Life in jail is enough compassion
Cop killer should not be released
Call it coincidental if the suggestion of a deeper meaning makes you uncomfortable, but it seemed noteworthy that last week’s commemoration of Yom HaShoah — the national day of Holocaust remembrance
— crossed paths with coverage of efforts to free Alfred Trenkler, now serving a life sentence in Arizona.
Citing COVID-19 concerns and noting his “advanced age” of 65, his attorney, a former Massachusetts judge named Nancy Gertner, is asking for “compassionate release,” saying cardiac concerns would put him at “grave risk” if he’s not set free.
What an appropriate term. Grave risk was exactly what confronted Jeremiah Hurley, a veteran Boston cop, the day he responded to the report of a suspicious package that had fallen from the undercarriage of a car in a Roslindale driveway.
It had been hidden there by Trenkler.
Hurley, 50, responded to many such calls over the years, yet there’s never anything routine about detonating a bomb, especially when it’s the handiwork of a madman.
The resulting explosion killed Hurley and permanently maimed (lost eye) his partner, Francis X. Foley.
Compassion? Trenkler’s sentence of lifetime incarceration was more compassion than he deserved and a punishment that surely did not fit the crime. He got to go on living while Hurley has been buried in a Hyde Park cemetery since 1991, never seeing four kids grow up, never experiencing the joy of hugs from 11 grandchildren, or savoring the fullness of a storybook marriage to his wife, Cynthia.
How does a defense team overlook that? Maybe TV’s ruthless J.R. Ewing had it right, saying that once you get past conscience the rest is easy.
Back to Yom HaShoah. Why must there be a day to remember what should never be forgotten?
Well, did the name Jeremiah Hurley ring a bell? No? There’s your answer.
Simon Wiesenthal, a survivor of five concentration camps, spent the remainder of his life hunting down Nazis. As he approached his 80s he was asked why he didn’t start taking it easy.
“It’s a debt we the living owe the dead,” he replied, “because if we forget them, it will be as if they died again.”
Jeremiah Hurley died once and it was too often.
This is why the Duxbury uproar over anti-Semitic tomfoolery was so intense. Did those kids not know any better?
We are indeed shamefully forgetful. Statues, monuments, signs, holidays — they’re all now under attack from delusional dissidents who are tearing down an America they wouldn’t know how to rebuild.
It’s an imperfect nation that owes them no apology.
And it owes Alfred Trenkler no “Get Out of Jail Free” card.
He’s where he belongs. By the way, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 27, wants to sue the American government for a mental decline he says he’s experienced because of unprofessional treatment by his guards.
Another joke? Yes. But the jokes are on us.