IT’S ONLY A YOUTHFUL INDESCRETION

Four Pennsylvania teenagers threw rocks from an overpass, one of which crushed a schoolteacher’s forehead

Shortly before midnight on July 10, brothers Brett, 18, and Dylan, 17, Lahr, Tyler Gregory Porter, 17, and a juvenile identified only as KLM were just out to have some fun. They drove onto an overpass on Interstate 80 in White Deer Township, Pa. where they stopped to pelt passing cars with rocks.

At the same time, an Ohio family was driving to New York to attend a show when suddenly an object smashed through the windshield of their Nissan. The object, which turned out to be an eight-pound rock the size of a football, crushed the forehead of Sharon Budd, 52, a seventh-grade Uniontown teacher and mother of four. Mrs. Budd was rushed to Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, where it was touch-and-go whether she would live or die.

Doctors worked feverishly over a two week period to keep Mrs. Budd alive. They had to remove pieces of her skull from her brain. They removed parts of her intact skull to allow for swelling of the brain and used a piece of her skull to fabricate a bridge between her eyes. Doctors felt it necessary to remove the right frontal brain lobe and parts of the left one too. They had to use screws, bolts and plates in order to keep her face together.

The scar from the rock runs from her right ear across her forehead. The one from the removed part of her skull runs across the top of her head from ear to ear. While Mrs. Budd is expected to live, she will probably lose the sight in her right eye. And she will no longer be able to function as a teacher, nor will she be able to perform some otherwise routine tasks.

Now that I’ve described the extent of her injuries and the extraordinary surgeries required to keep Ms. Budd alive, the question is: How should the four rock-throwing assholes be punished?

The two Lahr brothers and Porter are being held and charged as adults with aggravated assault and criminal conspiracy to commit aggravated assault, and counts of propulsion of missiles into an occupied vehicle or onto roadway, possessing of instruments of crime and recklessly endangering another person. KLM is being held as a juvenile.

I am sure there will be those do-gooders who will say that the assholes are only guilty of committing a youthful indiscretion. Youthful indiscretion my fucking ass! These four bastards were would-be murderers and don’t tell me they didn’t know that when they were tossing those rocks. All four must be punished to the fullest extent of the law and the sentences on all counts should run consecutively, not concurrently.