how many of you know a murderer?

i do. it's an old story, dating back to 2002, but for some reason i thought i'd google jared lischner, nephew of the lesbian couple who lived next door to me growing up, and see how his sentencing went.

jared and i were friends for a couple of summers, when he would visit peg and val, who eventually went nutty, and started harassing my family (another story all together). we would do kid things, like go to the zoo, trade star wars figures, have sleepovers. you know, kids stuff.

i didn't speak with him for at least fifteen years, but then some kid from duquense university went missing, and they found his body in the river, and yada yada yada I USED TO HAVE SLEEP OVERS WITH A MURDERER!

the fact that he was convicted of second degree murder doesn't make it any easier for me. we still had first degree sleep overs. it doesn't matter that he added about 200 lbs to his 60lb nine-year old frame. i still traded him an emperor for a palpoo ewok and felt good about it.

truth be told, when he was first indicated in the murder i got nauseous. physically sick. can you blame me? now that some time has gone by, it's shaping up to sound like something i should submit to "this american life". among the things i never thought i'd do, i can now add "know someone who murdered someone else" to the list the previously only included such innocent items as "picked blackberries off a bush in front of one of the windmills van gogh painted" and "owned a dachshund".

note: the pic on the right is not jared lischner, but rather some attractive girl who visited alcatraz