The outrage thread to end all outrage threads

Not defending her at all, but there is a VERY slim chance it was a tragic accident.

Not the same at all, but I have poured gone-cold coffee from the pot into a cup, then placed the metal banded coffee pot into the microwave and started it up, only realizing the mistake when the plastic handle attached to the metal band began emitting noxious fumes. Obviously, I needed that cup of coffee.

That’s the only one I can think of involving a microwave oven, but I do absent minded stuff like that all the freakin’ time. It is not a major factor, but it is something I factored into my decision to not become a parent.

Sane or not, what’re the chances she’ll get off on a light sentence?

I dunno…an insanity plea is usually a life sentence. I’m guessing she’ll never see the light of day unless they can pin it on the sitter.

Really? I can’t give you a cite, since I can’t remember names in order to google. But I know I have seen several instances where people were judged innocent by reason of insanity and then got declared sane and released and then…went out and killed again. I’ll work on my memory, so as to get you cites. But trust me. I’ve seen them. If memory serves me right, some of them happened here in WA state where I live.

I have no problem with insane people being declared innocent by reason of insanity. But I DO have a problem with them ever being released again. And…it happens.

You have GOT to be kidding.

You don’t think that there are evil people in the world, who just do evil things because…they are EVIL? That no one EVER does something horrid like this unless they are insane?

I wish I had your childlike faith in human nature. I really do.

A person puts their baby in the microwave and kills her…and you think they are not responsible for their actions? Justice doesn’t enter into it?

I’m sorry, but…even if true? It might be an explanation for their aberration. It is NOT an excuse for taking the life of their child. Or anyone else. Do you think that justice means that if someone had a bad childhood it excuses them when they go out and kill someone?

If someone in a psychotic episode broke into your home and you came home and surprised them while they were looking for money or things to sell …or just because they liked the look of your house and they decided it should be, and was, THEIRS…and they shot you…would you feel that it was “not a matter for justice?” That they were excused from responsibility because they were “not sane” at the time? Does mental illness absolve one from any kind of responsibility for one’s actions?

Sheesh…I’m a bleeding heart liberal, and even I don’t believe that.

Well, I don’t think that she could have come up with that thinking on her own. She REALLY looks like a lot of my mom’s caseload (maternal child health nurse in inner city practice) Not referring to her skin color…but rather the fact that she looks like the type of stereotypical welfare mom who wears tattered Starter jackets.
I’ve seen clips of her being interviewed. She always bursts into tears when she tells that she’s suspected of microwaving her baby. Hard to tell if it’s real grief or just “boo hoo hoo! I got caught!”
I just can’t see how anyone could stand there and just listen to the screams of a baby as its being cooked from the inside out!
Why is everyone thinking it’s the mom who did it? It could have been the father for all anyone knows. Like maybe he was in a drug induced rage, and he may also have been angry about having to support a child. There are fathers out there who still haven’t grown up, and who are also very sociopathic. Like the kind of person who would think it funny to put a cat in a microwave! :mad: :mad:
Hey…maybe it was one of the mom’s KIDS! Kids can ALSO be sociopaths.
Maybe too that something else happened to the baby. Maybe the “parents” gave her drugs or something, which then might have caused an overdose, which then killed the baby. Perhaps then they freaked out, and thought that a good idear would be to “cook” the baby so that the drugs couldn’t be detected. I’m praying that something like that happened…I just cannot see HOW ANYONE could just stand there and hear a baby SCREAMING… I mean from what someone said on Nancy Grace the pain would be excruxiating. The screaming would have woken EVERYONE up! It’s not something that would have happened without anyone taking note.
Another thing…what about the eyes? I thought that eyes exploded in the microwave, since they are mostly made of water.

Years and years ago there was a book called “No Language But a Cry” It’s about a girl named Laura who had FAS (Fetal Alchohol Syndrome) and autism.
Her parents were scheizophernics and tried to cook her alive in a frying pan. :eek:

No, not at all… Just that truely evil people tend to be VERY rare, like the Hitlers and Saddams of the world. Also those evil people tend to have a real lenghy history of doing evil shit. It’s not a clear blue sky thing.

Oh…she HAS said that she had “drunk” a bit…maybe that’s an euphenism for being high.

Yes I know that most drug addicts don’t kill their kids…but drugs CAN cause some pretty fucked up behavoir. I’m leaning towards a combonation of PPP (psychosis) and drug use. Like maybe she was using meth to bring her up from depression, and that may have caused some psycotic rage.

I’m quite certain that statistically speaking mothers are more likely to murder their children than are the fathers.

Since when does it take the likes of Hiter or Saddam to murder someone? I’ve got news for you there are plenty of people willing to kill, especially in the right circumstances.

