The Face of Grace

Last November, a teenage boy played a “prank” that went horribly awry. From a speeding vehicle, he threw a frozen 20lb turkey at a car, and it crashed through the window, bent the steering wheel and broke or fractured every bone in a woman’s face.

Yesterday, in a small courthouse in Riverhead, NY tough, hardened lawyers, reporters and others witnessed the face of grace, and it moved many of them to tears.

Accompanied by several friends and relatives, Ms. Ruvolo, a 44-year-old office manager, came to court wearing a black pantsuit and a gold cross on a chain for her first face-to-face meeting with Mr. Cushing.

Stopping to speak to her on his way out of the courtroom, Mr. Cushing choked on an apology and began to cry. For an intensely emotional few minutes, Ms. Ruvolo alternately embraced him tightly, stroked his face and patted his back as he sobbed uncontrollably.

Many of the two dozen people in court – prosecutors, court officers and reporters – choked back tears.

“I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,” Mr. Cushing said over and over again. “I didn’t mean it.” Most of their exchange was whispered, but at one point Ms. Ruvolo’s advice to him was just barely audible.

“It’s O.K., it’s O.K.,” she said. “I just want you to make your life the best it can be.”

A source who heard the local radio report of this story as it broke said that the female reporter covering it could not contain her own tears as she relayed the story. “Cushing,” she observed, “entered that courtroom defeated and small, with his head hanging, and he walked out with his head high, because this woman handed him back his dignity.”

Mr. Cushing and his lawyer, William Keahon, stopped to talk to reporters on their way out of the courthouse. “I love the woman,” Mr. Cushing said. “She’s a wonderful woman.”

Forgiveness is so powerful.

I pray Mr. Cushing takes this chance to learn how to become a “wonderful” man.