http://www.unionleader.com/article.aspx?headline=Mont+Vernon+prepares+for+sex+offender&articleId=b78312f0-b92c-4c4d-a0e0-28e2eb7c739c

The roads turned to dirt past the house (where I grew up) going west from Mont Vernon to Lyndeborough.  At the dusty corner of Beech Hill and Salisbury a troubled boy lived alone with his mother in a tumbledown house.  That boy was Raymond K. Fourrnier.  I knew him because he was in my sixth grade class, which we both had to repeat because we had learning disabilities.  The similarities ended there.

Raymond Fournier was a troubled soul.  he suffered from mild-to-moderate cognitive delays and subnormal intelligence.  He was what you might call borderline retarded.  He was mainstreamed.  That is, he was in regular classroom with resource room supplement.  So was I, however, my case was more due to problems with math and ADD (as they now call it) caused by turmoil at home.  He wasn't much of a conversationalist, but I sometimes corrected his spelling homework and administered quizzes for him on other subjects while I was in resource room.  I saw he had a full range of emotions.  He expressed humor, joy, frustration, and anger.  He demonstrated a social conscience indicating he new right from wrong.  He was a tall, rangy kid with a face mildly disfigured by what I believe was fetal alcohol syndrome.  His behavior seemed to match that diagnosis, but I never knew for sure.

He was socially ostracized.  The kids used to make wicked fun of him.  Sometimes Raymond would lash out in aggression, face reddened, limbs flailing, eyes aflame.  He could be a frightening figure when he got that way.  One time, I chanted across the playground, "Raymond Fournier got hornier and hornier and hornier 'till there was no one hornier than Raymond Fournier!"  Ray bolted over and knocked me flat on my back into woodchips and weed. I jumped up defensively shouting, "Whoa! Whoa! Take it easy Ray, I'm only joking!"
"Don't care," he growled, "Don't never saying nothin' like that about me again!" 

Today I choke on those words.

My family left town after my extended stint in the sixth grade.  I never knew what became of Raymond.  I felt concern for him because his background was so economically and culturally deprived, and his deficits seemed so detrimental.  I hoped he could manage his way through high school and perhaps learn a trade.  However, life sped ahead and Raymond Fournier became a distant memory, frozen in time as sixth grade Raymond.  Until this week.

One of the guys from that class started a Mont Vernon Facebook page and invited me to join.  Some jerk thought it would nice Facebook banter to post a photo of where all the sex offenders in town lived.  There he was, his faced imposed above Salisbury and Beech.  He was balding and roughed-up looking.  I was stunned. I hadn't thought about him in years.

I Googled the name "Raymond K. Fournier" and found as matter of public record that he had been convicted in 1994 of seven counts of aggravated sexual assault on children under the age of thirteen.  He had been sentenced to 5 to 15 years in state prison.  Again, facts I can garner for posted articles and legal briefs are not exactly clear.  Mr. Fournier, it seems, was released at some point, but re-offended, thus he went back to prison and maxed out his time.  This was not what I wanted to hear, nor did I want to hear the town's reaction -- but could I blame them?

The citizens of Mont Vernon don't want this vicious sex offender, Raymond Fournier, living back in town.  There is a lot of talk about why the state of New Hampshire could not hold Mr. Fournier in involuntary commitment and the state psychiatric hospital post prison sentence.  Hillsborough  County justices apparently did not act on the people's petition in time and the deadline past.  Fournier had to be release under state law.

Now what?  He is indigent.  He has a 15-year prison sentence behind him.  He has been convicted of sex crimes that make a man a lifetime pariah in our society.  Where is he going to go?  The only place he can.  He's going back to Mont Vernon to live with his mother.  If I still lived there I don't think I would feel comfortable.  If I was living in the house in which I was raised and had a family of my own, I'm not sure I wouldn't be down at the town hall with the other pitchfork-waving villagers. 

Yet, this is different for me.  I remember Raymond Fournier vividly before he was this monstrous child rapist those small-town Granite Staters want to burn at the stake.  I knew him first as a human being.  I knew him as a kid from a poverty-stricken home who had developmental problems of none of his own making.  It is only now, nearly three decades later I know that he raped children when he was 25 years old, and who knows how many he violated and eluded conviction.  From the stories he told me in sixth grade about this or that "uncle" who was living at the house at any given time and the way the uncle and his mother would drink lots of booze and act funny, I'm sure in retrospect Fournier was sexually abused serially himself.  It does not mitigate the crimes in which he injured children and damaged them for life.  However, my memories put a more human face on this "monster" they have made out of Raymond K. Fournier.

Very powerful story, Maxwell...

In a minimal way, he reminds me of Henry Lee Lucas. Lucas was the product of years of abuse from his mother (was made to wear a dress at school and got beaten up for accepting a pair of shoes) and would often see her have sex with other people in the house. Lucas lived in extremely poor conditions, uneducated and, most likely, mentally unstable as a result of what has happened in his life.

The thing with Lucas is no one seems to really know the depths of his crimes because he was a compulsive liar, fantasist and the police enforcement would try to frame him, determined to get someone for these crimes even if it was the wrong person. I still believe he committed insane crimes but he got off the death penalty and recieved life in prison instead.

Fournier, like Lucas, didn't get a break in a life. That in no way excuses anything that these two have done but I can't help feeling that the system has let these people down.

Heartbreaking on so many levels.  Well written, Max.

Fournier, like Lucas, didn't get a break in a life. That in no way excuses anything that these two have done but I can't help feeling that the system has let these people down.


I understand what you are saying.

Very powerful story, Max.

The system has let these people down.  And the children that have suffered at their hands.  There is no right answer.  It's just a sad sad story for everyone involved.  It's always different when there is a face to a story like this.  A name that you know.  Thanks for making us all think today, Max.

It's definitely a catch 22 situation.  :-\\  Human beings that have been failed by 'the system' (that means us as well).  That was a powerfully well written story Max.

Thanks guys!

I feel conflicted about what to make of Fournier.  I have a sinking feeling he will re-offend.  The town in which he was raised and the only real home he knew before his crimes has made it clear they don't want him.  His world rejects him.  He will be hurt and angry and lash out.  There is security back in the joint.  Charles Manson expressed many times he preferred prison to the outside world.  I think that is true of many people who become institutionalized. 

It gives you a different perspective when you know a criminal before he became a criminal. 

Henry Lee Lucas was a different sort of character.  His mother was wantonly depraved towards him.  Fournier told me his mother had him when she was sixteen. He said so a couple of times.  It sounds like she was not in control of her own life and a victim of domestic violence and alcohol abuse.  Lucas was also a serial murderer who eluded capture for decades.  When he was caught, he inflated the number of victims to something crazy like 400, then led police on steeple chases looking for remains of victims he knew didn't exist.  That way he got to ride around, look at the country side, and chow down on fast food instead of sitting in his cell.  Fournier wasn't capable of being that crafty and I doubt he had a murderous mind.  However, that could change if the locals decide to treat him like a piece of garbage. 
::)