One count of Petit Larceny, 5 counts of Grand Larceny, 7 counts of Obtaining Money through False Pretenses. That’s the bottom line, the thing that the State Of Virginia finally had to see to put my brother in jail. Where he belongs. In truth, the list is so much longer.

So today, my brother appeared in District Court for sentencing. He received 17 years. Fourteen of them were suspended, and I’m not really sure how that works, but the end result is he got three years in the pen. Add to that 5 years he already scored for a probation revocation, and he’ll be out in 2020. If he serves it all, that is.

He stood alone for his sentencing. I did not go. No one from the family did. Maybe he would have gotten more if I had made some kind of victim statement, certainly he would have if my parents did. I didn’t want to be in their shoes. I wouldn’t want to imagine standing before a judge and send your own son up the river for what could have been 20 years? I wasn’t asked to, and I’m not sure they would have taken my statement had I shown up and volunteered it.

It’s kind of bittersweet, and the bitter part is that I feel badly for my parents. Sean is their son as well. I can’t imagine what they’re going through, though my father talks a big line. He’s really a big ol’ softy, and I think that in some space where he’s by himself, this is just killing him. He’ll never admit it, of course. Men like Dad don’t do that.

The bottom line as far as they are concerned, is that Sean has been confined to a prison for what could be the rest of their lives. With their health issues, it’s increasingly likely that they may not see him again. I’ll be 50 in 2020. My mother 78, my father 74.

So for now, it’s over. That only took 25 years.

There are many things I get angry about when it comes to what happened to Sean, from my point of view. They’ve shaped my worldview about a great many things. The late 1970s emergence of the “latchkey kids” (which we were; I was taking care of Sean by myself as early as the age of 10 for hours at a time.) The all too easy diagnosis of ADD or ADHD in children back in the early 1980s (Sean was diagnosed with in kindergarten), the nonchalant prescribing of Ritalin at the time he was diagnosed (In the early to mid 1980′s, I would swear to you they were handing out Pez dispensers full of this demon pill), the evil of “social promotion” in our school systems which gave Sean the idea that hard work didn’t actually matter, and the endless trips in and out of court, and city jails over the last 18 years of his life, where Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Portsmouth, and Gloucester threatened him with serious jail time if he didn’t turn around. Seeing the error of his ways, he’d always say, I’m a reformed man. Once home and dry, and safe, no restitution was ever paid. No reform ever made. No error ever seen. Sean was simply Sean. Broken. Malicious. To him, perfectly normal. *We* were the evil ones, bent on making his life hell.

In the end, all these things were contributing factors, or perhaps band aids that hid the underlying problem: Something in my brother’s brain was (is) fundamentally broken, and not one person ever got to the root cause. Partly because of all the temporary “fixes” for wrong things, and partly because to my brother, everything was perfectly normal. So long as he could charm people into doing things for him, he could do anything he wanted. Never mind pesky little things like right and wrong, and the collateral destruction of other peoples’ lives in the process.

The only problem with this is that you need an endless supply of friends…or suckers. Sean eventually ran out of both. Additionally, he ran out of people who would listen to his boilerplate sob story designed to garner sympathy.

It’s a strange kind of closure for me. For years, I’ve railed about wanting, NEEDING to see him get his ‘comeuppance’. But then, something weird happened: I realized something about sociopaths that I hadn’t ever considered before. Not consciously, anyway.

The big revelation is simply that attention is control. A sociopath craves attention in order to work his dark magic. To show up in that courtroom yesterday gives Sean exactly what he needs to maintain some modicum of control over the lives of people he has destroyed. Be it a brother, an ex-wife, a former friend, or a parent. I have no doubt that any one of us would have been made a target in any remarks he wished to make before sentencing, and those remarks have been long thought out and designed to inflame. They also may be designed to gain a continuance or lessen the amount of his sentence if at all possible. No, it was best that he finally face this moment alone, with all control over any other person taken from him. He needed to see no familiar faces, and only then would he know that his future–and his fate–was starting at that moment.

To willingly hand over that attention to someone like Sean is the worst possible thing to do. Not only if you want to see him pay for what he’s done, of course, but also if you care enough to finally see him get the help he so desperately needs, in a situation he cannot–at long last–talk himself easily out of. When he was 10 or 11 (frankly, this one is a bit hazy), he was involuntarily committed to Kidscope, an inpatient facility in what was then Tidewater Psychiatric Institute. By all rights, he could have received some help at that time. He managed to tell the folks there exactly what they needed to hear in order to get out. He told his psychiatrist what HE needed to hear…and that doctor knew it. Instead of pressing him further…he just said that he didn’t think he could help, and offered mom a prescription for dealing better with Sean.

Call me crazy, but I never thought that was the way it was supposed to happen. He was supposed to get help. Instead, he got a vacation from school, a person to tell stories to, and Mom got Prozac.

I can’t lie to you, I’ve resented this longer than I care to think about. Because despite my own faults, I’ve tried to do the right things. I’ve worked hard. I’ve played by the rules. I’ve done all the things you are supposed to do to live a normal, healthy, and happy life. When I was growing up, I struggled with the obstacles life places in front of you every day. That’s the way it is supposed to be. Sean never did. He was never made to, or he just found someone to do it for him.

It occurs to me that we have a lot of support groups for living with people who have addiction. I don’t know if there are groups for people who have had their lives profoundly affected by a sociopath, but I’m beginning to think there might be a need for it. Almost the whole of my teen and adult years have been living with a certain amount of anger, and a kind of fear that my family would be targeted by someone so unencumbered by knowing the difference between right and wrong that he would have no problem attempting to destroy my life or my family because he somehow got it in his head that we were to blame for everything wrong with him. I’ve never really had anyone to talk to about this, and I can’t help but think that the quality of my life would be much better if there were a place for folks like me to share their own issues in dealing with a family member who is so clearly ill, and so utterly malevolent because of his sickness.

Bitter? Yes. There is no “winning” here, only losing. I lost a brother years ago to this sickness. The world is losing–and let’s be honest–a brilliant mind, even if it is twisted. That’s the worst part for me. That same mind that could con people so well, could have done so much that was good.

The chances are pretty good that you know someone like Sean. Don’t be blind to it, and please see them for what they are. If you’re related to them, please find a way to get them the help they need.

No family deserves the hole this has created in mine.