I should never have read past the headline.

“Suspect, Jail Share Same Name.”

Perfect.  Done.  Just add a touch of snark and call it a day.

On Wednesday, November 30, retired Colorado sheriff Patrick J. Sullivan Jr. was booked into the jail named after him: the Patrick J. Sullivan Jr. Detention Facility.  Nice.

I can only assume he got a corner cell with a view.

Sullivan, 68, was arrested on a charge of “the unlawful distribution, manufacturing, dispensing or sale of a controlled substance.”  The controlled substance was meth, and Sullivan preferred the barter system to cash.

In exchange for the drug, the married ex-sheriff demanded sex from his male customers.

Gay sex for meth?  Meh.  That’s nothing special.  That it was an ex-cop, though, is what turned meh into good, and that he ended up being booked into the jail named after him?  Well, that’s where good turned into great.   That he was once named  “Sheriff of the Year” by the National Sheriff’s Association was just icing on the cake.

Time to laugh at the hypocrite and be done with it, right?

Well, not quite…

In 1989, 24 year old Eugene Thompson, Jr. went on a rampage with a semiautomatic pistol in Arapahoe County, Colorado, abducting a woman and killing her and her mother-in-law.  He then raped another woman before being cornered in a townhouse.  During the townhouse standoff, he shot and wounded a deputy, who lay on the ground bleeding.  No one could get to him.  It was too dangerous.

Enter the closeted meth dealing ex-sheriff.

Sullivan crashes his Jeep through a fence to create a diversion.  He jumps out and rescues the wounded deputy as other deputies provide cover.  He backs out through the same fence he ran over and gets the wounded deputy to safety.

Afterwards, he uses the incident to publicly champion gun control.

Oops.

So now this story goes from being a bit of poetic justice – hypocritical lawman gets locked up in the building which bears his name – to the story of a conflicted man who had some real decency and courage in him, but could not accept who he was, and went illegal and underground to satisfy his sexual longings.

Simple sniggering shifted uncomfortably toward nuanced pity.

That old device of the devil and angel perched on your shoulders, each egging you on to do good and bad?

There’s a reason that device was invented.

The more I looked into it, the more heated the battle between angel and devil became.  It wasn’t just the standoff.  Sullivan allegedly smoked meth with three guys who shared an apartment, and encouraged them to do more and more of the drug.

Devil gets a point.

According to one of the three men, a 34 year old, Sullivan has power of attorney over him and cashed the man’s Social Security checks, giving him the cash from them, and taking the man shopping as needed.

Angel gets a point.

So who is Patrick J. Sullivan, Jr.?  A predator who takes advantage of drug addicted young men to satisfy his repressed sexual cravings?  A man who cares for drug addicts and crashes his Jeep into the middle of a dangerous standoff, risking life and limb to rescue a fellow officer?

“Both” is the obvious and true answer.  But “both” doesn’t do much to help out snarky bloggers looking to get a titter.   I wanted black and white, and I got gray.  I wanted “either/or,” and I got “both/and.”

Ugh!

Never read past the headline.