Shame in Plover: Robbery with Samurai Sword

A Wisconsin couple has brought shame on themselves.

PLOVER, Wis. -- A couple were thwarted in their effort to leave this small central Wisconsin town when they were arrested for robbing a gas station with a samurai sword.

Renee Ferreri, 22, told police that she and Brian A. Schmid, 24, "were tired of their lives, and they just 'gave up,"' according to a criminal complaint.

The couple needed money to leave town, so they stole a 2000 Mercury Sable on Aug. 8 from the Jeepers Gin Mill and drove to their home to pick up the sword and two stocking caps, police said.

Then Ferreri drove Schmid to a gas station, where a clerk said he threatened her with a "Japanese-style sword" and forced her to give him several hundred dollars from the station's registers.

Police arrested the couple after a Plover officer remembered seeing several samurai swords in their apartment when he responded to a domestic disturbance call in May.

Ferreri and Schmid have a collection of samurai swords in their home, but they obviously don't know or didn't choose to follow the code of samurai warriors.

Seppuku (AKA hara-kiri) was a key part of bushido, the code of the samurai warriors; it was used by warriors to avoid falling into enemy hands, and to attenuate shame.

In his book The Samurai Way of Death, Samurai: The World of the Warrior (ch.4), Dr. Stephen Turnbull states:

Seppuku was commonly performed using a tantō. It could take place with preparation and ritual in the privacy of one's home, or speedily in a quiet corner of a battlefield while one’s comrades kept the enemy at bay.

In the world of the warrior, seppuku was a deed of bravery that was admirable in a samurai who knew he was defeated, disgraced, or mortally wounded. It meant that he could end his days with his transgressions wiped away and with his reputation not merely intact but actually enhanced. The cutting of the abdomen released the samurai’s spirit in the most dramatic fashion, but it was an extremely painful and unpleasant way to die, and sometimes the samurai who was performing the act asked a loyal comrade to cut off his head at the moment of agony.

When Ferreri and Schmid became tired of their lives and "gave up," they didn't do the admirable thing.

No acts of bravery for them.

They chose to rob a gas station, destroy their reputations, and fall into "enemy hands."

Ferreri and Schmid are samurai posers.

Instead of stealing a car and robbing a gas station, they could have done the honorable thing -- GET A JOB, SAVE THEIR MONEY, AND LEAVE.