For
Jeremy Rollins, today was the proverbial first day of the rest of his life. The story of how he'd gotten to this point
was long and convoluted, fraught with injustice and compromise. Injustice because he'd been wrongly convicted
of heinous crimes and compromise because he'd willingly accepted those
convictions in order to be released from jail.
He'd spent eighteen months fighting those bogus charges, appearing in
court once a month ready and willing to go to trial to prove his innocence,
only to have the prosecutor request yet another delay and set another court
date yet another month further into the future.
Jeremy watched his life tick by one month at a time, with no idea of
when or even whether he would ever be released.
Finally
the prosecutor's office made him an offer he couldn't refuse – he was to plead
guilty to one count of public urination and one count of public lewdness, and
in so doing he would give up all rights to have the evidence against him
evaluated by judge or jury. He would also give up any right to appeal the case
in a higher court. In return for his guilty
plea, he was assured he would be sentenced to time served, and he could be
released that very afternoon. After
surviving eighteen months of repeated assaults and indignities at the hands of
a jail population that was less than tolerant of those accused of sex crimes
against children, the prospect of being immediately released from custody was
too good to pass up. It didn't matter
that he didn't commit the crimes he was accused of, that there were no
witnesses to the alleged lewd acts he supposedly committed or that there
existed not one shred of evidence to indicate that he had done any of those
things. The simple fact was that he was
charged with those crimes in a county where the prosecutor took his win/loss record
very seriously, and the prosecutor in this case was not willing to accept even
the slightest indication of a loss in a case like this one. After all, the prosecutor hoped that he was
going to be Governor someday.
Prospective Governors did not lose cases against sex offenders,
regardless of minor inconveniences such as the innocence of the defendant, lack
of evidence or the rights of the accused.
At the
time he entered his guilty plea, Jeremy hadn't been told that he would forever
after be legally considered a sex offender, nor that he would be required to
register as such with the sheriff of any county wherein he would like to reside
at any time in the future. He would not
be allowed to live within a certain distance of any school, park, playground,
church or any other place where children would be expected to gather. This
condition would seriously limit the choice of housing that would be available
to him. He also hadn't been told that
his name would be listed in an online database of convicted sex offenders. Any interested person would be able to look
him up in said database, which featured among other information his booking
photograph and his constantly updated home address.
One
other minor thing they neglected to mention was that he would be required to
serve a term of probation, including six months in what was called a
transitional living facility. These
facilities were also known as halfway houses, which were almost like jail
except that the beds were more comfortable and the food was better. All in all Jeremy felt he had been given a
raw deal, but there was nothing to be done about that now. He'd completed his six months in the halfway
house and probation successfully. He had
gotten a job and attended all the required classes, started a savings account
and fully reintegrated into the world of the unincarcerated. Today was the day he was finally being
released back into society to go and sin no more.
For
Jeremy Rollins, the time for revenge was at hand.
First on
his list of things to do was to deal with his good friend Joe LaMotta. Joe had volunteered to take care of Jeremy's
things while he was fighting his case.
Jeremy had been evicted from his apartment after missing two months'
rent and Joe had agreed to rent a storage space and put all of Jeremy's
property into storage. Instead Joe had
sold all of Jeremy's things just as soon as he got his hands on the keys to the
apartment. Anything Joe couldn't sell
was unceremoniously thrown into a dumpster.
The money Joe collected went toward the care and feeding of several of
the county's better known strippers and drug dealers. Upon his release from
custody, Jeremy had no possessions beyond the clothes on his back, and Joe was
not answering his phone.
Unfortunately
for Joe, Jeremy's cellmates were accomplished criminals. They taught him all manner of skills which
would be useful for a motivated individual intent on taking revenge. Jeremy fully intended to make use of those
skills to make life difficult or impossible for those that had done him wrong.
Also on Jeremy's list was the police officer
who had arrested him, Sgt. Pete Sanbourne of the Ocean County Sex Crimes Task
Force. Sgt. Sanbourne had taken the
complaint of a little girl who had been accosted by a man who exposed himself
to her and urinated on her leg. The girl
gave a description of someone similar to Jeremy, so Sgt. Sanbourne had driven
around the area, spotted Jeremy and arrested him on the spot. When he showed the girl a picture of Jeremy,
she said that it might have been him but she wasn't sure. In fact Jeremy had never encountered the
girl. It was a simple case of mistaken
identity. Five days after Jeremy was
arrested, a man was caught in the same neighborhood exposing himself to another
young girl. He was the same height and
weight as Jeremy with the same hair color and of similar appearance. By that time, however, Jeremy had already
been charged with the crime, and the aforementioned State Prosecutor was
unwilling to drop the charges lest his perfect record of criminal prosecutions
might suffer. The prosecutor, Ed Wilson,
had decided that the best course of action would be to delay the case as long
as possible, then offer Jeremy a sentence of time served if Jeremy would plead
guilty. It was a strategy that in the
past had always work well with so-called "innocent" defendants. It was Ed Wilson's opinion that nobody was
truly innocent, and that punishing someone for something he hadn't done was
just karmic retribution for something the person had done but had not been
caught at. Jeremy vowed to get even with
Ed Wilson as well.
Rounding
out Jeremy's list was the man who had committed the crime he was accused of in
the first place. Rob Olliver was
currently in the Ocean County Jail awaiting trial for exposing himself to
several young girls. Jeremy wasn't sure
how he would do it, but he was going to make sure that this man suffered for
what his actions had done to Jeremy's life.
Jeremy Rollins had much to do, but all the time in the world to do it.