Living and learning: a hard lesson

Normally, it wouldn't be unusual to see Jon smiling at me from across my counter at TCBY. He was a friendly guy who would occasionally drop by for an ice cream or even just to chat. I'd throw some extra sprinkles on his cone while he'd lightheartedly make fun of me or tell me what was new in his life. Jon was always like that -- outgoing, happy, cheerful. We weren't the closest of friends -- he was more of a friend-of-a-friend -- but Jon had a way of making everyone feel at ease.

So normally, it wouldn't have been strange to see his face at work. But on that day late last July, he wasn't actually there. Instead, it was only his picture that I saw, printed on a poster beneath the word "MISSING."

While I stared at it dumfounded, memories of my freshman year flooded my mind. I had spent many of my first weeks at college battling homesickness; so my friend Zara, accompanied by Jon, journeyed up from George Washington University to visit me. The three of us sat talking on Junior Balcony until late that Saturday night. I can hardly remember most of what we said, but I remember vividly that Jon had begun a conversation with a random passerby. Zara had commented on his clearly outgoing nature. "Yeah," he said with a laugh. "That whole 'never-talk-to-strangers rule' didn't work very well with me." His words echoed through my head as I stared at his poster in disbelief.

By the end of the day, the entire town was littered with signs describing Jon, who was last seen leaving the restaurant where he worked the past Friday night. Officials found his car parked outside a house in New Hampshire the next day. By that evening, they had found his body. Gradually, the pieces came together.

The police arrested Gary Sampson, who soon confessed to Jon's murder. Jon had stopped to help Sampson along the roadside, only to be car-jacked with a knife, forced to drive to a secluded area and stabbed to death. Jon wasn't the only victim -- Sampson apparently also killed 69 year-old Philip McCloskey in a similar fashion. He is additionally accused of the murder of Robert Whitney, 58, whose body was found inside the house where police recovered Jon's car -- but Sampson pleads "not guilty" to that murder.

Sampson is now in prison, where he will stay until the US Department of Justice determines whether or not they will convict him of federal car-jacking charges. Car-jacking, a federal crime, is punishable by the death penalty, or first-degree murder, a crime which carries only a 'life in prison' sentence in the state of Massachusetts.

And yet, it all could have been avoided. Just a few days before his killing spree, Sampson placed a phone call to Boston's FBI and attempted to turn himself in for the several North Carolina bank robberies he had committed previously. But an FBI worker who was just substituting on the phone lines accidentally disconnected Sampson's call. According to Sampson, he waited two hours for authorities, but no one ever showed up to arrest him.

It's been a year since Jon died. I want to have some sort of lesson to learn, something that applies to our lives, some good that could come from something so terrible. In the days that followed Jon's death, the most obvious lesson seemed to be not to trust people. Don't give rides to strangers; don't talk to them, and under no circumstances should you ever trust them. Something dark, evil and unexpected might be lurking around every corner. Six weeks later, Sept. 11 only amplified that lesson -- you can't trust strangers to be kind, you can't trust the government to prevent tragedy, and you can't trust your friends and family to be there tomorrow. But as months have slipped by and a bit of normalcy has returned, I've come to realize that even though Jon isn't around to say so, I doubt he'd want his death to be seen in that light.

It's easy to look at a tragedy, identify what went wrong and what could have averted it and call those lessons to be learned. But while that may be a piece of the picture, it comes up too shallow and misses the point. The reason death stings us is because of the loss we feel. Learning to fear everything and everyone won't change that, and in the end only hurts us more.

While I'm sure if Jon could do it again, he wouldn't have stopped for Sampson that night, I still hope that he would have remained the type to smile at a stranger and strike up a conversation with anyone. It was part of who he was. Although I'm afraid it sounds cliched, perhaps the best lesson I can find in this is to constantly remind myself that life can end abruptly, so it's best to embrace it while we can.

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