Watching the news reports of the guy walking into a New Bedford, Massachusetts gay bar and wounding three people with a hatchet and a handgun hit close to home for me. The interior shots of the bar looked similar to my usual hangout. Strangers wander in from time to time that don’t seem to fit in. Some don’t seem to know it’s a gay bar. Some do and seem uneasy - maybe it’s their first time in any gay bar. I could easily visualize such an incident happening here. The first victims were playing pool. Since I’m often found at the pool table, the whole thing just resonated with me.
I read today that the suspect died after a shootout in Arkansas. Too bad. I’d like to see the guy stand trial and serve a long prison term.
But here’s the thing that moved me to share my thoughts here. It seems on the way to Arkansas, Robida stopped in my little town to pick up his internet girlfriend. Yikes! Now I’m really visualizing the guy coming into my favorite watering-hole. Definitely too close to home.
Also, it seems my little state, West Virginia, has more than its share of connections to stories like this. It’s probably just a form of confirmation bias. Does anyone else feel this way about where they’re from?
Meh…In prison, he’d just wind up being celebrated by a bunch of neo-nazi fucktards and living as decent a life as one can in prison.
I’ve vehemently anti-death penalty, just because I feel no man has a right to decide who lives and who dies. Putting a cap in a sub-human piece of crap like this while he’s in the commission of a crime, though? Awww, too bad…sorry to see you go.
Incidentally, his myspace account is still up and running (for the time being, anyway).
Jesus. What a freak show. I can’t even make sense of his nazi rantings. What the fuck happened to this kid to make him so full of hate at such a young age?
I wonder how soon before people start blaming Insane Clown Posse for influencing him to kill. No doubt his lawyer would have, if the punk had survived.
Just every once in a while it would be refreshing if these people would skip directly to getting themselves killed and skip the intermediate steps of rampaging amongst the innocent citizenry.
The important thing to ask is: who taught this kid that it’s wrong to be gay, and that gay people’s lives are expendable? And who taught him that it’s appropriate to kill people who are different from you? And who taught him that even his own life didn’t matter? It’s time for people to be held accountable for, not only their actions, but the irrational hatred they spew.
Yesterday, some talking head on CNN said that, even though his prognosis was pretty grim, the cop-killing in Arkansas made it pretty unlikely that an extradition would ever take place. If he survived, he’d almost certainly have been executed for that before standing trial for hatchet attacks.
His myspace profile is seriously messed up. One the one side, it paints a picture of a typical racist thug – on the other hand, his whole approach to building his page seemed cribbed from a twelve-year-old girl. “Your murder weapon is… hatchet” parses exactly like “Your My Little Pony is… Cherry Treats.” WTF?
The words of support from his loser peers are depressing, too. It’s clear that the kid was totally antisocial, hateful, racist, homophobic, and obsessed with violent and murderous fantasies. “Y U do it? We’r shocked! U were such a gr8t guy! LOVE U!”
Like how? Charge his parents or friends with assisting murder, because they influenced him? Or Insane Clown Posse, for rapping about killing people (although not gays, afaik) with hatchets?
I read the story in the Washington Post newspaper. What got me is that while he was engaged in the gun battle, he shot and killed his female companion. Why would he do something like that?
My first thought was that she was killed by the police and the report was in error or a cover up. The latter wouldn’t work, of course and it’s been long enough that the error would be corrected.
Perhaps she was asking him to surrender and he was just pissed off.
Some men who commit suicide kill their familes to save them the disgrace, or think that they can’t live without them.
It’s still not clear how she came to be in the car with him. They had a prior relationship, but as of his last login (Feb. 1) he was self-described as single and looking.
This woman had three kids at home. I don’t think she was in the car with him willingly.
You think it was too close to home? New Bedfud is just down the rud for me.
I think maybe part of the reason why he was such a major hater is b/c he felt like he didn’t belong anywhere. Socilogical research indicates that folks are into hate groups b/c they feel like they don’t belong…and the hate group philosphy attracts them b/c they feel like they belong to that group.
It’s weird…he describes himself as white, but “pure white” folks around here, are VERY VERY rare. I grew up in this area, and most of the kids I grew up with were Portugese and some other weird combonation, that you’d never find outside of this area.
I was 16 when Matt Shepard was killed and had just come out to my extended family that weekend. At the time, my boyfriend lived in the US and was the same size as Matt.
These little details… just the way your brain finds of reminding you that you are part of a tiny minority of people that they meant to kill, and that had you been there, it would have been you.
Thanks, Hal Briston, for that link. What a mess - site, author, and friends. I was hoping for some kind of insight there. Was it simply hatred of gays that fueled his attack? Was he struggling with his own orientation? Or was he just mentally ill. I wonder if we’ll ever know they guy’s motivation. It’s interesting, and a little disturbing, that AndersonGold Films is already looking into this (acording to one of the myspace comments).
I didn’t know that the woman, Jennifer Bailey, was a mother of three until I read this morning’s paper*. It doesn’t list the children’s ages. She was 33. The paper also says Robida lived near here with her for a short time up until a year ago.
*Subscription needed for past articles, current articles are free.
