a shiny Cadillac.

But that night in January in a snowfall, Albert Kahl's life ended. He is buried in Oak Lawn Cemetery near his family home. Mr Welzant was acquitted at a trial in June, 1980, but his life and his family were shattered, and he died in 1990.

For as long as there have been kids and adults, there have been kids acting up toward adults. We would like to think that stories such as this would have led our society to find other ways to handle the problems...the kids saying there is nothing to do, so they bedevil the older people, and the older people can take just so much before tragedy falls down on the community.

At the time of the Welzant incident, Diane Silvestri, mother of a son who was a friend of young Kahl, told the Washington POST: "I think (the local kids) have learned a vital lesson. It's made them grow up and more adult-like about a lot of things, how serious life is and how quickly it can be taken away."

How quickly, indeed.