There are always going to be some cases where personal feelings get in the way of the neutral operation of the justice system. This seems to be one of those cases for a lot of people, a case with some similarities to the Liam Neeson movie “Taken.” Yesterday the Spokane police department put out a statement on Facebook saying they had arrested 60-year-old  John Eisenman for the crime of 1st degree murder. This came after the body of 19-year-old Aaron Sorenson was found in the trunk of a car about a week ago. Here are the circumstances that led to the crime:

In October 2020, 60-year-old John Eisenman discovered that his underage daughter’s boyfriend had allegedly sold her into a sex trafficking organization in Seattle for $1,000.

Eisenman traveled to Seattle and rescued and returned his daughter to Spokane that same month.

In November 2020, Spokane police believe Eisenman learned that the boyfriend, 19-year-old Aaron Sorenson, would be in Airway Heights, west of Spokane.

Police said Eisenman confronted Sorenson, where he zip-tied him and put him in the trunk of a car.

Court documents said Eisenman threw a cinder block at Sorenson’s head and stabbed him several times in the stomach, killing him.

The body remained in the trunk of the car, which Eisenman abandoned in a remote area. Someone apparently took the abandoned car and drove it back to Spokane where another group of people noticed it and started going through it. They discovered the body and called the police.

Obviously if all of this is true then it’s premeditated murder, but a lot of people are suggesting the father in the case deserves a pass and quite a few are calling him a hero. This screenshot shows some responses to the Spokane police. People are not shy telling the police what they think about this case but I’ve redacted the names:

Here’s more of the same.

It‘s not just a few dozen responses. There are thousands upon thousands of similar reactions on Twitter. Check the responses to this tweet if you don’t believe me.

That last comment in the screenshot above is the one that really gets me. I suspect a lot of the people offering these reactions are parents, like me, who have daughters (both men and women are saying the same thing). This story is basically every parent’s nightmare and it’s not hard to imagine wanting anyone who would do this to your daughter dead. The fact that the father apparently has no prior record of any crime, much less a violent one, suggests he’s no threat to anyone in the community.

Of course real life isn’t an action movie and it sets a bad precedent to let someone walk for murder. However, there’s a reason criminal cases get decided by a jury of our peers. In this case, all they need is a couple of parents with daughters on that jury and there’s little chance of a conviction. I think what the social media reaction shows is that this case is going to get nullified at trial. If the father somehow does get convicted my guess is the judge will go easy on him knowing there’s zero public appetite for a harsh sentence. If he got time served and 2 years probation I’d say that would pay his debt to society.