Police BlotterWeird But True

A Friendly Reminder To Not Be A Bully In The Locker Room, Lest Your Victim Shoot You Dead 50 Years Later

Remember Steve Buscemi’s character in Billy Madison, who Adam Sandler calls up and apologizes to for being a jerk in high school? And then Buscemi crosses Sandler’s name off his “People To Kill” list, before putting on some lipstick and vibing out to Electric Light Orchestra? (Watch it here if you haven’t, you fools.) This is like the real life version of that — if Sandler hadn’t called.

In Madison, South Dakota, 73-year-old Carl Ericsson rang the doorbell of former high school classmate Norman Johnson and, after confirming his victim’s identity, shot and killed him. Ericsson was sentenced to life in prison after pleading guilty but mentally ill to second-degree murder.

Why did Ericsson kill a man he hadn’t spoken to in years? From Yahoo! News:

The startling answer, a prosecutor said Friday, was a 1950s locker room humiliation that festered in Ericsson’s mind for a half-century.

“He said that a jockstrap was put on his head,” Kenneth Meyer said. “It’s the only thing he’s ever mentioned in talking to law enforcement.”

“I guess it was from something that happened over 50 years ago,” Ericsson told a judge then. “It was apparently in my subconscious.”

Johnson was a track star at Madison High School, and Ericsson a student sports manager. The prosecutor said he had no other details about the locker room story, which never was corroborated.

Johnson was a very popular high school athlete and a college football player, who later returned to teach at the same school where this jock strap incident took place. He leaves behind a wife, two kids and four grandkids.

Getting a jock strap put on your head — not fun. Worth killing somebody over, especially half a century later? No. But Ericsson “has a long history of anxiety problems and suffers from ‘severe and recurrent depression that is, for the most part, treatment resistant.’”

We’ll never know if Norman Johnson was your classic jock bully who tormented Ericsson, or a goofball whose sweaty, jock-strap-y antics were taken the wrong way (again, not that either scenario warranted the death penalty). But let this be a lesson to the true bullies out there: You may never know whether your victims are creeps with sniper rifles (fictionally speaking), or real life people with depression and anxiety issues — so it’s best to err on the side of “Being nice” rather than “Being a dick.”

h/t Off The Bench

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