Snapshots

By Ed Orzechowski

The man beside me peered through hazy glass into the shuttered building. “There used to be bars on these windows…like a prison,” he said, pointing to rusty brackets along the window frame.

F Building, where Donald Vitkus had grown up half a century ago, was padlocked, the structure decaying. Donald and I were walking the grounds of Belchertown State School, a former institution for the mentally handicapped in western Massachusetts, where at six years old, he had been d...