God's Merciful Irony
God's Merciful Irony
Becky Beane
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Only God could choose a killer to lead others into new life, and turn prison from a place of punishment into a place of promise.
Young Danny Croce was always “attracted to trouble,” he reminisces—gangs, gambling, booze, cocaine: high-risk activities to jolt him out of the numbing pointlessness of life. Before succumbing to that “inevitable grey tombstone,” he craved some thrills.
But in his mid-twenties he played a perilous game: After downing a six-pack of beer for lunch, he would return to his job of “hanging iron, ” laying steel girders atop some of Boston’s tallest skyscrapers.
Danny managed to avoid calamity on the job. But in February 1984, a cold rainstorm forced the crew to quit early—so they launched into a bar-hopping spree to warm themselves up. Later, “drunk out of my tree,” Danny was heading home when he rammed his car through a wooden barricade and struck a police officer directing traffic. A few days later, the officer died. Danny was charged with vehicular homicide.
A sobered Danny couldn’t escape the python of guilt coiled around his heart. “I’d replay the accident in my mind,” he explains. “I tried hard to change the ending, but I couldn’t.”
He wanted to go to the officer’s family to tell them he was sorry, that he didn’t mean to rip away their father and husband. But Danny’s lawyer immediately nixed that plan, afraid he might say something that would jeopardize his case.
