Random Access

Katy Hutchison walked into a jail cell in 2002 with a big box of facial tissues and a broken heart to finally meet the young man who had kicked her husband to death five years earlier.
"The first thing I thought was, 'He looks just like the boy next door,'" Hutchison told a rapt audience of students at Erindale Secondary School Friday. "He starts to sob. It was all I could do not to go over and give him a big hug."
That might seem like an unusual reaction from someone who had waited so long to confront the person who shattered her family life with four short kicks to her husband's head. Hutchison did indeed want to confront Ryan Aldridge, not to berate him, but to make him face the horrible consequences of his actions.
On New Year's Eve 1997, her husband Bob Mcintosh went down the road to a neighbour's place in Squamish B.C. to check on an out-of-control party at the house of a friend who was away on vacation. He never returned.
An angry young man named Ryan McMillan sucker-punched Mcintosh as he entered the crowded master bedroom of the house. He was knocked cold. Aldridge then delivered the fatal blows.
The presentation Hutchison has given to some 100,000 students across Canada is ostensibly about the problems associated with teens partying their brains out without any parental supervision.
But, more significantly, it's about forgiveness and personal responsibility.
Hutchison's story works because it's real. When the distraught mother tells her children what has happened to their father the next morning, her young son looks at her sadly and asks, "Can we have some Cheerios now?"
She realized then that, "I couldn't make our lives be about Bob's death."
Instead, she made their lives about trying to prevent more tragedies like Bob's.
Hutchison has come to know Ryan Aldridge very well. At the time of Bob's death he was a 19-year-old full of anger after years of being bullied as a child about his lisp, full of anger and guilt about his parent's divorce and full of alcohol that fueled the fury that caused him to kill a man he didn't even know, just because he tried to do the right thing.
"These kids suffered from a serious case of entitlement," Hutchison told the Erindale kids, many of whom have been to parties just like the fatal one she described. "We have to take a step back and look at what we have. We have all these resources, freedoms and access and with all we have, we have a nasty sense of entitlement to have more."
Some kids at the Squamish party felt they had a right to take over someone's home when they were away, party wildly and ultimately wreck the place and kill someone who got in the way of their pleasure.
On Hutchison's advice, Aldridge pleaded guilty to manslaughter and now helps her make the presentation to teens when she's in Vancouver, where he now lives in a half-way houses as he completes a five-year sentence.
A slide she shows near the end of Bob's Story shows Hutchison and Aldridge with their arms entwined, looking happy, very much like the mother and son that some Erindale students guessed they were.
No, they are widow and murderer.
One life was already wasted over a momentary act of utterly irresponsible stupidity. Hutchison wanted to make sure that another one wasn't.
"Anger is a tight, small, dead-end emotion that gets you nowhere," she told Erindale students. "Forgiveness will set you free."