`The judge recommended the two families meet.”
Somehow those words stood out in Friday’s Tribune story on the sentencing of the 16-year-old boy convicted of battery for a cross-check that paralyzed Neal Goss as a hockey game was ending last year.
Judge John Radosevich recommended that the Goss family and the family of the boy who was sentenced to probation and community service meet “in their own time and on their own terms.”
It is hard to imagine this happening anytime soon, with civil suits filed by the Goss family still pending. But if nothing else makes sense about the incident that forever altered a 15-year-old’s life and left another with a criminal record and untold remorse for one spontaneous act of horrible judgment, this would.
The judge did not ask Neal Goss or his family to forgive the boy. And he has no authority to make them talk to each other.
Reading the words of Goss, who so poignantly told the court of the impact of the incident “I lost … most of all, my faith in mankind,” was heart-wrenching. How can you ask a young man who says that “part of me has survived, and part of me has been lost forever” to put his anguish aside and forgive?
The answer is, you can’t. And yet you hope that someday he can, and that someday he will.
Michael Waller, the Lake County state’s attorney whose office brought the charges against the boy, believed then and believes now that the blow, delivered at the buzzer of a game long since won by Goss’ team, was a criminal act, regardless of the setting.
Waller believes the punishment–two years of probation and 120 hours of community service–was appropriate. He can see his own children on both sides of this tragic case and hopes the Goss family can one day find it in themselves to sit down with the other boy and his family.
“I’ve seen it in other cases,” Waller said. “One case we prosecuted in our office six or seven years ago, a child who lived down the block from us was killed by a drunken driver. The defense attorney asked if the family wanted to sit down and talk [to the driver].
“They went into a conference room and it was a very emotional, cathartic session and very helpful for everybody. I’ve seen it and I think it’s a real positive thing. It has a real healing impact.”
There was some discrepancy over whether the boy convicted in the Goss case attempted to contact the family. He said he called the hospital and was told the family did not want to talk to him, and that the police later discouraged him from initiating contact. The Goss family told Waller they never refused an apology.
Surely that was not the only sentiment left to fester over a horrific year. The Glenbrook North junior apologized in court Friday before sentencing, but the two boys rarely made eye contact, said those who were there, and reading from a prepared statement is obviously not the best way to communicate.
And so they all went their separate ways: Neal Goss to a life, however meaningful, he must struggle to live every day; the other boy to a sentence that will end in two years and to a future in which he’ll surely find it easier to cope, the lawyers to their respective briefs and motions.
The anger, you imagine, has to be as heavy a burden as the misery. The regret, you know, could never be eliminated. And yet you believe if the boys could be left in a room alone, without families and without lawyers, somehow some healing would have to take place.
Perhaps as men.
More Top Picks Best Grabber Tools
For now, however productive it might be, forgiveness is not on the docket.