😮 I removed the handcuffs from a prisoner and recognized the tattoo of my dead father. He died in Vietnam three months before I was born; I never knew him. 💔 And this 67-year-old man, accused of stealing medicine from a pharmacy, had the same military badge on his arm that my mother has had framed in the living room for forty-eight years.

quickly, like someone covering a pot before it boils over:

“No, daughter. Don’t say anything. Leave it like this. Let them sentence me, and that’s it.” I stared at him, uncomprehending.
A man about to be thrown in jail was begging me NOT to help him.

“Why?” I asked.

And the old man, his eyes brimming with tears, answered with something I struggled to continue reading …