THIS MAN SHOULD BE CHARGED
They should charge the brother.
If you buy drugs, you deserve to be arrested. It’s that simple.
But in Millard County, in what is undoubtedly an act of compassion, they have chosen foolishly.
I’m talking about Ryan Greathouse. The guy who got his sister killed.
The funeral was yesterday, in the big Mormon Church in Delta, Utah. There were police cars from all over the state, and black bands around the badges, and the governor came to show his respect. It was a cop funeral, for a beloved deputy who was gunned down a week ago.
But it is an even larger tragedy than that. This is like one of those plays from ancient Greece where everybody suffers and the gods look down from Olympus and treat the people like toys.
It started out as a burglary patrol. Sergeant Kimball and Deputy Fox sent out on a special detail to look for suspicious activity. Sergeant Kimball found it in the hour after midnight.
He was parked in the dark off Highway 50 when he saw two cars pull up alongside one another on the deserted road. They seemed to confer briefly and then one of them pulled away into the night.
Sergeant Kimball identified the car that stayed behind, and got its license plate number, and then he slunk back into the dark.
And the other car came back. It was an old Cadillac. There seemed to be a quick exchange between the occupants of the vehicles and then the Cadillac pulled quickly away. The other car also drove away, headed back to town.
Sergeant Kimball got on the shortwave and radioed a description of the Cadillac to Deputy Fox. It looked like a drug buy to him, and if they could get the dealer, that would be good.
Before Sergeant Kimball could go after the second car, Deputy Fox radioed that she had caught the Cadillac and pulled it over and wanted some back up.
That’s the last anyone heard from her.
When Sergeant Kimball got to her cruiser, idling with its lights on by the shoulder of the road, she was dead on the pavement in front of it.
The drug dealer had a gun. And after some 15 years of being an itinerant criminal, the twice-deported illegal alien -- according to the police -- stepped out and fired. She was felled instantly, with time to neither radio for help or pull her gun.
She was just murdered. In cold blood. Husband and babies at home. Everybody’s favorite deputy. With a shot through the chest, just above the vest.
But you’ve heard that story. You know that pain. You know about Deputy Josie Fox.
But this isn’t about her.
This is about the other car.
The one Sergeant Kimball saw drive back to town. If it was a drug dealer who gunned the deputy down, it was a drug buyer who drove off the other way.
And investigators went right to him.
They needed to know who the dealer was, how to contact him, where he was from. And the other driver knew. And he had his cell phone number.
Because it had been the second driver’s call which had brought the drug dealer to town. In the dark of the night, about midnight in the bridge between Sunday and Monday, he had wanted a fix, he had wanted to get high, so he called.
And the dealer came. They conferred, compared bona fides, agreed, and one waited while the other went to get product. Not 10 minutes later Deputy Fox was dead.
Deputy Josie Greathouse Fox.
The sister of Ryan Greathouse.
Who wanted to get high a little over a week ago. Who called his dealer. Who came home and took care of his jonesing.
While his dealer gunned down his sister.
That’s what police say happened.
It was one of those chain events. One of those unintended consequences. One of those victimless crimes that left a mother dead, a family grieving and a brother with blood on his hands.
I’m sorry to say that, and everyone has politely ignored that fact, but it is true. Ryan Greathouse’s criminal activity -- buying drugs -- led directly to his sister’s death. Without him wanting to get high that night, without him calling that drug dealer into town, she would be alive today.
And he should be charged.
Sergeant Fox saw Ryan Greathouse buy drugs. Ryan Greathouse told a sheriff’s investigator that he was buying drugs. Ryan Greathouse should be charged with buying drugs.
Period.
And everybody who buys illegal drugs should take a lesson from his fate. Because everybody who buys drugs has blood on their hands. Every dollar spent on illegal drugs is a dollar that helps run the illegal economy. It funds the gangs and the guns and the bullets and the killings.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s crack on the corner, meth in the country or marijuana in the suburbs -- it all comes from the same filthy hole. And it all funds the same heartless evil.
This man learned that first hand.
And he needs to be charged.
Just like everybody who buys drugs.
- by Bob Lonsberry © 2010
