My (adult) neighbor across the street when I was 4 paid a couple of thugs to whack his wife. I was friends with [del]their[/del] her kid, my best friend, so I much later wrote a poem about it. Didn’t capture my feelings about the mess, but it tended toward cathartic.
(big hugs toward my old buddy, Ruffian.)
I’m a pretty lighthearted guy.
I’ll be the first person to laugh at someone accidentally farting in front of bunch of people, Slipping on ice, or generally making a fool of themselves.
But that was inappropriate. Maybe I got a little worked up. Sorry.
No, I feel you, actually, because humor is funny (ha).
My husband and I have a saying. “African Aids Babies”.
We use it to remind eachother that whatever issue we are dealing with, it is small potatoes to the plight of poor babies dealing with AIDS in Africa. It has turned into a kind of joke for us, but we take the situation very seriously, actually. It is the sole charity that we are consistent about.
I only say that to say that one shouldn’t judge another by their humor. I think Silver Fire thought a pit thread might be the only place that a comment like that might be appropriate.
That said, enough of me trying to speak for Silver. I think it is really twisted what the ‘santa’ did. No one can defend that level of wickedness by pointing to any hard knocks the man may have had to endure.
Speaking of perspective…
The whole mess, is a crime of passion. Nobody else was in danger. You could have helped this guy change a tire 10 minutes before it and he would have been polite and charming to you.
The fucker did it himself. Blaming the circumstances is just ridiculous. We all have circumstances and we are still in charge of our life and actions.
The OP, ROed as he may be, is in is right to be as OTT as he cares to be. This is what message boards are for. He can scream trauma all he wants, it is not like he is suing the guy for emotional damages or anything.
Making fun of ugly shit is also what boards are for. Santa shoots kid, must be on the naughty list. Ho ho, move along. Next year, some other dude in a Santa costume will do something else (as it happens every year) and we will all gather round here to say how horrible this is and make jokes about it. Big deal. Remember the girls sleeping on the train tracks?
In short, guy does ugly shit, people react, life goes on. Get used to it.
No excuse. 13 months ago I got a (STILL ONGOING) bitter divorce, the bitch got a bullshit restraining order on me which caused me to lose my job of 5 years (because I was arrested for the crime of being in the house packing too long and she called the cops). I wasn’t eligible for unemployment because my asshole boss declared that three days of no call no show meant I willingly resigned. When my mom posted bail I was homeless, jobless, and family-less with only the clothes on my back. I didn’t even have a car to sleep in.
Nope, still haven’t gotten around to making the flamethrower yet. The guy was a prick and a psycho.
Where’d he get $17,000, then?
I’m surprised, in this day and age, that a guy would be ordered to pay alimony under these circumstances. (Man and woman both employed; very short marriage; marriage didn’t produce any children)
Seems to me the guy never should have married her in the first place.
Obviously none of this excuses going on a shooting spree. He should have just cashed out, moved to South America or wherever, and skipped the whole shooting thing.
No. Circumstances are not responsible for the act. He was. He planned it out and destroyed many lives.
I know the Constitution forbids “cruel and unusual punishment”, but this guy is a classic case of someone who should be hoisted by a strappado and placed over a low fire for many hours.
The thing is , though, almost anybody from the neightborhood could have been in that house because it was a holiday party. So yes, the whole neighborhood was in a sense endangered. Since AFAIK most of the bodies aren’t yet identified, it may turn out several more neighbors are dead. Would it be ok to be more traumatized then?
it doesn’t sound like he was ordered to pay alimony. His wife asked for short-term support, to ease the transition to being on her own again, which is pretty common when marriages of short duration end. However, at the final settlement last week, both parties waived any claim for spousal support, according to this LA Times article:
hugs EvilTOJ
This is an extremely disturbing event and my heart goes out to Ruffian and everyone in his community who was touched by this tragedy. There is nothing wrong, melodramatic, overreactive, etc. about feeling tied to your community. Would that we were all so connected to the people around us.
