John Hron – English text, first draft.
Wednesday evening
It’s wednesday evening, one of the last days of the summer vacation.
John will start his next school year next monday, the 8th grade. He
has had a good summer in many respects. His great interest is
canoeing, and in July he won a bronze medal in the Swedish youth
championship.
Before the end of the vacation John and a friend has decided to go
camping by a lake about 8 kilometers from their home. The lake is a
popular place for the youngsters in the neighborhood. John’s mother
drives them to the lake, and like all mothers she is a bit worried.
The boys thinks she is fussy. That’s the way young boys feel about
their mother’s worries. They leave the car and follows the little
path to the rocky cape at the south end of the lake.
That’s where they are going to camp.
It’s somewhere between eight and nine o’clock in the morning.
The boys pitch the tent and light a fire near the shore. They
are going to grill sausage.
No one knows that this is the last evening in John’s life. They sit
there talking, having a lot of fun. What are they talking about? The
past summer? Music? Canoeing? Girls? Mopeds? School, that is about
to start?
The murder
It’s the fire that attracts John’s murderers.
Four youngsters, two
aged eighteen, one seventeen and one fifteen, all of them skinheads,
come a bit later to the lake , at another cape.
They sit there and drink – they are well supplied with beer
and liquor. They shout to John and his comrade, but they do not
answer, so they decide to find out who the people by the fire are.
(Maybe this will be an enjoyable evening after all. Maybe
they will find someone to pester.)
The fifteen year old boy is sent to
observe. He is delighed: one of the boys by the fire is John Hron, a boy
he doesn’t like. During the past school year he has harassed and mobbed
and beaten him, even threatened to kill him. At school he has been called
Rambo. Noone can say why he has been bullying John, maybee it is because
he hasn’t been submissive enough, like other pupils. John is certainly
tall (over180 cm) and solid (nearly 70 kg), but right now Rambo has a
powerful back up.
The fifteen year old boy returns to his comrades and tell them that he
has found a jerk and the idiot Hron by the fire. He wants all of them to
go with him and beat John, he even suggests that they should kill him.
The others wants to drink a little more, but between half past ten and
eleven all of them tramp in at John’s and his comrade’s place. The
harassments starts right away. One of the eighteen year old boys thows
a bottle on John’s head, and starts to beat and kick him. John tumbles
down. John has to say that he loves nazis.
He refuses and gets more beating until he does what he is told. He gets
more whipping anyway, maybe because he obviously has been lying when he
previously said that he didn’t like nazis. The fifteen year old boy takes
over and gives John several hard kicks, of which one hits the back of his
head. At this stage John is panic-stricken. At least three of the gang
attacks him, often without any notice, sometimes from behind. His eyes
are according to one of the prosecuted wide open like bowls, and he
cannot focus his lock. It wanders constantly to and fro. He trembles
and finally he sits on his heel, with his head in his hands in order to
protect himself as well as he can against kicks and blows. That
doesn’t prevent him from getting more. He gets a violent jump kick,
kicks to his side and to the head. Again and again he falls from the
violent kicks. Someone beats him with a burning log from the fire.
Another one pushes him so that he falls into the fire. They light the
tent on fire. They steal and destroy their things. John and his
friend wants to go home but they are not permitted to do so.
Instead they continue to attack John with kicks and punches. Finally
he is left lying on the ground, his face bloody and swollen.
The picture of what really happens during the hideous hours is
unclear. The murderers doesn’t remember, or don’t want to remember
very much during the police investigation. They blame each other.
Sometimes they make a pause in the torture. They insist that John
shall have a beer, and the tone is friendlier. Nothing seems however
to stop new outbursts of violence. It is not enough that John against
all that he believes in has admitted that he love nazis. He has to take
more beating anyway. They are the cats playing with the mouse, and they
enjoy his anguish and fear. It’s an intoxicating feeling for the four
of them to have a scared boy so totally in their control. After a new
outbreak of battering they thow him into the lake.
John swims away from them. He is in pain, dazed and scared, but he is
a good swimmer. Soon the skinheads discovers that it wasn’t a good idea
to throw John into the lake. They can’t beat him anymore. They yell at
him, and demand that he come back, but he stays out in the lake for
about fifteen minutes. Then one of them comes up with the idea to
force John’s comrade to cry to John that he will have to take the
beating if John doesn’t return.
While John is out on the lake the mood seems to go down for the
skinheads. The other eighteen year old boy, who has been relatively
passive during the assault, and the seventeen year old boy are pleased.
