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In January 2004 Charles Gonsoulin of Los Angeles, then 40, attempted to visit a Quebec woman he’d met online two years earlier but was denied entry to Canada because of a 1984 robbery conviction. This February Gonsoulin tried again: he set out from Pembina, North Dakota, planning to sneak across the border on foot and get to Winnipeg (about 70 miles away), where he could catch a bus to Quebec (another 1,600 miles). Temperatures dropped as low as minus 15 degrees Fahrenheit, however, and when Canadian police found Gonsoulin wandering around a golf course just north of the border he had been outdoors for roughly 100 hours and was disoriented and severely frostbitten. In custody and facing the amputation of eight fingers and four toes, he remained upbeat: “It was all worth it for me. It’s the difference between sitting around dreaming about things and going out and getting them.” After his surgery in March, the object of Gonsoulin’s affection, 43-year-old Jennifer Couture–who had not yet met him face-to-face–described him as her “hero”; authorities said he would be deported after a month of recuperation.
After serving prison time for a variety of nonviolent crimes, John L. Stanley began a serious study of criminology in 1989, going on to lecture extensively on crime and host a Dallas radio show on the subject. In December he pleaded guilty to a 2004 Kansas City bank robbery; police had caught him near the bank, counting money in his parked getaway car. At his March sentencing, Stanley, now 61 and in bad shape after being beaten up by another inmate, suggested that he’d intentionally gotten caught so he could return to prison to continue his study of the criminal mind. “There are some things about crime you can’t understand,” he told the judge, “unless you get into the belly of the beast.”
During a fire in December at Westminster High School in Westminster, Maryland, teachers followed school policy for emergency evacuations: they brought the school’s two wheelchair-bound students, whose classes are on the second floor, to the stairwell, which was filling with smoke; they then exited the building with the other students, leaving the wheelchair users to wait alone for firefighters. The next month a specially convened committee modified the policy by adding a single word, recommending that students in wheelchairs be left only in smoke-free stairwells.
Twice in recent months a 20-year-old man was killed after putting on a flak jacket–failing to understand such garments are intended only to stop shrapnel–and apparently persuading a friend to shoot him. In a December incident near Weippe, Idaho, the victim dared his friend to fire a 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol at him; police believe the other victim, in Hobart, Indiana, in February, asked to be shot with a 20-gauge shotgun as preparation for his upcoming military service.