I completely agree with the point above. There is no fucking excuse, no circumstance so grim, that it would justify murder. Nobody was ever promised a goddamn rose garden. If you choose to deal with temporary setbacks in a violent way, the consequences are your responsibility alone. While I feel for anyone who is suffering, including the man who committed these heinous acts, he has to be held accountable for his actions (well, he’s dead, so I mean theoretically accountable.) There is no excuse for what he did. There is no fate so horrible as to justify this action. Viktor Frankl lost his entire family in the holocaust and he became a distinguished trauma psychologist. Nelson Mandela spent 30 years in prison and became the first leader of his free country. For every high-profile success story there’s a million others who live quiet lives and never consider, even for a second, that dressing up as Santa and shooting an 8 year old girl in the face is an acceptable way to cope. Fuck that guy.
This is one of the most callous posts I can remember seeing.
You are not a nice person.
I had a neighbor a couple of houses down that killed his parents with a butcher knife. I knew all of them pretty well, we’d been neighbors for years, same church, etc.
It was a horrible tragedy, but the media circus added insult to injury. Watching neighbors get dressed up to be on TV. Watching them whore their children out so the kids would have a moment in the spotlight. The helicopters, the police, the crime scene, the reporters and never ending gawkers.
Listening to the media report things, just to be first, irrespective of accuracy. Never any correction of facts, either. Real eye opener on the media, that was.
Having the government come in, and offer counseling service. First and only time I have ever seen my husband get pissed enough at a stranger to kick them off of our property. You know what? We’re neighbors. We’ve suffered a minor inconvenience, we don’t need fucking counseling. Reserve the empathy and sympathy for the actual victims and their family.
I understand a little of the OP’s rant.
What I rage at in circumstances like these is that there must be something in our culture and our society that creates so many incidents of rampage killing, and yet no serious nationwide conversation about it will ever get anywhere because the media, and the common wisdom, and our instincts, force us to stay focused on each individual incident.
It may be that we have to STOP BEING SHOCKED when these things happen in order to look at them and learn from them.
Not being shocked must seem almost sociopathic, I guess. Well, mark me down as a sociopath, then, and a cynic too. I am no longer shocked by rampaging. Disgusted and saddened. But nowhere near shocked.
Right. Because a mass murderer who kills at least nine people, shoots an eight-year old girl in the face, sets fire to a house in a suburban neighbourhood, and booby-traps his car with a bomb to injure whoever finds it, is really just needing a big ol’hug. It’s all society’s fault.
There aren’t enough :rolleyes: for your stupid post.
For interest’s sake, third-degree burns don’t actually hurt at all, because the nerves are all destroyed, along with everything else.
Wow. Your “bitch” wife and “asshole” boss sound like they really have some problems.
Good luck with that.
This isn’t really accurate. While it’s true that in the direct area of a third-degree burn the pain receptors are largely destroyed and the initial injury may be relatively painless, there is often considerable pain during the healing process, and areas surrounding the third-degree area will have lesser damage and pain receptors may be highly active in these regions.
I agree, but this incident will undoubtedly raise questions as to the fairness of many of our nation’s divorce courts. I’ve heard many stories of judges who automatically believe the woman is the victim and the man is the Bad Guy.
I’m not saying this is what occurred in *this *particular case - we don’t have enough information. None-the-less, I suspect people will start taking a closer look at this issue. 'Bout time they did.
Sapo, this really surprised me, coming from you. You’re usually a lot more thoughtful than that…
This was NOT a crime of passion. This was premeditated murder-- the guy had an escape plan mapped out. And how do you know that the guy was completely “normal” 10 minutes before the crime?
As for those who say no one else was in danger, the guy burned the house down-- it could easily have spread through the neighborhood if conditions had been right. The couple who owned the house were reportedly very sociable with their other neighbors, and any one of them could have been in that house that night. Or, the guy could have killed anyone else who happened to rush over to help.