Nonfiction | July 24, 2012

He stood six-foot two in socked feet, six-three in boots, and his hair was the color of rotting straw.  His father was a former Green Beret who referred to his combat tours as “paid vacation.”  His older brother, James, was an off-the-shelf psycho.  James got shot in the leg one night at Dandy Donuts, drove himself to the hospital, had a doctor remove the bullet from his thigh and inject him with penicillin, drove back to Dandy’s, beat the man who shot him into a coma, then started in on the night-shift workers who’d watched it happen.  So now the father was in prison for trafficking meth and the brother on his way for aggravated battery.  Connolly Ostrander was fourteen at the time.  He dropped out of high school and became a man.

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