Friday, December 12, 2008

Treading on A-Walk

Can we talk about Adrian Walker for a second?

I know I'm going to catch some flack for ragging on the Globe columnist. "Hey, Derjue, he's got a job and you don't." True enough. But I feel like an awful lot of his columns lately have been mea culpas explaining how he's been hoodwinked by a scam artist.

As Adam Gaffin points out, Walker got a dishonorable mention in the FBI's complaint against former State Senator Dianne Wilkerson. He said he didn't suspect anything when Wilkerson called him up to rail against the licensing process she was manipulating. Today, Walker explains how he was fooled by Jake Severino, a young man who faked a brain tumor.

The funny thing is, Walker's September column about Severino notes that doctors didn't believe his claims.

"He made the rounds of emergency rooms and they thought he was a junkie looking for drugs," [Severino's mother-in-law Lisa] Donovan said.

Referring to his wife, Kelli, one EMT told him, "You might be fooling this little girl, but you're not fooling me.' "

So if there were suspicious about his diagnosis, wouldn't you, the columnist, ask to see some medical records? Or at least talk to the doctors he was seeing to get another tearjerker quote about his grim prognosis?

Maybe this kid was a great scammer and presented Walker with some convincing fake medical bills. But Walker should have taken this kid's tragic story with a grain of salt.

No comments: