Captioned 鈥渂ody of a sedan, heart of a GTI,鈥?the short clip shows the red trim on the sporty grille with a honeycomb pattern like on the hot hatch. VW has removed the chrome accents you鈥檒l find on the regular Jetta to adopt a glossy black look, while the headlights appear to have a black tint to complete the darker appearance. Going up against other athletic sedans such as the Honda Civic Si and the Hyundai Elantra Sport, the new Jetta GLI will attempt to be a Golf GTI with a proper trunk. Under the hood, VW鈥檚 engineers are expected to install a turbocharged 2.0-liter gasoline engine with about 220 horsepower and 258 pound-feet (350 Newton-meters) of torque like the regular U.S.-spec Golf GTI. As you may recall, VoA added a Rabbit Edition to the hot hatch鈥檚 lineup, and that one makes an extra 8 hp for a grand total of 228 hp. Regardless if you鈥檙e a manual or an automatic person, you鈥檒l be happy to hear VW will probably sell the 2020 Jetta GLI with a choice between a six-speed stick shift and a seven-speed DSG. It would make sense for the torsion-beam suspension of the lesser versions to be replaced by a multi-link independent rear setup for better handling, while beefier brakes with larger alloy wheels should also be on the menu.
In fact, police believe the gun had never been loaded, or even removed from the thermoplastic case it came in. Instead, Paul used a paintball gun he鈥檇 rented the previous week, and before being tackled, had managed to get off somewhere between seventy-five and one hundred blood-red pellets. Paul himself sustained the most serious injury of the entire incident: a mildly dislocated shoulder. Paul was tall and thin with long frizzy hair, and at least two week鈥檚 worth of beard that grew abundantly down his neck. His eyes were wild behind his round, wire-rim glasses, and his grin was as mischievous as it was warm. Although snow was visible through the classroom window, he had on baggy cargo shorts, a faded T-shirt with a penguin on it, and a pair of thin rubber flip-flops. The excerpt seemed to be from the first class of the semester, and Paul began by explaining the course title. The notion that one could not prove a negative was a staple of what was sometimes referred to as 鈥渇olk logic.鈥?It was an argument liberally evoked by zealots, extremists, and dogmatists, and sometimes even erroneously conceded by scientists. That鈥檚 where I stopped the video.
My security token for logging into the network at work was in the kitchen, and I eventually found it in a drawer beside the refrigerator. I found my phone and charger at the same time, and started it charging beside the coffee pot just in case I needed to make some calls. There was about half a pot left over from yesterday, and since I knew I had a lot of reading ahead of me, I decided to switch from booze to caffeine. It somehow did not surprise me that Paul had chosen to represent himself in court, though the case never actually went to trial. A researcher had somehow obtained a copy of one of the letters, but out of respect for both Paul and the family for which it was written, I鈥檝e decided not to print it here. It鈥檚 sufficient to say that Paul conveyed exactly what he promised he would. He offered a lengthy and sincere apology for what he did, and although he admitted that his actions had been irresponsible and misguided, he had in fact been hoping that they would ultimately have a wider positive impact.
It was certainly a bizarre brand of logic鈥娾€斺€奱 kind of twisted attempt at negative proof, I suppose鈥娾€斺€奲ut it turned out that he was right. From what I could tell, Red Wednesday had generated far more traditional and social media coverage than all but the most horrific of school shootings before or since. And it continued to be referenced long after the news cycle had left actual tragedies far behind. Paul鈥檚 letter was contrite, heartfelt, and sincere enough that鈥娾€斺€奱ccording to the investigation conducted by the Times鈥娾€斺€奺leven families responded to him, accepting his apology. And of those eleven families, Paul apparently established regular correspondences with five of them. Paul鈥檚 death was an extraordinary interplay of tragedy and irony. He had never intended to get away with what he did, and understood very clearly what the repercussions of his protest would be. But he made one critical mistake鈥娾€斺€妎ne simple oversight that, while seemingly insignificant, proved catastrophic. Perhaps it was because he was nervous, or because focusing on one set of details came at the expense of focusing on another, but Paul left the gun he鈥檇 bought that morning in the trunk of his Volkswagen.
In addition to aggravated battery, therefore, Paul was found guilty of possession of a firearm on school property. According to the judge, that did not affect the length of Paul鈥檚 sentence, but it did influence where he would have to serve it. Rather than a local jail, Paul was sent to a state penitentiary to live among some of the country鈥檚 most hardened and violent criminals. As anyone who has watched enough TV knows, there is a hierarchy among inmates in a penitentiary, and those who commit crimes against children are placed at the very bottom. That was the end of the chronology of events leading up to Paul鈥檚 death, but it was not the end of the story. As the woman who knew Paul best described him to me, Paul always had multiple reasons for everything he did, and he always thought long-term. But although there were countless opportunities to observe and measure and document loss, it was not possible to measure whatever the opposite of loss was. In other words, it was easy to prove what a murdered child could never grow up to do, but until now, it had never been possible to unequivocally prove what they actually would do. I began to realize that the burden of proof had fallen to me. These children鈥檚 stories needed to be told. Michael Paul Ledbetter鈥檚 story needed to be told. At that moment, I remembered something that the senseless death of my own daughter made me forget: that the world was still so full of stories, and that I was alive to help tell them.
