I gave up awhile ago a belief in the notion that punishment deters crime. Maybe it is a function of growing older. The more tragedy I see and write about, the more I figure this to be true.
There are simply good people and bad people in the world. The only in-betweens are good people who make mistakes and wind up wearing handcuffs. I’m not talking about them.
Bad people are those who flat ditched or ignored the class on compassion, the one where the rest of us learned the Golden Rule and decided to live by it.
Which gets us back to punishment.
How do you run over someone with your car and leave them lying there to die in the street? I have forgotten how often I have posed that question here.
Maybe it stems from that Golden Rule lesson. Exactly how do you do that? It is among the most selfish, cold-blooded and cowardly of acts. You just — what? — go home and hop into bed?
Brandon Mondragon did it last October. He plowed through Tim Albo and Heather Kornman as they crossed 20th Street at Chestnut Place near Coors Field.
The man and woman, both badly broken, survived. Their lives, though, will never again be the same. It took police a week to catch up with Mondragon and his battered PT Cruiser at his Westminster home.
On Monday, Denver prosecutors allowed Mondragon to plead guilty to leaving the scene of an accident. Sort of makes it sound like he nicked a car in the grocery store parking lot and didn’t leave a note.
Under the deal, he will get six months with work release in jail, four years of probation and 300 hours of community service.
Every year in this state, scores of people, from bicyclists to pregnant women crossing the street, are hit and left in the roadway.
You tell me: What message does Brandon Mondragon’s sentence send about crime and punishment?
Tim Albo, 27, suffered a severe brain injury. He undergoes physical therapy three times a week. Every day his family must remind him of who they are.
“He can put four, five or six words together in a sentence now,” his oldest brother, Rodney, said in an interview. “He really struggles with a second sentence.”
It is “kind of crap,” is how he described Mondragon’s sentence. He already has called and written to legislators to see if the laws regarding hit-and-run can be changed.
“It is going to be my passion going forward,” he said.
The family, he said, knew the prosecution would be a difficult one, especially when statements by the two female passengers in the car began to diverge. The family had wanted a trial of Mondragon, he said, “to make an example of him.”
Instead, the young man smirked and smiled at the family as he left the courtroom Monday, Rodney Albo said.
“It was a smirking, really punk smile,” he said. “It was just a slap to the face, every bit of the court proceedings. This man left my brother in the street to die. His sentence, it was like he spit on him all over again.”
Drunken drivers, he said, get worse sentences. It tells people, he added, that if you are out drinking and run someone over, don’t stop. It means we all lose, he said.
The family is now concentrating on Tim, getting him to therapy, working with him to remember who he is, Rodney Albo said.
“As a Christian man,” he said, “I am supposed to forgive. But I can’t. I don’t know if I will ever be able to do that.
“I look at my brother, what he has become now, a man who still doesn’t understand what has happened to him. It is a tough thing to do.”
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