They want to go and they take John’s comrade who is scared out of his
wit with them. It is in just that moment John makes a disastrous
decision: he turns back towards land. Is it because he is worried about
his comrade? Does he think that all of the skinheads are about to leave,
or does he think that they won’t beat him anymore? He is in pain and he
is scared, but he cannot understand the magnitude of the hate his
tormentors feel. He is only fourteen years old. He doesn’t understand
that his two main torturers are drawn into a grotesque competition, a
competition neither of them can afford to loose. John’s life is at
stake, and right now it isn’t worth anything. We cannot know what John
thinks at the moment he swims back to the beach, but his decision will
mean ghastly consequences for him.
The fifteen year old boy and one of the eigten year old boys is waiting
for him. They are the two that mainly has been the active ones during
the battering, an they have got more than enough hate left. The beating
starts all over with a new decisiveness and efficiency, and there is no
escape now. A fist blow right on John’s face throws him to the ground.
He falls backwards, hits the back of his head to the rock and is
unconscious. He is dragged over to a grassy spot, because the murderers
want the kicking session to be more convenient. Hard, hard kicks hit
his head, but he can’t protect himself with his arm, he is unconcious.
The executioners sees that he moves but he doesn’t scream, he just
writhes in pain, mumbles something they can’t understand. The cat and
mouse play is over. The murderers are pleased and they lift, drag and
roll John over the cliff to the shore and kick him into the water.
Just before he falls they hear him mumble something again.
This time John doesn’t notice that he falls into the water. He drowns
and sinks slowly to the bottom of the lake. The murderers stands there
and watch it rolling a cigarette. No one lifts a finger although they
understand that John is dying.
It was a draw. Nobody won but none lost either. The murderers turn their
back to the dreadful scene and join the others. One of them says that
John sank like a stone when they throw him into the water for the second
time. The skinheads goes home and goes to bed. John’s comrade gets a
lift, returns home and beat the alarm. Only a few hours after that
Johns mother drove the boys to the lake, John is lying at its bottom,
beaten into unrecognizability.
Epilogue
It is very painful even to think about the last hours of John’s life.
He is tortured and humiliated in a outrageous way. His executioners
won’t even let him confess himself to the ideals he believes in and
stands for. With blows and kicks they finally manage to force him to say
what they want to hear: that he loves nazis. A boy, only fourteen years
of age is tormented and murdered, and his tormentors cannot even explain
why afterwards. There is no limit to the brutality that they display.
They go on and on cheering each other on, competing in a mad spiral
toward more brutality. They kick him everywhere, in the back, in his
side, on his legs, but mainly toward his neck and head.
When they has thrown him into the lake, thereby setting an end to the
assault they can’t realise that they have put an end to it themselves.
They fail to realise that they have let him out of their power voluntary.
They demand him to swim back and take more. For hours they have given
free outflow to a reckles rage and a limitless sadism, but still there
is time for consideration. Yet nothing indicates that they for a minute
consider to cease with their torture. They use the comrade as hostage
and exploit John’s sense of justice to prevent him from saving his
own life. Not even the wildest animals behaves like John’s murderers.
What more do they request from John? They want his life. That’s all he
has left, but he gives it to them anyway. He returns voluntary to his
executors to be exposed to more torture. Are they disarmed by his
courage? Do they feel ashamed? Not at all. They are even more brutal
in their assault, they spur each other to even harder kicks.
Will they at least be content when they have a broken tormented,
unconscious bundle at their feet, a rag of a human being, a lifeless
body, that cannot even express pain when kicked? Not even now
is it enough. They drag a unconscious fourteen year old boy to the
water and drown him.
If they previously didn’t understand how serious their battery has
been, there is still a last chance for them to come to their senses.
When they see that John doesn’t wake up being thrown into the water,
they can jump into it and pull him ashore. For a short moment,
before everything is too late, they have the chance to realise that
they have gone to far, they can save the boy from death by drowning.
They do nothing. Anxious and miserable, afraid to appear weak in
front of one another, they just watch. They roll a cigarette and
leave, let a fourteen year old boy, who has done them no harm, sink
like a stone and die.
A boy that has all his life ahead goes to a lake to camp, full of
life. After a couple of hours everything is turned into a nightmare.
He is assaulted, tortured and murdered in a mad outbreak of violence.
Such a thorough-paced cruelty and sadism, such a total lack of humanity
has seldom been displayed by teenagers.
John is dead, he is gone forever, but his death mustn’t be without any
meaning. We have all a responsibility for the society in which we live. We
must not do like John’s murderers, just turn our back to a poor boy’s
horrible, painful death and go on. The society we live in and what it
looks like is our responsibility. There is many of us that want to live
in a country where two boys safely can go out for an adventure in the
summer, and camp by a lake. If this is the society we want we must be
prepared to be courageous like John. We must show that we stand for
every human beings right to his life and his freedom. We must remember
John Hron, a boy that refused to flee and therefore lost his life.
Archive/File: people/h/hron.john/the-murder-of-john-hrun
Last-Modified: 1996/06/29
