We of course don't know that Cooper is indeed the killer of five Raleigh men slain in separate shootings, as the police allege -- Cooper, arrested after fleeing a Garner bank robbery, himself defiantly noted that the bullet-related evidence against him will have to stand up in court.

But the charges are out there, for us to reckon with as best we can. The premise we're asked to accept is that someone living among us could have been so cruel, so selfish, so utterly lacking in conscience.

As traced by this newspaper, the path that brought Cooper, 30, to the Wake County Jail awaiting trial on first-degree murder charges was long and dark. From petty crimes committed in his teens, he slid into drug trafficking and armed robbery. He was violent: During a prison escape, he beat an elderly man and stole his car. When brought to court, he attacked a sheriff's deputy and tried to wrest her gun away. It took several people to subdue him.

His record as a hardened and dangerous criminal notwithstanding, he was back on the street after serving only 12 years of a 20-year sentence. There was no support, no supervision. If the police are right, a robber and thug had become someone who would kill you for your money if you happened to be behind the counter at the convenience store; who would kill you just to keep you quiet if he thought you might identify him. Can we even comprehend the depths of anger, the corruption of character?

But then, thanks to The N&O's Thomasi McDonald and Jay Price, along came an account that allowed us to glimpse Cooper's humanity, as warped as it may have become.

In their article last Sunday, McDonald and Price delved into Cooper's upbringing and showed us the Sam Cooper who existed before he broke bad. No, this is not about to turn into a sociological sob story about how the poor guy was only a victim of circumstances. He made horrible choices that were indeed choices -- exercising that old free will that for better or worse is our human birthright.

Still, he regularly had been beaten by a father who himself was brutalized as a child. By his mid-teens, Cooper appears to have fallen off the cliff into a renegade existence, coming back from a year in a group home to be thrown out of the family residence on suspicion of drug dealing. Prison beckoned.

Making the saga even more sad is that helping hands had reached out to Cooper, but he either could not or would not let himself be rescued. The boy turns out to have been a track phenom, a star quarter-miler in a running club for disadvantaged youths. His coach and the group's founder, Bennie Mack, said Cooper could have been an Olympian.

The Capital City Track and Field Club had the larger mission of giving young people a boost toward success in life, with tutoring and guidance to help them go to college. Even after Cooper messed up, Mack tried to counsel him when the two crossed paths at Central Prison, where Mack worked. It must have been too late.

But just because Sam Cooper was too far gone to help, too embittered or soul-deadened, that doesn't mean the effort shouldn't be made to reach out to vulnerable kids.

When the police chiefs of Raleigh and Durham, both still quite new to their jobs, visited us here at the paper last week for a get-acquainted session, neither commented on the Cooper case specifically. But Raleigh's Harry Dolan and Durham's Jose Lopez were loud and clear on the same wave length when talking about the importance of a front-end approach to crime-fighting.

Dolan left no doubt that the police intend to bust hoodlums involved with "guns, gangs and drugs" -- the trio of criminal influences he is targeting. Yet he outlined a broader role for his officers that would have them also serving as mentors for young people growing up without adequate guidance or encouragement.

"All of us have to work together to save these kids," Dolan said, describing an effective police officer as a community problem-solver. Lopez was right with him, noting the "social services issues" that underlie so much crime. "We can't arrest our way out of the situation," he said.

When are we supposed to stop trying to help people who keep violating our trust and just throw them under the jail? Perhaps the Samuel Cooper story illustrates how tricky the answer is -- because most criminals, even when they're punished, will be turned loose.

Inevitably, some of them will heed their darkest instincts, and the rest of us will pay the price. But a society geared as much to rescuing as to punishing can keep their number down. We can salute the capture of a vicious murderer, but in so many ways any such capture comes too late.