It was a cold February night in Minnesota, 1978, when sixteen-year-old Eric Wicklund and two friends decided it was time to run away from home.They got together late in the afternoon to make a plan, only knowing for certain that they had to get away from their parents. After driving around, they reasoned that they needed money, and the best course of action to get some greenbacks was to rob a business. To do that, a gun might be necessary, so they drove back to Wicklund’s house to steal his father’s handgun.Then they drove off together.
The trio soon lost their nerve. Several hours later and three towns away, they settled on stealing a car instead. Well past midnight, the kid in the backseat was elected to steal a car they found in a lot, and, taking the gun with him, the young man opened the stranger’s car door and shot the sleeping man dead. Scared out of their wits now, the three criminals changed their plans to run away altogether and went home to forget about the whole incident.
For all of three months. When the getaway driver started bragging about the dirty deed at school, students started talking.Wicklund suddenly went from sitting in the principal’s office on a spring day to sitting in handcuffs inside a jail cell at the county lockup. “It was like a giant weight had been taken off my shoulders,” said Wicklund years later. “It was starting to affect me in my day-to-day life, it had to come out.”
