Commentary

October 8th, 2009

Some of you who regularly read The Paper will recall that we have long championed the case for Richard Keech to be released from prison.
See: http://thecommunitypaper.com/archive/2008/10_02/index.php

Brief background: Richard Keech was a Marine in WWII. He was captured and spent years in a Japanese POW camp. After the war he became a successful civilian businessman and worked for a major corporation for years. He married, raised a family, and didn't have so much as a traffic ticket.

His daughter married a British man who abused her verbally and physically, threatening to kill her. One day he came to Richard Keech's house, threatened Richard and his daughter. Richard got a pistol and shot him, fatally. Richard appears to have had very poor legal counsel and was convicted and sent to prison.

Within the past several years, Richard had become progressively more and more ill. Weak, unable to eat, barely able to walk, all kinds of ailments. Other inmates and even the correctional guards all supported a petition to release Richard on compassionate grounds. He represented a threat to no one - and he did what he did to protect his daughter. I've had many sworn law enforcement people tell me, "if someone abused my daughter the way that guy did, I'd have killed him too."

The compassionate release was granted yesterday. Richard, if he continues to live for a few more days, will be at home. There, he will die with his wife and family around him. He has weeks, maybe days, maybe hours, before he will die. He is that far along in his final journey. This message, below, from his daughter, the one he went to prison for protecting, arrived recently:

Sent: Monday, October 05, 2009 8:13 PM
Subject: Richard E. Keech, status of compassionate leave dtd 02 Oct 09

Hello Friends and Family,

With great joy I would like to announce that "We Won!"
Judge Garner approved the compassionate release of Richard Keech.
I can pick up dad within the week.
Thank you for all your love and support. It really made all the difference.
•••••
I don’t know yet how I feel about the city of Escondido building a new stadium to accommodate the San Diego Chargers. Still studying the issue. We understand there is a move afoot to put on an exhibition game this weekend, normally a bye week for the Chargers, between the Chargers and the Escondido High School Cougars.

At last report, the Escondido High School Cougars were a two touchdown favorite.
•••••
Travel Alert: It seems the travel woes just keep building up, whether it’s airlines charging for luggage, the Feds putting us through security lines, lost baggage, increased air fares, or rental car shenanigans.

We had two separate problems with Enterprise Car Rental recently. Most recently, Enterprise tried to charge us $85 a day for a Kia Rio! This is a rental car about the size of a shoe box. It should rent for $20 a day, or less (we found out later the normal rental rate is $17.10 a day; that’s reasonable). We arrived at Oklahoma City airport and, rather than inconvenience family, decided to rent a car. I heard the reservations agent say “$35 a day,.” I thought even that was high for a Kia, but I let it slide. The next day I happened to look at the paperwork and they were charging not $35 a day, but $85 a day. I blew up. We returned the car that evening. They acknowledged a mistake had been made but insisted on charging us $85 for the first day. Which they did. But they lost a car rental customer forever. We will not rent from Enterprise again. On an earlier trip to Alabama we had to jump through a number of unnecessary hoops just to turn the car back in. We had rented it the night before for a one-way trip from Birmingham to Montgomery, placed it in valet parking, returned it the next morning. Montgomery claimed there was a scratch on the bottom of the right (passenger) side. Couldn’t have been. The car was hardly used by us. We finally got the car turned in but it was an unpleasant experience.

Laura Bryant, an official spokesperson for Enterprise, argued that the rental car business has changed and they’ve had to increase rental rates, particularly during the week. The $17.10 rate for the Kia, she said, was a weekend rate. We had rented on a Thursday night, which is not a weekend. Fine. But there is no way you can persuade this renter that you can justify charging $85 for a Kia Rio. We could have rented a cab to our family member’s home for $20.

So long, Enterprise, it’s been an interestin experience.