Shooter gets 10 years, while victim and his family get life sentence:
This is a great article about a real victim in a school shooting. The one who is actually shot. Not these cowards with guns who have delusions that they were wronged somehow…
The gavel came down in the Roseburg courtroom a few weeks ago. Fifteen-year-old Vincent Leodoro will spend the next 10 years in custody for trying to kill 16-year-old Joe Monti at Roseburg High School last February.
Sentence pronounced. Justice done.
Well, no. Not in this society. Not unless you think saddling Joe Monti’s mother, Yvonne Allison, with crushing debt is justice. Yvonne says Joe’s medical bills from the shooting are about $2 million.
Did I mention Yvonne is a single mom who does not work outside the home because she is a full-time caregiver for two disabled sons, whose fathers are dead? Yvonne used to have only one disabled son until Joe was shot four times by an angry high school freshman, who used a semi-automatic pistol with hollow-point bullets.
“He currently has no feeling in his right foot, so he shuffles,” Yvonne says. “He also has many fragments of bullets in his back they were unable to remove.” Joe’s entire life may be affected by the nature of his injuries. “He asked why this happened to him. I said, ‘I’m sorry, Joseph. I don’t know.’ “
Yvonne was at home on the small ranch outside Roseburg, early Feb. 23. Her oldest son, Eric, 35, owns the ranch and lets Yvonne live there. For years Yvonne has been caregiver for her son Justin, who’s 23.
“He was born with neurofibromatosis,” she says. Sometimes wrongly called the “Elephant Man disease,” it’s an incurable genetic disorder that causes tumors to grow. “His eye was removed when he was 6. By 8 he’d had a craniotomy. . . . He also has brain cancer, but it’s in remission.”
Yvonne is angry that news accounts after the shooting appeared to blame Joe, always mentioning a minor school bus incident he had been involved in. “Joe is not a bully,” she says. (In fact, Vince told police he had not been a victim of bullying.) “But the reports made it sound like this was all Joe’s fault, and it wasn’t in any way. It was the fault of an insecure, immature 14-year-old boy who had access to deadly weapons.”
No matter how many reconstructive surgeries he endures, Joseph will never be the same strong boy he was the morning he was shot. He may never regain feeling in his right foot and be able to walk normally.
And Yvonne cannot imagine how she ever will pay the enormous debt she now owes. She had no medical insurance when Joseph was shot; she could not afford payments. And she had not enrolled the family in the Oregon Health Plan because she was only living in Oregon part-time because Justin’s doctors all are in California.
And that’s only part of the article. I defy someone to tell me that the gunmen in these school shootings are victims.
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