Alyce Van Etten laughs in spite of herself, because her son, Jack Tobin, is in a big jam about 5,000 miles away from home.
Russian prisons are nothing to laugh about.
She's remembering what he was like before he was clapped into a Russian prison, facing a sentence of three years and a month of hard labor. He was an early reader, a daredevil skateboarder. Jack and his big brother, Eli, had the idea that if they could drain the family pool, it would make a fine skateboard park. One time, Jack and Eli trussed up their little sister like a Christmas turkey and attached her to the swing set in their yard. That was a long time ago.