LITTLE ROCK — I’d rather not pen a column like this one. Yet some events can’t be ignored, especially when so many in the community are talking about them.
I’m speaking of the truly bizarre case of 42-year-old Christopher Webb, the now-former high school principal in Farmington. He’s the educator who made multiple headlines after police accused him of assaulting a woman and allegedly using a knife to kill a dog inside his home.
Soon after his initial arrest, Webb resigned the job he’d held for four years in Farmington. Prior to that, he was junior high school principal, assistant superintendent and superintendent in Prairie Grove.
Sheriff’s deputies booked Webb before releasing him on $5,000 bond last week, charging him with multiple offenses, from assault to endangering a minor’s welfare, resisting arrest and cruelty to animals.
Webb’s arraignment is set for August 20 and the court system will determine his guilt or innocence. Regardless, this sort of incident is bound to haunt the man and his career for the remainder of his life. But why, in one nightmarish act, would a seemingly upstanding person with a responsible position as a role model overseeing hundreds of teachers and students supposedly lose control of himself and his future?
That cruelty charge was the one that seemed to stun folks the hardest, including me. In fact, it was one of those news stories that was difficult to read, much less visualize. It seemed better-suited for a B-horror movie.
Farmington officers arrested the veteran educator and public school administrator July 19 after a 911 call for help. At the fashionable brick home Webb shares with his fiancee on Hydrangea Drive, police say they heard screams for help. They said they entered to discover walls and the floor splotched in blood.
Webb was found nude and also smeared with blood from his 13-weekold black Labrador puppy, Haus, who lay dead in the bathtub with his throat slit, according to protection records filed with the court by Webb’s former wife, Dina Andrejcik, on behalf of Webb’s 12-year-old daughter, who was apparently in the home at the time.
The charges also allege that Webb was dragging his fiancee through the home, trying to jab at her eyes and choking her.
News reports said Webb was taken to the Farmington Police Department in a strait-jacket and later admitted to Vista Health, a local mental health facility. He remained there under involuntary commitment until Washington County sheriff’s deputies took him into custody and booked him into the county jail upon his release nearly a week later.
There has to be so much more to this peculiar story. People are still talking about it over water coolers and coffee because the alleged crimes seem to make no sense.
What would cause a respected man whom superiors, even school boards, felt was up to the demands of leading a school, and even a school district, to wind up in such a sad situation? To work hard for 20 years to build a career only to have it lead to this?
I can’t help but wonder if one or more mind- (or mood-) altering medications was involved in his inexplicable behavior. If so, that would raise other questions in my tiny brain. If a physician prescribes a legal drug and it triggers a violent reaction, are we really more at fault than the medication that caused our reaction?
Or what if we’re prescribed medication to prevent radical, possibly violent, behavior but fail to take it as prescribed, or even mix it with, say, alcohol?
Those kinds of situations throw the matter of a person’s true intentions into question when a crime is committed. At least they do for me.
Don’t mistake my point. I’m not excusing Webb or his alleged behavior that night, actions that will reverberate in his life until his final breath.
It’s yet another instance of those ripple effects I talk about invariably rocking the lives of so many others around a person.
He is paying-and will continue to pay in a big way-for those several minutes that led to the charges filed against him, especially in the career field he’s chosen.
I’m simply wondering what’s the obvious deeper story behind the choices Webb might have made that night.
And what role, if any, that extenuating circumstances might play when legally (and fairly) analyzing any person’s self-destructive behavior.
Expressing gratitude
Remember that blurb a week or so back about the Johnson couple living on disability and a fixed income who were surprised to see three members of the Johnson City Fire Department suddenly show up to mow the overgrown yard of their duplex?
Well, Ken “Dusty” Wells and his wife Joan, an Air Force veteran, now are busy preparing her “world famous” shrimp dish to deliver to the firemen as their expression of gratitude.
Nice to see this pay-it-forward thing twixt folks at work, isn’t it?
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Mike Masterson is opinion editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s Northwest edition.
Editorial, Pages 13 on 07/31/2012