Ba dum
- The Aristocrats! *
Wah wah wah wahhhhh
This is Florida - and the extreme northern part at that. Pure redneck territory.
FL and TX have a competition for “most fucked-up legal system”.
I’m guessing trial as adult for the 15 yr old on first degree murder. It’s a toss-up on the 11 year old.
The Aristocrats!
Too soon?
I’m going to hell, aren’t I? 
Whoops, more like too late, I guess.
Wow. Poor kids. Every time I think my life sucked/sucks, I should just remember these kids. 
One report quotes the parents as saying that they locked her in her room for up to 20 consecutive days. What a fucked up family.
I grew up in a home with severe abuse. Both of my parents came from really screwed up families, and their parents did as well.
The poor girl should be pretty much anywhere but a jail right now. What a sad story.
To be fair, part of that is the sunshine laws in Florida that make it a lot easier to find and publish “weird crimes”.
Well, but hey, apparently he had to be shot dead in order for his sister to have a chance to not be returned home, and now he’s dead we may as well assume he deserved it and concentrate on the live girl who is still in a position to suffer. Or else I’m not understanding things.
It certainly looks from context as though he thought that beating your sister and imprisoning her when she’s “bad” is the way the world works. The wrong parties have ended up dead here, I’m thinking.
Kinda surprised she didn’t shoot the parents.
If someone like Francince Hughes of the “Burning Bed” case can be found “not guilty,” surely this girl could too?
If so, I’m going with you: I laughed.
Once her little sister let her out of her room, she got a knife, went outside, and used the knife to pry a window A/C unit out of the window to the parents’ bedroom, according to the news story I read. And having done that, she got in through the window.
Since all she had in her room was a blanket and a bucket, it’s not like she could have broken out of her own room the same way she broke into her parents’ room, if that’s what you’re asking.
Quite possibly both a victim of abuse, and an abuser of his younger siblings.
Does anyone know if these girls went to school, or if the family had any contact with other people?
I did see on another website that the 16-year-old had been expelled from school for ongoing behavior problems. I didn’t think you could do that any more, but maybe he was old enough that he didn’t HAVE to be in school.
I have to wonder if law enforcement, by releasing the details, are setting the girls up for a sympathetic jury. It would be difficult to find someone in the pool who hadn’t heard of the case, and if they’ve already read about the abuse, would tend to see this more as self defense.
It seems that the adults in all of the children’s lives have failed them.
Lack of opportunity, perhaps.
The 16 year old boy was still in school. The shooter, Ariel, was “withdrawn from school as of January 1st” according to this article. http://www.gainesville.com/article/20150107/articles/150109742?p=2&tc=pg
Unless he was “the favored one”, which could be regarded as a different kind of abuse.
I’m glad this is someone else’s decision, not mine. Those kids’ lives are so fucked up, I think the only thing to do is get them into a safe place, and provide lots of therapy, and hope it helps. This isn’t a legal problem, but an ethical one. And a tough one at that.
That’s what happened in our family. My older brother was also a victim of abuse and in turn abused us.
I could see how it could happen.
This really is a sad story.
Is there any precedent for charging an 11-year-old an adult? Besides, what was her part in the crime other than letting her sister out of a locked room?
In my experience once you’re a older teen even if still under the custody of your parents police and other authorities treat the situation like they just want to get away from the messed up family, go away basically.
A cop advised me to leave at age 16, when I pointed out my parents could call him and he would forcibly return me he laughed and said well yea. Touh shit kid yea thats life!