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Baby-crazed Kassandra Toruga is accused of trying to cut a baby out of her friend's pregnant belly
It doesn’t happen often, but on rare occasions I am without words. This is one of those times.
According to law enforcement officials, an 18-year-old girl in Arizona has admitted to attacking her nine-months-pregnant friend in an attempt to steal her unborn child.
Kassandra Toruga of Maricopa was apprehended by firefighters at her friend’s home while in possession of butchers knives, scissors, diapers and a bag of baby clothes.
There’s now a motive in the strange case of Food Network chef Juan-Carlos Cruz, arrested last week for allegedly attempting to arrange for the murder of his wife.
Infertility. Continue reading »
When a child commits a serious crime, should he or she be put in prison for life? According to the Supreme Court, that depends upon the crime.
In a landmark ruling, the Supreme Court said yesterday that except for in the case of murder, a sentence of life without parole for minors violates the Constitution’s ban on “cruel and unusual” punishment. Continue reading »
The Daily Beast posted an sad and somewhat half-baked piece this weekend about the case dubbed “The Socialite Autism Murder.”
This depressing tale, for those of you who don’t follow New York tabloid journalism, is about Gigi Jordan, an international socialite, who appears to have snapped under the strain of caring for her severely autistic eight-year-old son. Seemingly convinced that she was facing a custody battle and that her son was on the verge of being sexually abused by his father or step-father (all were delusions), she checked into a five star New York City hotel, and killed her son with a lethal dose of prescription painkillers. Her own attempt at suicide failed. She’s now being held without bail in a New York City jail.
Former New York State Attorney General Dennis Vacco posited in the Daily Beat piece Jordan’s been targeted because of her wealth, and that a less affluent mother with her history would have been long since either granted bail or at least transferred to a secure psychiatric facility. Maybe. Maybe not. The New York tabloids have been quick to point out that New York City prosecutors suspect Jordan of faking her own attempt at death, a fact Vacco conveniently leaves out of his retelling.
Vacco is, however, on more secure ground when it points out “if this case proves anything, it’s that autism impacts families regardless of financial status.”
In fact, Jordan is far from the first parent to kill a disabled child. The website neurodiversity.com keeps track of such events, which makes mention of another New York City case, that of Jose Stable, who murdered his severely disabled son in 2006. And for me personally, I can go all the way back to the 1970s, and recall a family murder that took place near my home during my own childhood, when the dad of a blind and deaf boy suffered a mental breakdown and bludgeoned his entire family to death, a crime re-examined a few years ago by reporter Julie Salamon in her book Facing the Wind.
It would be easy and probably true to argue a contributor to these ghastly deaths is the lack of practical support our society offers parents of disabled children. But that seems a bit simplistic. First, killing one’s own child (or children) remains an extremely rare event. Second, in at least both the Jordan and Stable cases, it’s possible that outside intervention actually triggered the final tragedy. New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services had sought to remove Jose Stable’s son from his custody. Similarly, there is a record of both state and family attempts to intervene in Jordan’s case. It seems more likely that simply having a child that is so profoundly disabled preys on their parents and, in some terrible cases, causes them to literally go insane.
What do you think?
File this under, “the punishment doesn’t fit the crime.” Strike that; file this under, “You clearly should not be a parent unless your job is to raise a serial killer.”
38-year-old mom Lynn Middlebrooks Geter was arrested after she forced her 12-year-old son to kill his pet hamster with a hammer as a punishment for earning a bad grade.
Kate Elizabeth Hutchinson, a 36-year-old psychiatric ward patient, recently gave birth to her 6th or 7th child (no one knows for sure). This after birthing all her former children with different fathers, having all stripped from her care and one, according to police, possibly murdered. Two of the woman’s children were born with autism and another died of muscular dystrophy four years ago.
Now her mother, Helen, is begging authorities to step in.
He’s the kind of guy no pregnant woman wants to meet in a back alley, and now Scott Peterson wants your money!
The father-to-be who killed his pregnant wife, Laci, says money from the state of California won’t be enough to cover his attempt to appeal his murder conviction. So his family is asking for donations on their Website. Continue reading »
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