XPost: talk.politics.guns, sac.politics   
   From: jrt@asu.edu   
      
   Time seemed to slow for Thomas Yoxall. He soaked in the details: the four   
   flares set up roadside, the patrol car’s lights in the pre-dawn darkness.   
   The trooper on the ground being pummeled by a man.   
      
   Yoxall pulled his car over and exited. He held his handgun in a three-   
   quarter draw, ready to fire. He walked step-over-step, trying to keep   
   himself as narrow a potential target as possible.   
      
   Yoxall yelled at the man to back away from the trooper. The man did not.   
   Instead, he raised his fists high in the air.   
      
   Yoxall saw his opportunity.   
      
   He fired three times. He watched through the gun sights as the second and   
   third shots hit their mark. There was no doubt, Yoxall said.   
      
   Yoxall,44, saved the patrolman’s life that January morning on Interstate   
   10. He also lived out an argument-ending episode about why upstanding   
   individuals should be armed.   
      
   Yoxall believes that. He also believes there should be restrictions on   
   ownership.   
      
   Part of that comes from his own knowledge that guns are not always used   
   for celebrated purposes.   
      
   He has been on the wrong end of a gun at least four times, during   
   confrontations in his youthful hellion days. Those were four times when he   
   also could have fired at a person and had that homicide potentially ruled   
   a justified use of force.   
      
   When the story of what he had done was initially reported, no one knew   
   anything about Yoxall. Not his name. Not that he was heavily tattooed,   
   that he was a journeyman plumber who dabbled in portrait photography. Not   
   that he was a former felon. The public only knew what he did on the side   
   of the freeway.   
      
   And for that, Yoxall was given a title: “Good Samaritan.”   
      
   In the biblical story, a man is beaten and left lying on the side of the   
   road. Two people pass by the man. But a man from Samaria, a region that   
   feuded with the Jewish people to whom Jesus told the parable, stopped to   
   help. The Samaritan tended to the man's wounds and took him to a nearby   
   inn.   
      
   No one died in that tale.   
      
   What is similar in the stories is that people who could have stopped to   
   help kept moving.   
      
   “I loathe society,” Yoxall said. He figured there must have been dozens of   
   cars that drove by the scene. He said he was later told no one called 911.   
   “I can’t fathom that," he said.   
      
   Yoxall said he had no choice but to stop. Throughout his life, he had   
   always seen himself in the role of a protector. This incident validated   
   that notion.   
      
   "You always hope that at that moment, that critical moment, you can be   
   able to perform based on what your convictions are," he said. "You never   
   know until that moment of truth."   
      
   A rocky start   
   In 1999, Yoxall was not a Good Samaritan. He was a youth counselor working   
   at a group home in Glendale called Pathways. According to court records,   
   he didn’t get along with many of the kids and thought they were stealing   
   from him. He devised a plan to even the score.   
      
   One evening, he drove the group of residents to a movie. He returned to   
   the home and, with an accomplice, stole stuff: a Playstation gaming   
   console. A CD player. A camera and other items easily fenced, which is   
   what Yoxall did.   
      
   When the juveniles came back and saw their belongings gone, Yoxall called   
   police to report the theft. Months later, someone implicated him in the   
   crime, telling police they were afraid Yoxall would shoot him if he found   
   out.   
      
   When questioned, Yoxall confessed. He said he did it for the money, court   
   papers say. He also said he was sorry.   
      
   Before he was sentenced, he told his life story to an officer charged with   
   determining what his punishment should be.   
      
   Yoxall said he had a childhood marked by physical and verbal abuse,   
   records say. He has a knot on his forehead, the result he said, of being   
   thrown against a piece of furniture.   
      
   He started drinking at 12, the court records say. He started smoking   
   marijuana at 11. He added LSD and mushrooms by 14.   
      
   He was diagnosed as bipolar and spent time in a mental facility in his   
   junior year while battling depression. Part of his tailspin was the loss   
   of three close friends that year, two to accidents and one to suicide.   
      
   For Yoxall, his three months in the “loony bin,” as he described it,   
   marked the first time he felt calm. He was free from what he felt was the   
   chaos at home.   
      
   Yoxall moved out of his house at 17, lying on a lease application to get   
   his own apartment.   
      
   He told the details of his childhood to the probation officer who filled   
   it out in the requisite forms. The officer wrote that Yoxall felt "ashamed   
   and humiliated" and that the thought of the crime made Yoxall feel "sick   
   all the way down to the pit of his stomach."   
      
   The report recommended a sentence of probation. The judge granted it in   
   January 2001.   
      
   As a condition, Yoxall was not allowed to own a firearm.   
      
   Yoxall got his first tattoo at age 17. Something small, stupid and easily   
   hidden under clothes, he said. As the years passed, the ink creations   
   became larger, more elaborate and more meaningful.   
      
   At 24, Yoxall had etched into his right arm the character Winnie the Pooh   
   as depicted in the Disney cartoons, but wearing a blindfold, cigarette in   
   his mouth, and crucified. Blood from the nail hole in his paw was dripping   
   into a jar marked “Hunny."   
      
   To Yoxall, it was a memorial to the loss of innocence. He had just lost a   
   friend to a car wreck. And he thought about friends he lost as a teenager,   
   to suicide and in other car wrecks.   
      
   It is a tattoo that might startle people, but on Yoxall's arm it blends in   
   with so many others. Yoxall's collection of tattoos are along his arms,   
   chest and back. He had letters tattooed on the knuckles of his hands that   
   read, “Forsaken.” He had smaller letters placed vertically on the middle   
   sections of his fingers. When interlaced, the letters spelled “Assassin.”   
      
   Yoxall also stretched holes in his ear lobes with gauges. He started with   
   a tunnel three-eighths of an inch in diameter, among the largest available   
   at the time, he said. He also had small barbells placed through the skin   
   in his back, near the nape of his neck. He said he was among the first in   
   the city to get the body modification jewelry.   
      
   Yoxall took the gauges out of his ears three years ago. But the holes were   
   so wide, his ear lobe will never grow back together. There will always be   
   a slit in his ear.   
      
   Yoxall doesn’t mind. Even though he is not that person anymore, he can’t   
   deny he was at one time. And he is all right showing it.   
      
   He feels the same about his tattoos. He touches up old ones and adds new   
   ones to some of the remaining bare skin on his body. Most recently, he had   
   one added to the top of his foot.   
      
   For Yoxall, his tattoos reveal his level of commitment and conviction. He   
   took one step of commitment when he extended his tattoos below his sleeve.   
   Then, he added the one on his neck.   
      
      
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