Pool,
good point…but are the stats on mothers who kill kids more on the traditional married middle class population? B/c i do remember from sociology of the family that it does tend to be stepdads or dads who aren’t exactly members of healthy families (ie they are the kind that go around and have tons of kids all by different mothers, and they don’t exactly pay child support) who tend to abuse and or kill their kids.
I really think that the end story is going to be basicly extreme ghetto dysfunctional family issues, as the cause of the baby getting microwaved.
I’m not that naive as to think that only Saddams and Hitlers are capabile of murder.
But cold bloodedly putting a baby into a microwave and turning it on? I’m sorry, but if you want to commit murder, there are MUCH more humane ways to do it…walking away from the baby while they’re in the tub, spiking baby formula with whatever…why a non sociopathlogical murderer would even think of doing something like that…ugh.I mean microwaving a baby is even worse then Saddam’s favorite trick…putting a prisonor through a woodchipper alive!
I just cannot fathom a tattered Starter jacket mom being THAT evil, or even thinking that complexly. Like a lot of those types of moms are very…not exactly the brightest coin in the box. Alot of my mom’s clients are like that. Like they do not possess really complex thinking or the abilty to make good reasoned decisions. Like one of the clients bought a purebred dog and, didn’t even have a place to live! But then again…maybe she’s undiganosed profound bipolar (the kind that can be confused with schieznophernia) and she decided to do something that would teach the baby a lesson…then again, usuallly it’s pretty easy to tell if someone’s going off on a rant or whatever. Usually someone who’s really legitimatly mentally ill, will show signs of obvious issues. It’s rare that an epidsode will appear out of the clear blue sky, and be over so quickly. One wonders…did the ER people, the father etc notice any odd behavoirs?
Watching her on TV…I gotta say that I think that this might be a little more complex then simply just the mom murdering the baby. I really wonder…

When my aunt suffered from post-partum, no one in my family realized it until it was too late. She was very careful to hide what she was feeling from her family. In her case, it manifested as a desire to hurt herself, but it just as easily could have been the baby that she killed.

But you’re right: there are usually signs when a woman goes into PPP. Remember Andrea Yates: there was a woman who was screaming for help, but her husband chose to ignore it until she did something terrible.

Are you serious? Where are you going with this?

This sounds like the same shit Andrea Yates and Susan Smith did… not exactly stereotypical welfare moms wearing tattered Starter jackets and pictures of extreme ghetto dysfunction. Putting a kid in a microwave oven is fucked up beyond words. I fail to understand the connection between what you assume to be this woman’s background and “ghetto dysfunction.”

Lissa, could it have been a combonation of things? Like maybe PPP, a bipolar temper tantrum ( and trust me, those Starter jacket queens aren’t always mild mannered) I’m not discounting PPP at all…I know it can be wicked severe. But, I really cannot fathom such a profound out of the clear blue sky attack that it would cause her to microwave her baby! I say that as a person who has gone through some pretty awful mental illness as well as having some mild developmental issues (more on the mild learning disabilty curve)
What about other explinations? We really gotta make sure we’re not just piling on her or making excuses for her. It’s really hard to say…I really can’t “read” her affect. She could be autistic/ sociopathic…Before anyone jumps on me, there ARE some autistic people who really cannot understand that some of their actions are wrong.Like there was this autistic kid i went to college with. He got in trouble for things like following girls, and walking in on his ra when she was changing! He had absolutly no clue whatsoever that what he did was wrong!!! It IS very very clear that she’s a full blown member of the Tattered Starter Jacket Brigade. But does that make her resposible for what happened? What if China was white? This is just such a complicated and gross and scary case.

What the hell are you talking about? Every post is more nonsensical than the one before it.

WHAT???

It likely didn’t come out of the “clear blue sky.” If she did have PPP, it probably built over time until it became uncontrollable. If she lived alone or the people in her home weren’t paying close attention, she could have hidden her illness.

Bipolar disorder is also a severe mental problem. It’s not a “temper tantrum” or a character flaw. If she wasn’t being medicated for it, combined with PPP, it could have been the cause of this.

That’s exactly why we should judge or condemn until she’s had a full psychiatric work-up. We, the newspaper-reading public cannot know whether she was mentally ill based solely on the information provided.

I don’t understand this, and I don’t really think I want to.

China’s race is completely irrelevant to me when it comes to what the criminal justice system should do. It is, however, important to note that as a poor black woman, she was statistically less likely to get the sort of help she may have needed.

I’m sorry, but I did not understand your post. What is the “starter jacket” referring to? Why is walking in on someone while they are changing so outrageous?

Ah, I went back to the first page and now see the “starter jacket” reference. My apologies. I find your posting style difficult to follow and seem to have missed this reference the first time over.

However, I’m still confused by the part about the autistic kid you went to college with who walked in on someone who was changing.

