The reality is it ranges all over. One time when I was stationed in Germany one of the men under my command was involved in a bar fight with another soldier and beat him so badly if you looked at pictures of the guy you’d be 100% sure he was dead. He ended up being fine and was actually out of the hospital a few days later (the assailant faced charges, obv.)
Then locally there was a High School senior who was sitting on the closed tailgate of a pickup truck, the truck wasn’t moving but somehow the tailgate itself popped open and the kid fell back and hit the back of his head on the pavement. At first the kid was able to get up and everything but then collapsed again and was hospitalized, he ended up dying in the hospital from that single head wound. (And kids falling out of parked/slow moving pickups and dying is actually something I’ve read about 5-6 times in the news.)
If you remember that guy who went to the top of the University of Texas administrative tower and killed some 16 people or whatever, the first person he killed was a woman who was working as a receptionist on the top floor. When he came up to her he didn’t shoot her, he actually took a rifle and drove the butt of it into her face, once. She died from that single wound.
Is that the one that happened in Athens, GA, just wondering?
In regards to the OP I don’t know about anybody else but if somebody killed my son, I wouldn’t have any self-control in that situation, I would totally lose it and I would kill them, probably even if it was an accident.
He apparently can be out in 9 if he fulfills the conditions set by the judge (anger management classes and finishes his college degree while in prison), which seems more reasonable. The judge also hints pretty heavily that the sentence was in part for leaving his kids alone with their mentally ill mother why he did drugs with his friends.
So with those two factors, I don’t think its too unreasonable.
I wasn’t necessarily classifying this particular crime as archetypal vigilantism, per se; I was just curious to hear what the OP thought of vigilantism, at which point I hoped to draw an analogy.
Also, re: BigT: “vigilanteism” is an acceptable variant, I am told. Though I admit, I was unaware that “vigilantism” was the more popular spelling.
He was obviously unhinged at the time he did it, who wouldn’t be? And I would expect the judge to take that into consideration (as seems to be the case). I think the sentencing seems right to me.
Remember, this was his mentally ill wife. She committed a terrible act but who’s to say that she was any less unhinged than he was when she murdered?
Of course we’ll never know now and she’ll never get a chance to experience proper justice.
The other thing to consider is that the wife was mentally ill and therefore, I assume, wasn’t in full control of her faculties when she killed one child and tried to kill the other. The state isn’t allowed to do the death penalty on the mentally ill anymore, so it shouldn’t be ok for a civilian to kill the person either. I understand it was in the heat of the moment and the victims were his kids, but no one should be cheering him on, especially since he left his deranged wife alone with his kids to go get high. The woman deserved some compassion and a whole lot of help, not to be murdered.
It looks like his sister-in-law has managed to implant some false memories in his daughter or the daughter read what her aunt wrote, since the daughter’s court statement says that :
Shouldn’t the sister-in-law be charged with inciting perjury?
Of course, it puts a different spin on things when you realize he left his children with a woman he knew was insane, so he could go do some cocaine and then came home and beat a woman who was already unconscious woman to death.
I have a few opinions about this. First… I am myself mentally ill. I’ve been hospitalized before (bipolar disorder, suicide attempt). That said, my ex-husband and my current husband leave me alone with my son all the time. Granted he’s 16 now so it’s not like he couldn’t fight back or anything, but the point is that just because someone is mentally ill does not automatically mean that it’s totally out of the bounds of believability that a rational person would leave said mentally ill person alone with their own child(ren).
That said, I don’t know the details of her mental illness, so I don’t know if this kind of behavior could have been predicted or not. I know that I have never shown any indication that I’d ever hurt my son, and if I had, things would probably have been different as he grew up.
As for killing the mother when he found her there with the dead kid and the other kid passed out… I can understand the rage, especially if he was on drugs. I’ve never done crack but I’ve known people who did it and they turned into absolute assholes when they were on that shit. Same thing with cocaine. People I liked and cared about turned into people I didn’t want anything to do with. So I think the drugs likely played a large factor in his actions when he came home.
The instinct to protect one’s offspring is not to be underestimated. I’ve gone into mama-bear mode a few times myself (never in a physical way, and no, I don’t remember the situations in any kind of detail–they were long, long ago; I just remember how I felt like I would do anything I needed to to protect my son. It was a STRONG feeling. It overpowered things like self-control and rational thought.) I can imagine hitting, even with the intent to kill, someone who had killed… or hell even seriously injured my child. At that point all you see is red and all you can think about is protecting your kid. Not sure how that works if the kid is already dead–obviously, thank god, I don’t have any experience with that particular situation. But I can imagine not being able to control oneself, especially if on drugs, from physically attacking someone who had done something like that to one’s child(ren).
I’m not sure what I think an appropriate sentence would be. I think the one he got is too long. I think he obviously needs some kind of punishment–we can’t, as a society, let people do this kind of thing. It would be anarchy. I am also unsure how much good the anger management classes would be since anyone would be in a rage in the same situation. It had nothing to do with normal anger management.
I think it’s likely he’ll get out in the 9 years. I hope he does the college courses and gets his degree, and doesn’t go back on drugs when he gets out. It’s sad that he won’t be around to raise his daughter. The whole thing is just fucked up and sad. It’s hard to point fingers here.
Yeah, I bet the daughter’s taped testimony did him more good than harm - but don’t blame the sister-in-law herself, she might be the sane one in the family, and other relatives might have coached the kid. Absolutely horrible thing to do to a kid.
As for the mother - it is not unheard of for a parent under great stress, who believes their lives have completely fallen apart, to decide to … hmm, take their children with them when they commit suicide. The woman was mentally ill and married to an evidentially violent man who did illegal drugs, possibly beyond recreationally. With hostile in-laws. And a family of her own that are nothing to brag about. So, she’s a wreck, no support anywhere, her sweet husband goes out to blow the rent and food money on drugs - again …
[Edited to say I’m not saying I support her actions, just that I’ve heard the like before]
And this guy, trapped between a crazy wife and a sniping mother, with her family chiming in to blame everything on him - was he unemployed? - and he goes out one night to hang with the guys, and comes home to his family dead.
Just a sad story from every side.
Except - they didn’t say “killed her with a blow - or several blows - to the head with a flashlight”, they said “Beat her to death”.
And his lawyer agreed to the deal, even after the change in the daughter’s story, which really was bad for the prosecution.
The article in the OP says that she was hospitalized several times, and that she was “paranoid, obsessed with death and convinced her husband and mother-in-law were plotting to take her children away.”
Of course, there are a lot of different psychiatric diagnoses that are associated with paranoia, and we don’t know what she was diagnosed with. I know that hindsight is 20/20, but it seems like maybe her paranoia might have been a sign leading up to what she did - maybe she thought that killing her children would prevent her husband/MIL from taking them away from her.
Ah, I missed that. I stand corrected. [I’d only read the first article]
But for your second point:
I don’t really approve of judging people who don’t behave in extremis as I assume I would … but, well, this time, I think I have point. How could a parent not cut down a child? In fact, how could a parent assume incorrectly a child was dead? Don’t parents hold on to hope beyond what is reasonable?
I hope that that’s just a detail that I haven’t seen, that he did do something for her.
She strangled her four year old son and seven year old daughter (unsuccessfully) to death.
He killed the woman who’d just strangled his four year old son and seven year old daughter to death.
It seems self-evident to me that the “crazy threshold” would be higher for the former than the latter.
Eh, the asst. attorney general actually prosecuting the case seems convinced. I don’t really see any value in trying to second guess the people who’ve presumably put many hours into the case on the basis of a news story.