http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=607795
Tracy Butler and Christopher Young apparently didn't much feel like going to school Tuesday.
The two 17-year-olds, police say, had a gun and felt like getting themselves some money.
They started, the cops believe, by taking $4 and a black plastic comb from a 45-year-old cognitively disabled man waiting for a bus in Wauwatosa.
Then, around 11 a.m., they moved on to someone they must have figured was even more vulnerable: an 81-year-old man loading groceries into his van in the parking lot of a Pick 'n Save in Glendale.
According to police: One came at him from the back. The other, revealing the revolver in his pants, came at him from the front.
"I knew I was in trouble," said Wayne Smith, sitting in the living room of his modest Whitefish Bay home as an American flag rustled out front.
They ordered him to hand over both his money and his keys.
"I am not going to give you the money," responded Smith. "I am not going to give you the keys."
"Do you want to get popped?" one of the kids asked.
"No," said Smith, "I don't want to get popped."
"You don't want to do this," said one of the children, imagining himself a man.
"No," replied Mr. Smith, "you don't want to do this."
Wayne Smith was himself once 17, so he knows what it can be like. When he was 17, he went to class. When he was 18, in May of 1944, he joined the Marines. He was at Okinawa in 1945, as part of a division that landed in Nagasaki after the bomb.
To this day, just across from the American flag out front, flies another. "United States Marine Corps," it says. "Semper Fidelis."
Smith is over 6 feet tall and weighs a trim 175 pounds. He retired 13 years ago from the company he ran, but still works out every day.
Butler and Young couldn't have fathomed any of this. All they knew, one of them told police, was that Smith told them to, "Go (expletive) with someone else."
Marines know a little about swearing. But, he says, "I did not swear. I said, 'Shove off.' "
And guess what? They did.
It might have been because a woman drove by slowly. It might have been because, one of the kids later told the Glendale police, who quickly caught them and had them charged with attempted armed robbery, the gun was empty.
It might be, too, that they had never met somebody like Smith.
I know a million people are going to say the damn fool should have cowered in the dirt. I probably would. You get to a certain age and live life a certain way, though, and you don't bend so easy maybe. You have something in you, built up from a long life of working and fighting and raising kids the right way, that keeps you straight up.
"If somebody pulls a gun on me," he said, "they'd better be willing to use it. What is the worst that is going to happen to me?"
Well, I noted, you could get shot.
He kind of smiled.
"I have confidence in my ability to protect myself," he said, "and to me these punks are not going to take my money and my car; and at 81 years old I have had a nice life."
He paused.
"I would like to live a little longer," he noted.
"My feeling was I could get to him before he could get that (gun) out" completely.
"If he had pulled that gun out, I would have taken him down."
I, for one, have no doubt.
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