My brother tipped me off to a gripping story about Jeff Riordan, who was a star closer for several baseball teams in the '80s and '90s. I remembered reading about his bizarre stick-up of a jewelry store last Christmas and wondered at the time what the rest of the story was. It turns out that Riordan was on a combination of twelve medicines at the time of the robbery, including a batch of anti-depressants he's been taking. Riordan's 20-year-old son had fatally overdosed the year before, and he had slipped into a debilitating depression.
Riordan was found not guilty by reason of insanity. He remembers nothing about the robbery. Following two months of hospitalization, which included electroconvulsive therapy, he is recovering.
"People don't understand unless they're going through it," he told ESPN's William Weinbaum. "Everybody says, 'You've got to get over it, you've got to get over it.' Well, it's kind of hard when you spend 20 years with your son, and you love him and still love him, and all of a sudden he's not here for you to get a hug or a phone call or anything like that."
The Elephant on Main Street © 2005, 2006, 2007 Thom Forbes