Not knowing anyone involved, it’s easy to be just another reader wandering in, and it strikes me that yes, he is a kid, and yes he could have done better, but still he did a pretty darn good job of ‘fessing up. He clearly said he’s sorry, and to whom, and other than the passive voice thing (admittedly a biggie), I didn’t intuit any insincerity here.

Sounds to me like everyone behaved pretty well here: it was right to fire him, right to feel for him, and he was of course right to apologize.

For his first step in learning from it, there have been some fine things written on the passive voice faux apology of which he is being accused, and about which he would greatly benefit from reading.

The most famous example is Ronald Reagan’s famous “Mistakes were made” line from Iran/Contra, but he wasn’t alone. It is a classic form of evading responsibility.

William Schneider called it a new grammatical tense, the “past exonerative.”

If young Daniel reads that piece, and gets it, he will have benefited enormously from the experience.