Medicine Hat Media

Posts Tagged ‘Arrested’

As plastered on the front page of the Medicine Hat News, Gregory Fritzke has been arrested and charged with accessing and distributing child pornography. Okay… pretty sick, but to make matters worse, he was the vice-principle at Ross Glen School. Start the angry parents riot! Parents of children that go to Ross Glen are going crazy, and this is just from the comments posted on the Medicine Hat News website (most of the comments are now gone when the Medicine Hat News website was updated), who knows what the future of Ticked Off & Tickled Pink will look like.

Gregory Fritzke, 43 - Image from CTV

Greg Fritzke, 43 - Image from CTV Calgary

Quotes have appeared like “We as a society need to screen the people involved in our childrens lives on a daily basis more carefully” from one commenter. Comments like this remind me of the Grey Hound bus situation – one person gets killed, or one sick bastard is all it takes to warrant spending thousands if not millions of dollars for these “screening” procedures. Obviously in this case, I believe the commenter is referring to using ourselves as a “screen” to weed out child pornography collectors (somehow). This is a rare and  isolated event in this community – just like the Grey Hound bus slaying. There’s no magic “pedophile-meter”, just like there is no method to gauge if somebody is just going to wind up and kill somebody; obviously there are warning signs to these types of psychological issues, but they aren’t accurate, even so, the average person is not trained to spot these “warning signs”. In no way am I defending Gregory Fritzke or his actions, I’m just against the irrationality involved with people commenting and ranting over these isolated events (isolated in terms of the Medicine Hat community, not on a global scale).

Supposedly Gregory Fritzke did not have any images/photography of children at the school in his stash – but the fact of the matter is he was a vice-principle and he seen kids all day. Obviously this makes parents feel pretty sick even if he didn’t actually harm any children at the school. Psychologically speaking, Gregory Fritzke knew that what he was doing was wrong which is why he never acted out on his thoughts at school, instead he went home and downloaded child porn to satisfy his urge. Obviously I’m not a psychologist but I’ve read enough on the subject to know that most of these people aren’t pure evil, Satan incarnates; rather, they may have psychologically traumatized in their past or some past experience made him this way (maybe he was molested as a child). Obviously I’m being general and pretty speculative on the incident until actual details arrive. The bottom line is he downloaded and looked at child pornography which is wrong, granted, but he is NOT a child molester, child rapist, nor did he physically abuse children in any way as far as anybody knows currently (this may have changed though – see below). Guilty before proven innocent? I guess there is no gray area to most people…

*UPDATE – February 11th, 2009*

More charges have been laid against Fritzke which leads me to not retract my above statement but to clarify. I said that “nor did he physically abuse children in any way as far as anybody knows currently” which is still the case right now since he has NOT been found guilty.

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