Oct 23 2008
Justifiable patricide?
My goat and I apologize for leaving you in the collective lurch yesterday. I sustained a minor fencing injury, and the goat diagnosed it as a broken finger; I couldn’t type with two fingers taped together. Fortunately for me, the goat was wrong, and I once again have full use of all ten digits. For the record, I did not consider taking one for the team and cutting it off in order to deliver your daily goat.
I’ve been halfway watching a trial with my father; unfortunately I did not catch any names, and I can not find this particular trial on Google. If you know the case of which I’m speaking, please give me a link.
A young woman (16 years old, I believe, 15 at the time of arrest) was found guilty of patricide today. During the trial the claim was that she convinced her older boyfriend (20, 19 at the time if I have my numbers right) to kill her father with a baseball bat. She helped plan it, made sure the dog was not in the room to protect her father, and gave the young man the means to commit the crime. The cases were severed, and I have not heard his side of the story yet.
After she was found guilty, the young woman in question admitted to committing the crime herself. The motive presented by the prosecution was the girl’s despair over her father’s disapproval. She could not continue her relationship with the older boy while she lived with her father.
This threw up some red flags for me. I was recently a teenage girl, and my father did not approve of all my friends (big surprise, that’s what dads do). I bitched about it. I wrote angry poetry about it. I glared and slammed doors. I did not try to harm him.
When I Googled “patricide” along with other possible terms like “16-year-old girl” and “baseball bat” I got several results (oddly, none for this case) dating all the way back to the King brothers who put my hometown on the map by beating their father to death with the same weapon. While there were some exceptions, these stories usually involved some type of abuse.
I am not condoning blaming the victim (especially since the defendant giggled throughout the trial and only showed remorse after the verdict was returned), but I am curious about what exactly took place in that house prior to the crime. The combination of the brutal manner in which that man died and the motive of wanting to run away with a boyfriend made me think that this was more than a typical father-daughter dispute.
Personally, I try not to advocate substituting one bad situation for another (i.e., getting married young to move out of a dysfunctional home), but I see it happen regularly. And while I do not doubt that this young lady believed (possibly still believes) that she was in love with the young man in question, there are always other options.
Why didn’t she just run away with the boyfriend and leave the father unharmed? Was she afraid he would try to find her? Was she afraid of what would happen if he did find her? Or was this another senseless act of violence brought on my fierce teenage emotions and a drive for some sort of inheritance?
I’ll admit that I don’t know all the facts; I can’t even come up with this girl’s name. But I do know that I saw something fishy behind the smiling pictures of her late father, and my goat wants to know what it is.
