The Story that Kept Me Up All Night

It was a long night last night. I had some indigestion, which initially woke me at around 2:30 AM. Then it was too warm to get back to sleep. I tried reading. I went on the computer again. But I my mind kept racing and I wasn't able to relax enough to drift back to sleep. This is a blog article about one of the things that kept me awake.

I read the Page 3 editorial in the July 2012 edition of ACCESSline and learned that an old friend of mine got caught up in a child sex sting.

I won't be sharing his name here, but here are the basic details. He apparently moved to or visited Florida. He is accused of using a computer to connect with the parent of a 12-year-old boy and making arrangements to have sex with them, as well as traveling to solicit sex acts with these hypothetical boys. The "parent" was an undercover cop and he ended up getting arrested down in Florida as part of a child sex sting that netted 31 men. If convicted, my friend could serve up to 15 years in prison.

I'm completely dumbfounded and a little bit in shock. It seems totally out of character for the man that I knew back in the 90s. We were close enough that we saw each other regularly. Mark and I went to his place to watch Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager and Queer As Folk with a large group of mutual friends every weekend for a while there. We held our commitment ceremony reception at his home. Then he moved away and my only interactions with him for the past decade-plus were annual birthday cards.

My friend is innocent until proven guilty. I am hoping beyond hope that he got caught up in an entrapment scheme with trumped up charges. Assuming that he is innocent of these charges, how does one come out of this type of thing? And assuming he isn't innocent...? It totally calls into question my memories of this past friendship.