Just google his name along with Cheshire County and you will get the usual page after page of right wing blogs...all talking about the mistreatment this poor soul got at the hands of the system. A typical headline...
"Keene martyr died protesting Federal "war on men"""
So, what is his story?
Well, let's use his own words to describe the situation that caused him to pour gasoline over himself and burn himself to death in front of the Cheshire County Court House. He sent a 15 page letter to the local newspaper. Here are some pertinent parts...
My story starts with the infamous slapping incident of April 2001. While putting my four year old daughter to bed, she began licking my hand. After giving her three verbal warnings I slapped her. She got a cut lip. My wife asked me to leave to calm things down.
.
.
.
I could not figure out why she had called the police. And bail condition prevented me from asking her. So I no longer trusted her judgment.
After six months of me not lifting a finger to save this marriage, she filed for divorce.
.
.
.
The police sergeant Freyer screwed this up from the get go. When I got the Court Complaint form the box was checked that said Domestic Violence Related. I could not believe that slapping your child was domestic violence.
.
.
.
I lost visitation with my two daughters when I got arrested. One was the victim-the other was the witness. After a not guilty, I expected to get visitation with my girls. But the divorce judge, Sullivan, decreed that counseling was in order and they would decide when we would reunite. I told the judge that the decision on whether these two girls had a father or a fatherless childhood was not leaving this courthouse.
.
.
.
There is no evidence that the police, courts, or government is planning to do anything different in the immediate future. And they will not do anything different until we make it so uncomfortable that they must change. Bureaucracy at its worst. So burn them out. This is too important to be using that touchy-feeling coaching that is so popular with business these days. You need to flatten them, like Wile E. Coyote. They need to be taught never to replace the rule of law. BURN-THEM-OUT!
Most of the police stations built in New England over the last 20 years are stone or brick. Fortunately, the roofs are still wood. The advantage of fire on the roof is that it is above the sprinklers. But even the sprinklers going off work to our advantage. There is no way they can work in a building with six inches of water. And I am certain we will disrupt their momentum once they start working out of a FEMA trailers. If they still do not get the message, then burn down the trailers.
The easiest way of burning a building is with the Molotov cocktail. It was invented by the Finns when the Soviets invaded in 1939. You fill a bottle with gasoline and stuff a rag in the end for a wick. You light the wick and throw bottle, It shatters on impact spraying gas everywhere and the wick ignites the gas. Simple, readily available, and effective
Most of the rest of the 15 pages consists of his attempts to place the blame for his situation on anyone but himself. There is also a lot of the typical right wing nit-picking with the minutiae of the law.
Now, I have heard horror stories about the Court system and it's possible that he was grossly mistreated. From his rant, I get the sense that most of his problems were self-imposed, but, who knows? Except, of course, the dozens of right wing blogs that have taken him up as a cause celebre and proof that men are being emasculated in today's society. One would think that, if that was true, they could find better examples than a guy who slapped his four year old child bloody after she ignored his verbal warnings not to lick his hand, but, I am no expert on the convoluted thinking of the right wing blogger.