Larry Williams Drive

I feel no sympathy whatsoever for the teenage burglar who had a bit of his finger cut off. But I do feel something: I feel sad for him. If you read his ex-girlfriend’s account of what happened you realise it was probably always going to take something drastic like this for that 17-year-old to realise there are consequences. This was the fourth time he broke into the farmer’s house in Piopio. The fourth time.  And this time he went into the farmer’s room in the middle of the night looking for car keys and when the farmer woke up, he hit him over the head with a wine bottle, three times. The farmer grabbed a gun and, even then, the teenager was an idiot telling the farmer to shoot him. Even when the farmer forced him to lie on the kitchen floor the teenager still had a knife and wanted to stab the farmer with it. So the farmer and his son gave the teenager the bash. This is how the ex-girlfriend – who by the way was 15 – tells the story: The men were hitting the teenager with a wooden bat, she said. “It was har