This isn't exactly the way we'd like to start your Tuesday but here it goes: 73-year-old Carl Ericsson is serving a life sentence for shooting his high school bully who put a jockstrap on his head in the 1950s. The story of Ericsson and Norman Johnson, his bully, reads like a typical high school trope (and you could draw parallels to Mitt Romney's bullying conversation, about why something that happened 50-plus years ago matters today): Ericsson was the student sports manager (this is the fancy term for water boys right?), and Johnson was the high school track star (big man on campus), the AP reports, though no one really knows what happened 50 some-odd years ago in the locker room other than that a jockstrap was involved. Whatever happened, that humiliation festered until this past January when Ericsson showed up to his classmate's house, asked for his name and then shot him dead. According to Minneapolis's City Pages, a psychiatrist had evaluated Ericsson and described him as mentally ill during the time of the murder.

Playing up that "you can never escape high school angle" the AP mentions that Johnson's funeral was well-attended and included some barbs from Johnson's daughter during Friday's court hearing. "It was just goofing off in a locker room," Johnson's daughter Beth Ribstein said in court, which gave Ericsson the life sentence on Friday. "I can't blame you for being jealous of dad."

Want to add to this story? Let us know in comments or send an email to the author at aabadsantos at theatlantic dot com. You can share ideas for stories on the Open Wire.
Alexander Abad-Santos