What. The. Fuck.
I remember something like this happening in Britain some years ago, too. What in the fuck is wrong with some of these fucking kids?
He is so screwed for the rest of his life, the little bastard.
Apologies - I incorrectly called it a “rape” on the title. The link calls it a “sexual assault.”
FWIW
That’s only about 7 miles from me, too. I heard it on the local news after it happened and was totally shocked.
Was the 10 year old fucked up mentally, or abused by his parents? That is the only possible explanation I can think of. Normal 10 year old kids don’t do this.
It’s sad that hardly a day goes by without reading some news story that just takes your breath away with it’s senselessness and depravity.
That’s horrible! It boggles my mind to think about a 10 year old serving 20 years for killing a THREE year old!
Wasn’t the child’s name of Arabic origin too?
(It could be India,Egypt,or any number of “Arab” countries…)
Is the possibility that it’s a hate crime being investigated? This is an idea that occured to me when I read the story. There is a lot of hatred in this country for “Arabs”. Maybe he’s been exposed to a lot of hateful ideas about what should be done to them,and he thought he’d found an “Arab” to kill? I don’t know what ethnicity the child’s name is,but I can see how an ignorant person could lump it into the catagory of “Arab” especially if the little boy had dark hair,and brown eyes. This is a very sad thing…
ya gotta love humanity…
Sadly, I was not shocked when I read this. I wish that I were though.
I heard it on the radio this morning on the way to work, but, strangely enough, NOTHING about this heinous crime was reported in our paper??
Mind you, I live no where near N.J., but I don’t exactly live in a hick town either!
Truly sad.
This is so disturbing…
In other news, random speculation runs rampant.
Possibly, but Amir Beeks (the 3 year old’s name) does sound Arabic.
Amir is indeed an Arabic name.
However, Beeks is, I believe, Dutch or Afrikaans.
Yeah, me neither. It’s horrible, of course, and these things don’t happen every day. But I gave some “history of crime” books, and 100, 200 years ago, kids of ten and under were being jailed in dungeons or hanged for equally hideous murders. It’s nothing new, and at least nowadays we don’t actually lynch the ten-year-olds.
Where was the toddler’s mother or other guardian? How could this baby be lured out of the library unless his mother or whoever wasn’t keeping an eye on him?
Do you spend alot of time blaming the victim or is this a new thing.
For one thing, the victim was the baby, and I’m certainly not blaming him. The blame rests solely on the murderer.
However, my question was legitimate.
When I was three, my mother used to take me to the public library for story hour. She would drop me off and leave me with the lady who read the stories (as did the other mothers or fathers). After the stories were done we were left to wander the childrens section of the library for a few minutes to check out a few books for our parents to read to us. Even though my mother would be waiting right at the door, there are moments were it would have been easy to abduct me.
No matter how great of a parent you are, there are many moments every day where you may even just momentarily loose sight of your child, the parents or guardians can’t be blamed for this.
As I said before, unfortunately this didn’t shock me (as tragic as it was). I am going to ammend that. The fact that it happened in a library shocked me a bit. I’ve always kind of thought as libraries as a safe house and the fact that something like this could happen there is a bit distressing to me.
Or that he was an out-of-control brat who had never been disciplined and had oblivious parents.
Well, in the similar case alluded to by bernse, the killing of two-year-old Jamie Bulger by two ten year-old boys, there was no abuse at all in the families of the killers (and if there had been, you can be sure we’d know about it). There was nothing to flag them as potential killers or give them anything like an insanity plea.
This is how.
You are in a library with a young child. You are there to choose a book. You are thus using your eyes to look at the books and read the blurbs and first few pages, which requires some mental focussing — you can’t look over at your child more than every minute or so. Standing very close to a bookcase, your field of peripheral vision is limited. So watching your child is not possible on a second-by-second basis.
Aural supervision is difficult, too. You could keep up a constant chatter with your child, but then you wouldn’t be able to read the books. You could listen out for suspicious silence indicating that your child is no longer in the vicinity, but even a child of three will often sit quietly with a book for short periods of times, so silence is no clue.
You could, of course, keep hold of your child’s hand — as long as you didn’t want to actually pick up any books. It takes two hands to page through a book, leaving none to hold the child. Given this, you could physically restrain your child, either in a buggy/stroller or with reins. Such restraints are rarely a good choice, for numerous valid reasons (that I won’t go into because that would create a trivial hijack), which is why you see so few parents use them on their children.
Now consider the structure of libraries: row upon row of tall bookcases with fairly narrow passages in between. Consider the height of a three-year-old: significantly less than even half-size bookcases. A young child goes round the corner — which takes perhaps one second, two? — and they are lost from sight.
Then, even if you look up and see that your child has wandered off, you might not investigate it straight away. You might call out immediately (which a three-year-old is quite likely to ignore), but you might wait a whole extra minute or two to actually run around hunting for your child. This is a library, after all, a safe place, or so you would think.
Thus, even with the most careful supervision, a young child can very easily become separated from its parent/guardian for a couple of minutes, which is more than adequate time for an abduction.
I’m going into so much detail because when Jamie Bulger was abducted, an awful lot of people said the same thing about his mother as you are about this child’s parent or guardian.
Apart from the ‘safe place’ factor, everything I said applies to his abduction too. Jamie was stolen from a shopping centre while his mother was the till (cash desk?), and CCTV records that he was out of her sight for less than a minute. She contacted security guards within a few minutes (after searching by herself). It is undeniable that Jamie’s mother was not negligent — yet many people still blamed her, as if she needed extra trauma at that time.
Amir Beeks’ case might be different — his mother might have been negligent. I don’t know, and neither do you. Even if it turns out that she wasn’t vigilant enough, that doesn’t excuse your immediate assumption of guilt. I repeat, even with the most careful supervision, a young child can very easily become separated from its parent/guardian for a couple of minutes.
That is important to make clear from the start, because the speculation about the mother’s watchfulness clouded the issue in the Bulger case. It deflected discussion away from the core of the case — that a young child killed an even younger child. Perhaps that was too hard to cope with for many people, therefore they focused on the more everyday concept of parental irresponsibility. In any case, such speculation was unhelpful and even harmful in trying to understand that murder, and it would be in this case, too.
Doh, sorry, I deleted the ascription in an edit and forgot to reinsert it. The second quote (about the mother) was from DarkWriter. Apologies for any confusion.