Tragic

I find it interesting how following seemingly random links on the internet can teach you something you’d never have any reason to know otherwise. I started out looking at this Metafilter thread about the web site dead.atyourage.com. You enter your exact date of birth and find out about famous/infamous/interesting people who died at your age or thereabouts.

The first person on my list was Lyman Bostock, a baseball player I’d never heard of. Apparently, he is still the only MLB player to have been murdered during the baseball season. That’s sad enough, but I went to the Wikipedia article about him and read the story of his death; it’s heartbreaking. He was a great hitter on his way to being a pretty big star, and was murdered by Leonard Smith, the jealous, estranged husband of a woman he’d only just met. Even worse, Smith was found guilty in his second trial (the first ended in a mistrial due to a hung jury), was committed for psychiatric treatment, and was released after seven months when he was deemed to be no longer mentally ill. Including that time and the time he was in jail awaiting trial, he served less than two years for Bostock’s murder. ESPN Outside the Lines also did a story on Bostock’s murder. It seems like a slap in the face of Bostock’s family that Smith has been free for nearly thirty years, even though he was found guilty of murder. As a direct result of this case, the state of Indiana changed the way that the sentences of those found guilty by reason of insanity are handles, so that people found guilty and then deemed no longer insane would go to jail, instead of be released.