Before I begin this latest entry, I want to give folks a brief peek behind the scenes of how the sausage is made.
Every once in a while, I run across a story that might be blog worthy, but that I won’t blog because I think the details are just too much for my readers, even with a warning. There was a flaming hyena I saw the other day, but didn’t blog for exactly that reason. I realize my readers are all adults (well, I hope so anyway), but there’s just some things that I don’t feel like I need to blog.
This story is right on the edge, for what that’s worth.
William Monroe Palmer is the president of the “San Francisco Sheriff’s Department Oversight Board”.
Allegedly, he picked up the young woman two days later, (allegedly) got her into his car, (allegedly) took her back to his place, and (allegedly) spent the next five days smoking drugs and having sex with her.
At one point, she was told she had to be resuscitated from an overdose. The drug use made her unsure in her decision-making, she said.
“I felt hesitant, but I took my clothes off because he told me to take my clothes off,” she said. “I felt very messed up, I couldn’t tell if I wanted to have sex or not.”
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Meanwhile, her mother reported her missing on July 3, panicking about her daughter’s whereabouts. Four days later, an unidentified man called the mother and said her daughter was at an art studio near Market Street.
The mom called the police, who found both her daughter and Palmer together. Officers handcuffed Palmer and placed the woman in a mental health hold, but he was eventually released.
But wait, there’s more.
Palmer later tried to visit the woman at San Francisco General Hospital using his official position, but was turned away. He reportedly even emailed the district attorney’s office that he was “deeply” concerned about how police had ended his “trauma-informed intervention” in the woman’s life.
According to Palmer, he said he took care of the woman. He spotted her and got her out of a situation she didn’t belong in, he said. He allegedly took her to acupuncture sessions, and Palmer said he gave her a drink that he claimed turned people into a “total different person.”
“I’m her life coach,” Palmer told the Chronicle. “I talked to her and told her the things that she needed to hear to snap out of the lifestyle she was in and to get into the life that she wants to be in.”
He refused to confirm whether he had sex or did drugs with her.
But wait, there’s more.
But wait, there’s more. He was appointed to the board because they were looking “to include people with ‘lived experience’ to shape the jail system.” What was his “lived experience”? If you said “doing time”, take two gold stars and advance to the next blue square.
He had served 31 years of a life sentence in prison for a crime he committed as a teenager.
There’s an effort underway to remove him, but (quel fromage!) that’s not an easy thing for the SF Board of Supervisors to do.
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It makes one long for the days of my youth, in the 1960’s and early 1970’s. Back then we would often hear of a “window peeker” going about our tiny village of about 1,000. Around a week or two later, some POS would turn up with signs of a good thrashing, black eyes, bruises about the face, and sometimes even a broken nose.
Nothing was ever said, no police report taken from the bad guy or who might have tried to help him up from his fall into a deep ditch that caused his injuries.
I was born in 1960, so I was too young to know, but there were rumors about that more than one overly ambitious POS who tried to consummate his relationship with an unwilling and underaged female just left town, never to return.
I do know that in my early 20’s when I was a deacon in a Baptist church, a friend of mine who was a farmer told me that any living thing that fell into their slurry tanks, which are huge tanks of liquid manure that they wash down their milking stall, would never be seen again, since they stuff in the tanks would dissolve meat, bone, hair, everything.
Of course I don’t condone vigilante tactics, and that sort of thing would never be able to go unnoticed with so many cameras everywhere now. It makes one wonder if we are better off today, with our kinder and more merciful system of law enforcement.
One the other side, I am now a fervent anti death penalty for any criminal act. This sounds a bit strange, until one looks into the death penalty, and how now that we have DNA to use to help with identifying criminals, it looks like some 7% of those sitting on death row may in fact be innocent of the charges that put them their.
I have to figure that if we execute one innocent person, that somehow makes it wrong to execute those who are actually guilty of their crimes, no matter how horrific.
That doesn’t mean that I would support keeping that type of criminal in some luxury or easy time.