Abbie said “Rational Abbie on,” but I don’t think the program started up.
Yeah. And long after he was obviously not a threat anymore, they kept beating the shit out of him. Then they left, came back, discussed killing him and what they would do with the body, raped him with a tree branch, and got caught by the cops. They went over the top a lot sooner than you’re saying they did.
Here’s my idea: I guess they’re still heroes if Russo doesn’t die, so when they get out of jail, throw a parade for them. You can be the grand marshall. But, uh, don’t let them get anywhere near the baton.
Russo is not well liked in the neighborhood. Perhaps he has been accused of breaking into his neighbors apartments and stealing. Maybe the folks at this apartment have weed in the house. Perhaps they have had weed stolen from them before.
During the night, Phipps walks out to his car and sees Russo (who may be peeping, or may be preparing to break in and steal). He and his buddies decide to teach this ass a lesson he’ll never forget. They beat him badly, and rape him with freakin’ tree branch. Russo may well die. Oh shit!!! They’ve gone too far!
Then they remember the cameras. They try to disable one of them. Doesn’t work out quite as well as they had hoped. Go to plan B. Accuse Russo of something heinous! Yeah! He wasn’t breaking in…he was…looking at the 5 year old! Yeah! And masturbating! He was a pedophile! yeah! Russo may die, so he may not be able to say any different!
Given the facts we have, is my theory any less plausible than the one offered by the rapists?
Uh, you do realize the flaw in that reasoning don’t you? “Most rapists were voyeurs” is not equivalent to “Most voyeurs will become rapists”. The same logical flaw is used with regard to pornography. It’s often noted that rapists are found to have pornography, and wrongly concluded that pornography leads to rape. They’re confusing a causal connection with a synchronous connection.
Here’s an example of the fallacy:
“All lawyers went to college, therefore all people who go to college will become lawyers.”
How far do you want to go down the “if person X does action Y, therefore in the future he might commit crime Z” route? One of the assailants was a 15 year old child. She was the girlfriend of one of the adults, age 19. I suggest that adult has already crossed the boundary of what is acceptable with children, and may progress further down that route. It would not, however, be acceptable to beat him to a pulp for an hour and shove a branch up his ass, based on my or anybody else’s expectation of how far he might travel down that route. This story is abhorrent.
Looking even worse for the barbarians, the Smoking Gun has a page from the police report. Not only does it seem that the sodomy may have accured up to an hour after the initial beating but at least one of the principles in the beating lied to the police about his name. These people were acting far too guilty to claim that even they believed they had done the right thing.
Thanks for the update, Erroneous. I had been meaning to keep tabs on this story. Another quote from Russo’s girlfriend:
So it looks at the moment like we’ve got some poor bastard with mental health problems resulting from previous head trauma, and he has a seizure and goes for a wander, and gets beaten senseless by a bunch of fucking lunatics.
Hope they put the lot of them away for a very long time.