I find your optimism charming. :slight_smile: :frowning:

Sailboat

Hippy Hollow, I’m saying that maybe just maybe the cause might not have been straight dead on raving loony pschotic behavoir. I’m not saying that tattered Starter jacket moms might be more likely to do something like that. I KNOW that the other moms like andrea yates and susan smith were not that tattered starter jacket types. But i meant, maybe b/c of the severe disfunction present in a lot of those types of families, there might be another explaination, such as drug use etc. Trust me…the dysfunction of those types of families can be mindboggling.
swallowed my cellphone…i was just using the example of that autistic kid as an illustration as to how some autistic people can’t even see why a particualr behavor is wrong.
pool…read post 45.
Lissa, but i mean if she’d had an episode that was so bad that she cooked the baby, it would have been very apparent to the folks at the er. i know about mood swings…but man.

I research families from different classes. Middle class, working class, and poor. Trust me, there is plenty of dysfunction going around in all these family types. Money just makes it easier to camouflage. Conversely, I see strong families - though perhaps not similar to the Cleaver family stereotype - in low-income communities. Of the students I taught, I would only categorize a small number of them coming from environments with extreme dysfunction (from my unprofessional assessment). Judging from my friends who have taught in high-income, suburban communities, there’s plenty of dysfunctional families on the other end of the SES spectrum.

As someone who has taught in a low-income community, I find your characterization of these families (I’m assuming this is what you mean by “tattered starter jacket types”) to be a gross generalization. I’d recommend you drop that descriptor. If you look at the media accounts, infanticide at the hands of the mother seems to be the domain of middle-class White homemakers. Yet it would be an incredible overgeneralization to say that they are the only parents, or specially predisposed to be, involved in these tragedies.

As several posters have mentioned, this is a hideous, horrible crime against a defenseless child. We’re going to have to wait to hear more about the investigation before we attribute this behavior to anything, be it PPD, drug use, psychotic behavior, etc.

After she drowned her children, Andrea Yates calmly called the police and her husband and waited for the police to come arrest her. She wasn’t running around in circles pulling her hair out or acting like a lunatic. From all the reports I’ve heard, she seemed pretty “normal” to everyone around her after the killings. (Which is one reason why the prosecutor didn’t believe she was insane.)

People can be “bat-shit crazy” and still appear to be rational in front of others. My husband works with quite a few of these kinds of people in the criminal justice system. One of the problems he has, he tells me, is that the staff relaxes around these inmates, lulled into complacency by a long period of calm behavior, only to be caught off-guard when the inmate suddenly snaps.

hippy hollow, i’m not using that phrase to refer to the entire low income population. Rather more of a subpopulation of people in that population. This sub population can and does have significent dysfunction…like, drug abuse, severe violence, very poor relationships, things like developmental issues (eg significent learning disablities) Like there are a lot of people who will work their way off of welfare and foodstamps whether through smarts or hard work. But the members of the Tattered Starter Jacket Club, tend not to have the skills to get off of welfare, or make good decisions about relationships or whatever. Like a Tattered Starter Jacket Mom is the mom, who came in to the supermarket with a WIC voucher, and a brand of cheese not accepted. the WIC voucher stated specificly that you could only get certain brands. She spent fifteen mintues arguing that she COULD get that brand with the voucher. She finally left in a huff, after she bought cigerettes.
You kinda see what I’m saying? They are modren day Ewells (to kill a mockingbird) in other words. Those types of people lead lives so dysfunctional that there could be a number of alternative explainations for the murder of the baby. The father could be a sociopath, anyone could have been on dangerous street drugs, and so on and so on.
Also, perhaps her being surrounded by dysfunction really might not have helped. Perhaps her boyfriend wasn’t the best judge of charector, and so missed clues that might have helped her avoid this situion. Perhaps if she’d had better coping skills, and was a little more developmentally mature, then perhaps she would not have done something so severe. NOT suggesting that if she had undx whatever, that it was a charector flaw. But i do know, personally that a lot of developmentally affected people who also have mental illness can act like they are five years old. Whereas if she’d been a little bit more mature, then perhaps all she would have done is something a bit more not extreme. I mean there are tons and tons of cases of PPP every year. The microwave has also been around or a few decades. How come sope something like this hasn’t happened before? Yes, i know there was that case in Virgina, but that was more due to a weird type of seizure. (the mom in that case was observed to have had a seizure and started doing stuff in a trancelike state) That’s all…didn’t mean to rag on** all** poor people or **all **people on welfare .
Lissa, it’s still very difficult to wrap your mind around that fact…that a person could be superfically sane, but underneath be as mad as a hatter.
I mean even in a lot of cases like that, people can still give off an odd “affect”…my mom says that I always give off a weird affect, even if on my meds.