"Authorities in Northern California on Saturday announced the arrest of a 12-year-old boy in the stabbing death of his younger sister, whose killing last month sparked a manhunt for a supposed intruder who the boy had said committed the crime.
…
Leila and her brother were home together on the night of April 27 at the family home in Valley Springs, a rural town of 7,500 residents southeast of Sacramento. Their parents had gone to a Little League game.
The boy told investigators he had heard an intruder, then saw a man running away from the home. The boy said he then found his severely injured sister. He called his parents, then 911, officials said."
alphaboi867, runner pat – and everyone else – there was no gun involved, so take any discussion of the issues around gun control elsewhere. They are off-topic in this thread.
I saw an article that mentioned two witnesses claimed they saw someone running from the house. WTF? Why do people just make stuff up about things that are this important? Are they trying to get attention for themselves or something?
It is crystal clear that alpha was just expressing sadness that the murder wasn’t an accident. What agony it must be for the mind to constantly tick with agendas and politics and subtexts at work.
Perhaps they just saw the brother running off somewhere, noticing nothing in particular, then after the fact conflated that with an intruder. But many people do seem willing to do anything for attention.
Compare to the neighbors in the Cleveland kidnapping case who said they saw the women naked in the yard. They aren’t necessarily lying, but even at best, the memory works in funny ways, and people can genuinely remember things that never happened.
There’s plenty of evidence that eyewitness testimony is *fantastically *unreliable. Yet our justice system continues to rely on it. I guess it’s the best we can do, though, short of installing CCTV everywhere.
It’s not.