It was one of those sultry late July nights that have been known to plague the Valley.

It was barely six weeks after I graduated high school.

Mom had gone down to the Lincoln Laundromat with a couple of loads of clothes given it was on the fritz.

About 11p.m. there was the sound of someone knocking on the screen door.

It was Lincoln Police Sgt. Bob Barroso.

The sergeant had a request.

My mom was out in the patrol car

She had been attacked earlier.

Would I mind taking some pictures as the department’s camera couldn’t take close-up photos as good as the one I used to work for the News Messenger, Lincoln’s weekly newspaper.

As I was saying yes, another officer was bringing Mom up the walk. Her face was black, blue, and bloody.

The close-up photos they wanted included inside her mouth. It was a bloody mess.

But what stunned me the most none of them seemed to be in place.

Mom was barely intelligible.

She managed to make two things clear.

She would be OK.

An officer had agreed to drive her to the hospital in Roseville.

And she absolutely didn’t want any of us — myself and my siblings — to go there. She made us promise to respect her wish and that she would call later.

Less than an hour earlier, Mom had been walking out the back of the laundromat into a parking lot off the alley shared with several other businesses including Lupita’s Mexican Restaurant.

As she reached her car, she was suddenly grabbed from behind and her head slammed into the hood.

They demanded that she give them the money.

Her purse was in the car, which she told them.

Using a few choice words as they shouted at her they wanted the restaurant receipts, one threatened to hit her with a baseball bat.

At one point, it was clear to one of the assailants after going through my mom’s purse — that my mom wasn’t Lupita.

That angered the other thug.

He then pulled my mom’s face up from the hood, swung her around and delivered two hard blows with the baseball bat to her face.

By this time, patrons at the nearby Lincoln Inn who heard the shouting were entering the parking lot. That prompted the assailants to flee, leaving behind a bloody baseball bat, a blood smeared car hood, and a brutalized 55 year-old woman on the ground.

Mom ended up losing all of her teeth and had a jaw that was broken and fractured in several places.

When one of my older brothers showed up at the hospital after she had been admitted, she refused to see him. She again made it clear no one was to come by until she was released.

Her stay in the hospital ended after four days.

Mom’s jaw was wired shut and she would end up having her teeth replaced.

She eventually told us her prohibition against us going to the hospital was because she wanted to spare us of the trauma of seeing her in that condition.

Mom has been against the police having me take photos, but she relented when they said the better the photos the more impact it would have in court. Apparently, the police had more faith in the system than it warranted.

A month or so later the two were arrested in Utah and turned over to the Lincoln Police.

The man — if that is what you want to call him — who slammed her head into the car hood and whacked her three times with the bat after finding out she wasn’t Lupita, got three years.

The other participant who tried to stop the attack with the bat got five years.

How did that happen, that the attacker had a record and it was the first offense for the other participant?

I’d like to say it was the fact the guy with the rap sheet didn’t have a public defender and his partner did.

But that wasn’t the case.

The guy that tried to stop the attack owned up to what he did.

The attacker wielding the bat had a lawyer that argued mitigating circumstances.

In other words, he had a bad childhood plus impoverished roots that led him to abusing drugs.

That was really rich.

My Mom was a child of the Depression and didn’t live in a house with running water or a flush toilet until she was 15. Her mother lost a working ranch after trying to make a go of it for almost a decade in the worst financial era in this nation’s history. Did I mention my grandmother was left with six children to raise after her boozing husband walked away?

Several years after he was released from prison, the man with a rough childhood who consisted of having an “abusive father who was a drunk,” was arrested again after leaving someone for dead in an armed robbery.

I have no idea what happened to the rough childhood guy.

But I know from that night in 1974 until she passed away 28 years later, Mom had almost daily migraines and was in pain when she ate. She didn’t complain. Nor did she sit around blaming her two attackers for her lot in life. Her only concession to that day was to hook the screen door was the front door was open to cool the house down.

What brought up this unpleasant memory, is an argument being made against Proposition 36. It’s wrong, the argument goes, to criminalize drug abuse.

Given what Proposition 36 actually targets, that’s a fairly bizarre statement to make. The language specifically goes after those who supply drugs that lead to death.

There is a different between criminalizing drug use and increasing the penalty for drug users, or suppliers, who commit a criminal act.

Proposition 36, at the end of the day, has nothing to do with anyone supposedly driven to a life of crime by a rotten childhood or is using drugs per se.

It has everything to do with making sure there are consequences for one’s actions.

Society can’t exist without rules.

And civilized behavior and freedom won’t exist in a society unless those rules are enforced in a measured manner.

Proposition 36 is not a cure-all, but it will help move the dial in the right direction.

—  This column is the opinion of editor, Dennis Wyatt, and does not necessarily represent the opinions of The Courier or 209 Multimedia. He may be reached at dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com