“Broward Sheriff’s Office detectives say 85-year-old Alzheimer’s patient wandered away from her Pompano Beach home Monday morning, and in an hour’s time, was raped, shot and left lying in the road. The woman, who suffers from dementia, was awakened and dressed by her daughter at 5 a.m. The daughter said she left her mother alone in the living room for a few minutes and she left the house and walked away. At about 5:30 a.m., the daughter called 911 to report that her mother had wandered away. Deputies responded to the house and took a missing person’s report, broadcasting a be-on-the-lookout bulletin to other deputies in the area. At 6:00 a.m., a deputy on patrol found the woman lying on the pavement in the 3000 block of Hammondville Road. Pompano Beach Fire Rescue paramedics were called to the scene and transported the woman to North Broward Medical Center. Doctors at the hospital examined the woman and discovered that she was wounded near her rectum. X-rays revealed a bullet lodged in her pelvic area. They also found evidence that the woman was also raped. Following surgery, the elderly victim remains hospitalized in critical condition.” —Local10.com (US)

(Thanks to alanr for the link.)

It’s hard to imagine the truly bizarre conjunction of circumstances that resulted in this tragedy. On one hand, there’s a gerontophile with a gun lurking around a certain neighborhood in the wee hours of the morning. On the other hand, an octogenarian with dementia wanders out into the street at precisely the same wee hour of the morning. It’s such a weird bit of serendipity — or maybe anti-serendipity, given the consequences — that it calls to mind the famous surrealist dictum about the chance meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on an operating table. The chance meeting of an armed gerontophile and an 85-year-old Alzheimer’s patient is just as surreal.

Perhaps the underlying lesson is that many if not most rapes are in fact crimes of circumstance. Rapists are opportunistic. Like scavengers, they take what comes their way. Usually you imagine them passing on the old and the disabled, but in a few cases you have that chance encounter where the rapist might actually enjoy the thought of exploiting the elderly. What makes it surreal is simply the improbability involved, the one-in-a-million aspect of the encounter. But then that’s the nature of chance, of randomness. When a drunk cheerleader walks alone into the purview of a rapist, there’s a good chance she’s in danger. When a demented octogenarian walks alone into the purview of a rapist, there’s a small chance she’s in danger — but however small it may be, however surreal, it’s still a chance.

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