Of innocence lost and lives turned tragic.

Byline: Bob Welch / The Register-Guard

When he shuffled into the courtroom Wednesday, hands and ankles shackled and with a Lane County sheriff's deputy at his side, I hardly recognized him. But, then, 16 years is a long time.

I was the coach of the fourth- and fifth-grade boys basketball team at Springfield's Camp Creek Elementary, enrollment 65. Jarrod Swisher, along with my son Ryan, was one of seven players on a team that couldn't afford many guys fouling out.

We were the Beavers. We were terrible. But we had fun being terrible, my favorite memory being an evening practice during which it began snowing and after which we segued into a spirited snowball fight.

The deputy sat Jarrod in the juror's box. Last week, the jury sitting there had found him guilty on all nine counts stemming from a botched robbery attempt in Veneta on Dec. 6 involving two accomplices. Now it was time for sentencing.

Jarrod's mother, Karen, and sister, Nanette, looked at him from 20 feet away - as if wanting desperately to say something to him but knowing they could not. He looked straight ahead. Occasionally, he sniffed.

On the night before the sentencing, I'd found the 1989-90 team photo: seven players and me mugging for the camera. One player is giving me rabbit ears. Jarrod is pulling on his ears and sticking out his lips, looking a little like Mr. Potato Head.

His powder blue uniform has a number "9." Now, in the courtroom, his deep green uniform reads "Lane Co. Jail."

How does a 10-year-old kid go from such innocence to a home-invasion robbery in which he's toting a shotgun? In which 12 shots are fired - all missing? In which the team's mask-and-camo style is eerily similar to the stuff of an online game called Counter-Strike, promoted as "the most addictive in war/combat video games?"

"He played it 24/7," Nanette says.

Was it because this man-boy had forgotten what was real and what was not? Or could you trace it to the night Jarrod's father left him alone when he was 6, drove away and put a bullet through his head?

Jarrod struggled with anger. He got into minor-league trouble: smoking cigarettes, bashing mailboxes. But until the robbery attempt, he had no criminal record.

Did he do the crime because he so desperately wanted to belong after losing a father to suicide, a stepfather to Lou Gehrig's disease and a godfather to an accident?

He quit high school at Thurston in 1998, the day after Kip Kinkel killed two students and wounded 25 others with gunfire. He had known one of the victims.

He learned the locksmith trade. Coached his girlfriend's brother's baseball team. Was planning on being married this summer.

Then, last December, I read the news. And thought of the kid whose father had killed himself. Mr. Potato Head. The 26-year-old man now standing before a judge and reading a handwritten note.

"To all who suffered," he began, "I take full responsibility. I deeply apologize for my wrongful actions."

His voice quivered. "If I could go back to any one day and change it, Dec. 6 would be it. I don't expect anyone to forgive me, but this is all I have to offer. I'm deeply sorry."

When Jarrod finished speaking, Judge Lauren Holland sentenced him to 192 months in prison. Sixteen years. The same amount of time since I'd last seen him.

As coaches, teachers and mentors, it's as if we work on assembly lines, charged with putting one tiny piece in lives that briefly glide by. We hope our contribution somehow makes them better. But we have no control over the larger pieces that have come before. Or those that will come after.

So as the deputy escorts away one of those lives, we, too, leave. And, once outside, find ourselves thinking of snowball fights, the laughter of little boys and the losses that will always haunt us.

INSIDE

Sentenced: A prosecutor calls it `a contemporary American tragedy' / D3