Aaron Spencer executed a man on the highway and the courts freed him. A thirteen-year-old girl was violated, and the men who wore the badges and carried the gavels failed her. They released her abuser on a fifty-thousand-dollar bond while he faced forty criminal counts. Spencer drove out at one in the morning to find his child. He found Michael Fosler in a truck. He forced the truck off the road. He stepped out of his vehicle and he pulled the trigger. Now the prosecuting authorities have misplaced a memory card, the murder charge is dismissed, and Spencer, the Republican nominee, killed the man and then ran for sheriff. The killing isn’t disputed.
You are a combat veteran, Aaron. I understand why Lonoke County sees a hero. I’ve known combat veterans who carry that same volcanic rage — the kind that ignites when someone they love is harmed. The impulse to take matters into your own hands is ancient. It is also what the law exists to contain. A society that deputizes that impulse instead of restraining it becomes a society that has abandoned the rule of law for the rule of the gun. And when the man who pulled the trigger becomes the man who wears the badge, the message is not order; it is that the badge is merely a weapon worn on the chest.
The state left your child to the wolves. The Hebrew prophets name the failure of the watchman who leaves the flock. The state’s failure is a structural sin we must name before we name yours. We who demand punitive sentencing for everyone else while starving the public defenders who keep the system from collapsing are the ones who broke the levees. We built the vacuum that your grief rushed to fill.
But the sword was not yours to wield. The red letters of the gospel are plain on this point. You do not take vengeance into your own hands. You leave room for the rule of law. When a father seizes the executioner’s role on the shoulder of the interstate, he shatters the covenant that prevents the street from drowning in blood. Thurman warned us of the hounds of hell — fear, hypocrisy, and hatred. Hatred wears the mask of justice when it hunts a man down in the dirt.
Pope Francis writes in Fratelli Tutti that when a man turns his neighbor into an obstacle to be removed, he abandons the covenant of fraternity. He also revised the Catechism of the Catholic Church, amending paragraph 2267 to declare the death penalty “inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” The revision was not a technicality. It was a declaration that even the state cannot be trusted to take a life justly. If the state ought not kill, then a private citizen armed with a handgun and a father’s grief certainly ought not. The same tradition holds that the right to defend life is real, but it is hedged by necessity and proportion: there must be no other way, and the force used must stop the threat, not annihilate the threatener. Spencer chased Fosler down. He had a phone. He had a radio. He chose the gun.
The prophet Micah tells us to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly. Justice without kindness becomes a club; kindness without justice becomes a permission slip for the powerful. The father who kills the abuser has done neither. He has done vengeance, which feels like justice but is not, and he has called it love, which it might partly be, but it is a love that has left a body on the highway and a sheriff’s badge on the horizon.
Aaron Spencer, you killed a man. You didn’t call the police. You chased him, forced him off the road, and shot him. The man you killed was a predator who had done unspeakable harm to your daughter, and the law had already failed to keep him away from her. I truly hear that. But now you seek an office whose first duty is to arrest people like you — people who decide that a wrong justifies a killing. You ran against the sheriff who oversaw your arrest. Winning the general election in a heavily Republican county would put you in charge of a department staffed by officers who, if they were to apply your own precedent, would be entitled to use lethal force the moment they feel a righteous fury. You cannot be the sheriff while you are still trying to justify the shooting. The badge is not a verdict on your righteousness; it is a covenant that nobody, not even a grieving father, is above the law.
Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker, wrote after Hiroshima that “we have killed 318,000 Japanese” — a sentence that never let her readers forget that the bombing was our act, not an abstraction. She refused the comfort of the passive voice. I try to do the same, and the missing dash‑cam card in Spencer’s case is the same kind of evasion: a memory card that could have shown what happened, conveniently gone. Spencer killed Fosler. I am not willing to call it heroism, even when my own heart understands every impulse that led him there. The door of return is open. It always is. But it begins with a single admission: I killed, and killing was not my right. Unless he can say that — and mean it — he should not be sheriff. Lonoke County needs a keeper of the peace, not a victor of the feud.
I do not pretend that the rule of law feels like enough when the courts release a predator on a $50,000 bond and a child is taken from her bed. It isn’t enough. It is a broken and partial instrument, run by people who lose memory cards and fail victims. But it is the only instrument we have that doesn’t ask every injured father to become his own judge, jury, and executioner. I want a world where we stop pretending that vengeance is a synonym for justice and start demanding that the system be repaired rather than abandoned. That begins by refusing to hand the badge to a man who has already decided that the law is optional when the crime is personal. The chapter is not closed. Lay yours down, Aaron. Walk away from the race. Hold your daughter, mend your household, and let the law do the work it failed to do for you. The body is still on the highway.