Skip to main content

Jesse Osmun, Peace Corps South Africa volunteer, charged with sexually abusing children

Dear god:
BRIDGEPORT -- Federal agents arrested a 31-year-old former Peace Corps volunteer on charges he sexually abused at least five young girls while working in a South African preschool.

Agents from the Peace Corps' Office of Inspector General and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Jesse Osmun, 32, of Glen Street, Milford, on charges that he traveled from the U.S. to engage in sexual conduct with a minor. The charge carries a maximum 30-year prison term and $250,000 fine. U.S. Magistrate Judge Holly B. Fitzsimmons Thursday ordered him detained without bond.

A criminal complaint signed by Special Agent Joyce Shores, of the Peace Corps' Office of Inspector General, alleged that Osmun "provided a written confession" that "he engaged in sexual contact with three underage girls for approximately one year."
Reading The Looming Tower, I thought by the end that I could place Osama bin Laden in the human family.  He was an evil mass murderer, but Wright refused to take the easy way out and label him insane or inhuman.  To grapple with the fact of bin Laden, of Hitler, is to grapple with the depth of human depravity, of what we as a species are capable.  Bin Laden was evil, yes, and deserved his fate, but he was not crazy.  Mass murder is not that uncommon in history.

This is still fresh, but I cannot do that now.  This man commented on my site, back before he came here.  Like nearly all Peace Corps volunteers, he wrote a blog.  He had a completely normal, even clichéd, title: The Road Less Traveled.  He wrote normal posts about normal Peace Corps things.  I never met him, but he was notorious for self-righteousness; he even commented to that effect on the infamous post that got one of my best friends kicked out of the Peace CorpsHis blog is on my blogroll right now.  Yet while doing much the same thing as I have been doing for two years he was allegedly raping little girls.  Five years old.  It is too close.  All I can summon, as a defense mechanism perhaps, is a stunned, disbelieving horror.  The only thing that comes to mind is this, from Blood Meridian:
Aye. It's a mystery. A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it. You believe that?

I dont know.

Believe that.
The horrible part is, of course, that raping young children, even babies, is also not that uncommon.

NB: Mr. Osmun, though he has apparently confessed, has not yet been convicted of anything. If this turns out to be a mistake—and I will be paying attention—then I will be first to call for his reputation to be rehabilitated.

Comments

  1. I haven't gotten over the feeling of wanting to vomit since I heard about this.

    ReplyDelete
  2. i wrote to twitter and linked in to get his profiles shut down. disgusting.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Well, again, he hasn't been convicted yet. In any case it seems sorta beside the point, linkedin and twitter will be little help to him in prison. I see where you're coming from though.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I knew this guy. He served with me in AmeriCorps. He even went to my birthday party! I can't believe he would do this! It's disgusting! I always thought his social skills were a little off.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actually b

The Basic Instinct of Socialism

This year I finally decided to stop beating around the bush and start calling myself a democratic socialist. I think the reason for the long hesitation is the very long record of horrifying atrocities carried out by self-described socialist countries. Of course, there is no social system that doesn't have a long, bloody rap sheet, capitalism very much included . But I've never described myself as a capitalist either, and the whole point of socialism is that it's supposed to be better than that. So of course I cannot be a tankie — Stalin and Mao were evil, terrible butchers, some of the worst people who ever lived. There are two basic lessons to be learned from the failures of Soviet and Chinese Communism, I think. One is that Marxism-Leninism is not a just or workable system. One cannot simply skip over capitalist development, and any socialist project must be democratic and preserve basic liberal freedoms. The second, perhaps more profound lesson, is that there is no s

Varanus albigularis albigularis

That is the Latin name for the white-throated monitor lizard , a large reptile native to southern Africa that can grow up to two meters long (see pictures of one at the Oakland Zoo here ). In Setswana, it's called a "gopane." I saw one of these in my village yesterday on the way back from my run. Some kids from school found it in the riverbed and tortured it to death, stabbing out its eyes, cutting off its tail, and gutting it which finally killed it. It seemed to be a female as there were a bunch of round white things I can only imagine were eggs amongst the guts. I only arrived after it was already dead, but they described what had happened with much hilarity and re-enactment. When I asked why they killed it, they said it was because it would eat their chickens and eggs, which is probably true, and because it sucks blood from people, which is completely ridiculous. It might bite a person, but not unless threatened. It seems roughly the same as killing wolves that