There is no telling when Judge Jane Haggerty will decide what to do with the killer of James Alenson. She has been asked to reduce his life sentence to a term with parole, and is formulating her response.
Ever since the murder, on Jan. 19, 2007, the focus for Alenson's family has alternated between mourning and justice. They attended a three-week trial in Middlesex Superior Court in Woburn Massachusetts, and listened day after day to grueling testimony, detailed descriptions of how young James was stabbed repeatedly with a sharp kitchen knife, his final moments spent bleeding to death on the cold tile floor of a bathroom at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School.
Most wrenching was the testimony from another student hidden in another stall, of James pleading with his attacker, "What are you doing to me? You're hurting me! Stop!"
None of us, least of all his parents who tended to his scraped knees and runny nose as a boy, will ever know what he thought, how he felt, or how much pain he experienced as his puncture wounds multiplied. But one thing we know for sure is he suffered, and suffered as the result of another student whose troubled background made his very presence at the school a cause for internal debate.
We go through life never really understanding what justice means, until someone we know becomes the victim of a violent crime, and the word takes on a whole new meaning. In this case, the meaning of justice rang loud and clear on April 29, 2010, when John Odgren was found guilty of the murder by a jury of his peers and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, as required under Massachusetts law: Justice.
For the Alenson family, parents and siblings, there will never be a satisfactory answer for what went on that day. Some consolation might be taken from the post-mortems that shed light on the life of John Odgren, a student with mental health issues who was neither a friend nor an enemy of the victim, just his killer.
Adding to the family's trauma comparisons have been made between Odgren's murder of Alenson and the recent suicide of student Phoebe Prince.
The now-19-year old Odgren was described in court as a very bright boy with a dark side and a keen appreciation for some of the more violent cartoons and video games, someone who likes to watch television of the CSI variety and whose self-education in police procedure is a source of evident pride, as when he told the police officers what their next move should be, and when he asked another what the sentence is for manslaughter, "15 to 20?"
Odgren supporters think he was not only too young at 16 to be jailed for life, but that his crime was the symptom of a sick community; it took a village to kill James Alenson.
It might be easier to appreciate that others were negligent in the care and custody of John Odgren if his lawyers didn't use words like "barbaric and uncivilized" in arguing for a reduced sentence, as if his random yet pre-meditated attack was anything other than barbaric and uncivilized.
To revisit the issue and decide now that Odgren should someday go free would be to hit the Replay button on the days of the notorious “Revolving Door" system of justice in Massachusetts.
Justice demands that an unrepentant, unreformed John Odgren gets the same chance of walking out of prison as James Alenson had of making it from the bathroom back to class on that fateful January day in 2007.
He never did. He wouldn't make it to summer that year, to his 16th birthday on July 28, or to any other family celebrations. His future was decided for him by John Odgren, whose fantasy used to be about killing a person, and lately is about getting away with it.
Laurie Myers is the president of Community VOICES, a victims’ advocacy organization and resident of Chelmsford Massachusetts. lmyers@communityvoices.net
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