I am so sick of criminals trotting out the “retarded” defense. Moreover, I think it tends to produce in some people’s minds the idea that retarded people are somehow prone to horrific crime.
There’s a young man here in Missouri who’s trying to get out of the death penalty for taking part in the gang rape and murder of two young women (they also forced a male cousin of the girls to jump from a bridge into the Mississippi River, but he survived) on the grounds that he’s retarded. And then this horrific case above (sentence fragment, I know).
I have a retarded older brother. In addition to knowing him all my life, I’ve also had the privilege of knowing many of his co-workers. To a man and to a woman, they are gentle, loving people who would never harm a fly, who would perhaps not even know how to harm a person. They may not have the same intelligence the rest of us were gifted with, but they do know that you don’t hurt people, you don’t rape people, and you don’t set little girls on fire.
Geez, when did the words “evil” and “retarded” become so conflated? I’m opposed to the death penalty, but I’d be willing to reconsider in cases like these. Some people have just given up all their oxygen privilieges.
Just to make a bad situation worse, about an hour ago I heard a portion of a news radio report about a woman who drowned her four kids in the bathtub. Someone can provide details, I’m sure.
In any event, this stuff just reaffirms for me that human beings are not special or divinely blessed, and that we can be destructive and outright stupid at odd times. As a parent myself, I cannot even begin to imagine the kind of mindset it takes to do something like this.
About the only satisfaction I can derive after one of these incidents is the knowledge that the bonehead in question won’t propagate his/her genes further down the course of human history – but it’s still a cold, unsatisfying comfort.
Yeah… a mod should throw this in the Pit. Sorry about the subject there, guys. I was a little upset at the time.
And it was 5 children… ages 6 months to 7 years of age. I just read it after I read about the guy who set his little girl on fire.
As the mother of a 6 yr old… I just cannot even IMAGINE. I just can’t. I think that mother should be able to kill him in any way she sees fit for what he’s done. God knows if someone decided it would be a good idea to set my boy on fire, I would kill them very slowly and torture him mercilessly in the process.
Which I guess doesnt make me much better. But jesus… I couldnt even imagine someone doing something like that to my cat… let alone my baby.
Moderator’s Notes: I’ll move this to the Pit, but I need to ask you to do something, malkavia. I need you to stop posting copyrighted articles to this message board. What you should do is post a small introductory paragraph and a link. Reposting of large amounts of an article violates copyright laws. the Chicago Reader, the newspaper which happens to own this message board, takes copyright law very seriously, as one would suspect. Let me quote the relevant statement from the user agreement:
Therefore, I’ve chopped the majority of your initial post. In this thread and the other one. You should dig up links to those article and post them in the appropriate thread. Okay? Thanks.
Isn’t that just charming. This 16 year old who sodimized a 12 year old with a tire iron and burned her alive, has her own fan club! And she smiles so nicely in her mug shot, as do the other girls.
I was shocked to hear of this crime when I heard about it on another SDMB thread.
Do you think any of those girls truly have realized the horror of what they have done? I don’t just mean that they realize how outraged their fellow citizens were when they learned of that poor girl’s murder, but actual, real remorse.
No, I don’t. Not all of them, anyway. I think it was Toni who was the only one who realized later. Not that that wins her any points with me. Toni seemed to go along willingly, but with reservations (read Little Lost Angel or Cruel Sacrifice for more info on this murder). But, at some point, every single one of those people had the ability to put a stop to it before Shanda died. IIRC, the girls stopped for gas (!!) with Shanda unconcious in the trunk, beaten with a tire iron. Toni was by a pay phone, and thought about calling the police, but ultimately decided not to. She very easily could have stopped this with a phone call. Because she didn’t, Shanda was sodomized with a tire iron, beaten with it, and set on fire while she was still alive. According to the coroner’s report (as cited in one of the above books), it wasn’t blunt trauma that killed Shanda. She was STILL ALIVE when she was set on fire, and that’s what killed her.
If anyone wants to know what my connection to this is, I have two: A good friend of mine was really good friends with Melinda Loveless, and one of the friends who didn’t go, but knew about it, a girl named Kari Pope (I only mention her name because it IS cited in Cruel Sacrifice) was my older brother’s girlfriend’s best friend, and used to want to go out with me. Thank God I said no.
My sister is assistant manager of a used book store. After I read about the crime on the SDMB, I went to my sister’s store.
I usually avoid the true crime section, something about some (maybe most) of the books, and especially some of the people who buy them seem ghoulish to me.
I flipped through Cruel Sacrifice, the crime was too awful to actually read about straight through. Besides, the author seems to glorify the four ‘witches’ more than feel for their victim. I wish Little Lost Angel had been there, it, IIRC, was written with the cooperation of Shanda’s family.
I guess what I was looking for was some human regret from the four teenagers, if not during, then after their crime. The crime was so monstrous that the mind reels, not wanting to believe that people could be such monsters, just instead making monstrous mistakes.
This whole thread seems to prove that there is no limit to what some people are capable of. I take some comfort in that these horrible crimes made (inter)national news due to their relative rarity. But it would such a better world if they didn’t happen at all.
Thanks for your post, Superdude. I don’t doubt that the savage killing has taken a toll on your community as a whole, besides the obvious and unimaginable suffering of the Sharer family.