OK, kid, melt our hearts why don’t you?

Try as we might, it is impossible to remain angry at 18-year-old Billie Coburn who on Thursday walked to the Sun Journal to deliver an unusual message.

Coburn was one of three young men recently arrested for knocking over more than 100 headstones at Riverside Cemetery in Lewiston.

Apparently unprompted and without the advice of an lawyer, he simply decided to take responsibility for his actions, publicly confess his crimes and seek forgiveness from all those affected.

“Dear Sun Journal, city of Lewiston, volunteers, Kevin Ouellete, Det. Lee Jones:” he wrote. (Ouellete is caretaker at the cemetery.)

“I wanted to take the time I still have to apologize for the destruction of the Riverside Cemetery. I want to apologize to the ones I have shocked, disturbed and hurt in this community. My actions were disrespectful, uncalled for, and not me.”

There was more, but you get the idea.

“I’m ready for the consequences of my actions and I hope many will forgive me for what I’ve done.”

Coburn said he was influenced that night by peer pressure, alcohol and really bad judgment, a particularly dangerous combination for teenagers.

Coburn’s confession comes atop mounting research showing that adolescents may have the bodies of adults but they often still have the emotional control of children.

They simply lack the brain connections required for adult decision-making and impulse control.

That’s not to say every kid is going to become a vandal or criminal. And it certainly doesn’t excuse criminal behavior.

But it does explain the age-old question exasperated parents have asked of shamed-faced teenagers since the beginning of time: “WHAT were you THINKING?”

The answer, of course, is that they were not thinking, at least not thinking in the way adults do.

Combine alcohol with peer pressure, the excitement of the moment and the lack of impulse control, and bad things — sometimes fatal things — happen.

There’s a lesson on Thursday’s front page for all young people (not to mention more than a few adults) in how lives can so easily diverge.

On one side of the page was the picture of Daryl Scott Roberts, who police say has confessed to snatching a wallet from an elderly woman.

It was another incident which outraged the community. Roberts allegedly approached an 80-year-old stroke victim in her apartment building, grabbed the wallet from her walker and ran.

He later traded her food-stamp card for a $50 piece of crack cocaine.

Roberts is 27 and has a lengthy history of convictions for theft, assault and burglary.

Coburn is only 18 and he is in the same position many other young people find themselves at some point in their young lives: a fork in the road.

Choose one path and you wake up a decade later with a criminal history, a drug problem and in a jail cell for robbing a senior citizen.

Or, you can stand up, take responsibility for your actions, apologize, ask to be forgiven and change your life.

We applaud Billie Coburn for choosing the right path. He should stick with it.

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