One Brick Short

There are some things that are damn near impossible to make up.

I ran across this horrendous tidbit from the Associated Press wire and it made my decaf taste like battery acid. “What’s wrong with people?“ I asked my computer mouse. “Scratch our civilized veneer and we’re like animals, only meaner, nastier and far, far more brutal. Why does such evil lurk in the hearts of mankind?“

The mouse didn’t know, either.
Here’s what I’m talking about: For three years, neighbors in Spring Hill, Florida, a quaint, middle-class community, scarcely saw the lanky 16-year-old boy who lived with his adoptive mother and her boyfriend, primarily because he was locked in a bathroom with a piece of plywood over the window and the door locked.
That, of course, was when he wasn’t being beaten and tortured by his adopted mom and her boyfriend.

When he escaped last week, the boy had a broken forearm, scars, scabs and oozing wounds marking years of abuse, according to the AP.

Authorities think Tailing Gigliotti, the boy’s aunt and adoptive mother, brought him from Taiwan to the United States when he was a young child. The teen told investigators his stepfather was the Philadelphia Orchestra’s principal clarinetist, Anthony Gigliotti, who died at age 79 in 2001. It seems Tailing Gigliotti had met her late husband when she took clarinet lessons from him.

According to the AP, Anthony Gigliotti’s family said the woman could be controlling and rude, refusing the family visits with Mr. Gigliotti when he fell ill and refusing to let them talk by phone. The musician told his daughter he’d stopped Tailing from hitting the boy.
About the time Anthony Gigliotti died, his wife, 50 years old, and 45-year-old Anton Angelo began living together. Neighbors said the family moved into their Spring Hill house, about an hour north of Tampa, approximately four years ago. A year later all hell broke loose.

According to an arrest affidavit reported by the AP, the abuse began when the boy was forced to sleep in a hallway as punishment. Then in November 2007 daily confinement in a bathroom began. Police said the boy seemed to believe the abuse was his fault for minor problems like a messy room. He was also told he’d be deported if he escaped.

Last week, according to an arrest affidavit, Gigliotti and Angelo discovered the boy had found a way to pry open a barricaded window and free himself with a piece of his clarinet. The teen was forced to strip, and Gigliotti beat him with a piece of wood about three feet long, police said.

The authorities’ account stated that, when the teen couldn’t stand the pain, he grabbed the wood and held it. Gigliotti beckoned her boyfriend, who came in and took the wood away. She then beat him with the metal and plastic ends of a water hose. After that, his hands were bound with packing tape. He was left nude and with cuts all around his body. The bathroom’s electricity was cut, leaving him in darkness.

Hard to believe, but Gigliotti is free on $15,000 bond and Angelo is free on $50,000 bond. The boy is, meanwhile, in foster care.

So what sickness, then, causes humans to act like this? This is an isolated incident, but brutality certainly is not rare. Look at systematic rapes in the Congo and bizarre acts of violence between tribes in Rwanda and domestic violence and child abuse here at home.
Tell me something about human beings isn’t crosswired and shorted out. Tell me why such evil lurks in the hearts of mankind.

I don’t know either. Guess I’ll wait until later today when the sun is full in the sky and ask my shadow.

Maybe the shadow knows.