Sticks of Fire: a Tampa blog

An article with the following headline from the St. Pete Times came to my attention earlier this week (thanks, Denise):

Clash ends in stabbing by sword

As if my interest wasn’t piqued sufficiently, this was the sub headline:

A man confronts his wife and her new lover - sex offenders all - and it quickly turns deadly.

Helloooo nurse!

It looks like what happened was Mr. Willie Tarpley, a one-legged, black belt martial arts expert (I know, yet another story about a one-legged, black belt martial arts expert, but bear with me) found out his estranged wife Jacqueline had begun dating Lee Alexander, a convicted sex offender who was convicted in 2000 of a lewd and lascivious act on a person under 16. Apparently Willie, a convicted sex offender himself, either unable to appreciate irony or simply a hypocrite, took umbrage and went to the home in Brandon he had formerly shared with Jacqueline (also a convicted sex offender), and got one (as in “of many”) of the swords he kept in the garage to confront Lee. Now normally I’d say that three convicted sex offenders going at each other with swords is an idea with no discernible downside, aside from there being no actual guarantee that there would be no survivors and post-event cleanup. Except in this case small children are involved.

Willie went inside, picked up his 14-month-old daughter and menaced Jacqueline with his 42-inch katana, a Japanese samurai sword. Still holding the child, he held the blade to Lee’s neck and threatened to cut off his head if he didn’t leave. He did, but in his understandable hurry to do so, backed his car into Willie’s Corvette in the driveway. That’s when Willie came out and stabbed Lee through the open window of the car. There’s some values for you: Pose a threat to the family and get your life threatened but ding the ‘Vette and you will find yourself actually dead.

Willie claims he didn’t realize he’d actually stabbed Lee, just that he’d jabbed the sword in his general direction to make a point. I’ve never seen an owner’s manual for a samurai sword, but I’ll bet there’s a chapter that covers things like this: “WARNING: When making flamboyantly threatening gestures towards your foe, be careful not to point too far. The resistance you feel against the stabby part at the end of the sword is probably that person’s skin, bone and internal organs and continued over-gesturing of this type could result in severe trauma. Unless, you know, that’s what you were going for.”

Offered as proof that Willie didn’t realize what he’d done was the fact that he laughed when Lee got out of the car and attempted to run down the street, because everybody knows that nothing is more hilarious than threatening another person’s life when your toddlers are present. Of course, when Lee collapsed in the street a few feet later, the yuks stopped.

And what was fair Lady Jacqueline doing while all this was taking place? No doubt flashing back to better, happier times. Maybe like the prison sentences she and Willie served for the 1987 kidnapping and sexual torture of a woman who had apparently stolen some of Willie’s belongings. Imagine: “Oh Willie, we had it all back then. Except for the stuff that woman stole, I mean. What went wrong?”

Gosh, you have to wonder, if they couldn’t make it work…

(crossposted at Ridiculously Inconsistent Trickle of Conscioiusness)

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