No one was hurt

By Published by The Editorial Board

Published: June 4, 2008

We wrote last week about a pair of troubling events involving residents of Rockingham County.
Over the Memorial Day weekend, police said, a Reidsville woman lost her leg trying to board a moving train and an Eden man fell from the trunk of a moving car, striking his head on the pavement.
Law enforcement officials could do little to stop either event, which would only have been prevented by some better judgment by those involved.
This wasn’t the case Monday, when a man well known to Reidsville workers and officials shot at a public works truck near a busy downtown intersection. The only damage from the incident was incurred by the truck, which was scarred by the shots from what police say was a powerful .30-30 rifle. It obviously could have been much worse, not only for the two workers in the truck but for pedestrians and other drivers as well.
The workers drove to police, who, knowing the man’s routine, waited for him outside a restaurant on Freeway Drive, followed him and arrested him without incident. Again, if police and the workers would have acted differently, the situation could have escalated and people could have been hurt, or worse.
The man, Charles Bright, has a history of harassing city workers and was banned from city parks. And it’s a natural reaction to criticize the city and police for failing to take more decisive action much sooner. Hindsight is always the clearest after shootings and other tragedies perpetuated by disturbed people – “This could have been prevented if …”
But the reality is, life is filled with too many variables and uncertainties that foresight and extended planning, though preferable, are all too often derailed by daily events and human frailty – not to mention a respect for one’s civil liberties.
So, we get by mostly on good judgment and simple common sense. Bright is in jail on $500,000 bail, which means he’ll probably remain there until trial. A judge will decide his fate and, beyond the emotional ramifications inherent to the judicial process, no one has been hurt. We can only hope that all such cases will have similar endings. Unfortunately, they won’t.