A 12-year-old girl in Tennessee has been charged with murder, accused of smothering her 8-year-old cousin as the younger girl slept. A relative said they had been arguing over an iPhone.
A security camera recorded the killing, inside the bedroom they shared on July 15 in Humboldt, Tennessee, the county prosecutor said.
The recording shows the older child using bedding to suffocate her cousin as the younger girl slept in the top bunk, Gibson District Attorney Frederick Agee’s statement said. After the child died, “the juvenile cleaned up the victim and repositioned her body,” Agee said.
A relative told WREG-TV in Memphis that the girls had been arguing over an iPhone after coming from out of town to stay with their grandmother.
Am I the only one that thinks charging her as an adult is a little much? A 12 year old is probably still treatable. Incarceration in our criminal justice system will not accomplish that.
She’s about to spend a ton of time in the system either way. Whether that be juvi or somewhere else. This kid will not reemerge a rehabilitated individual. In the system you simply learn to be a better criminal, rehabilitation is myth
In the US, yes.
Well it is in the US so…?
So then yes.
I definitely agree that whatever decision the courts make, this person is not going to be properly rehabilitated via the sentence.
I obviously have no expertise in the matter, but I really do wonder what the appropriate “consequence” would be for something like this. They’re still a child, basically at 12. But they committed to doing something VERY permanent. Do they have any understanding for what it is they’ve done? I would think they have a semblance of it. Emotions, hormones, and everything about a pre-pubescant can run hot at those ages, but this was an egregious failure for self control.
I’m very likely just being a fence sitter about it. Murdering someone over something petty like this would be an obvious charge for an assumed adult. Just hard to wrap my head around it when I see news like this I guess.
I say charge her as a black male.
The younger they are, the longer private prisons get to earn government revenue for their incarceration. 👍🏻
A bit much? She is a child. A very american thing to do… In europe she would get therapy and that’s it…
Generation alpha is so fucking lost.
Well done parents who are constantly on their smartphones instead there for their children.
Kids killing kids sadly happens all through time. But it’s quite rare, so it makes the news.
Back in 1993, there was the murder of 2 year old James Bulger in the UK. He was abducted, tortured and killed by two boys aged 10. After they tortured him to death, they put the body on train tracks where it was cut in half, so as to make it look like an accident.
One of the kids was in and out of jail a few times since then, as well as charged with child porn.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_James_Bulger
The UK really should’ve given both the death penalty if it had still been available. Humanity is better off without people like that.
All generations have kids who do this shit.
Well, most generations don’t have kids anymore
I remember when I was a kid, some 13 year old shot their parents because they took away Halo 3.
Most of us Gen Zers are normal. At least to the extent we don’t kill our family members for video games or smartphones.
Troubled kids exist. Shit like this happens. That kids like 12 and probably had no idea anywhere near the actual gravity of what they where doing. The world is a really, really fucked up place.
Absolutely. People love to point to some societal issue, but the sad truth is that some people are psychopaths/have personality disorders and this is just what they do.
A few years back, about a half hour away from my hometown in NJ two teenage kids offered to help a young teenage girl fix her bike. They did, and then wanted payment, which she apparently refused. They killed her and threw her body in a dumpster and took her bike like nothing had happened. It was just a normal day for them.
Ok zoomer
I’m a millennial thank you very much.
Then you’d remember that kid who killed his brother over a cheeseburger.
Gen Z and Alpha are more like us than any others.
Yeah true every gen had some psychos. But good parenting could help in some cases to not turn into something as violent as this.
Are you a parent?
Already claimed to be millennial so I’m guessing either 0 or 5 kids with no I’m between
Nooo come on, let millennials be the ones to leave this generational war stuff in the past.
I can’t deny my age, now can I?
Sigh I’m a millennial (82) with a gen alpha kid, and you’re an idiot.
I guess I am then when I see all those parents with their strollers in trams and underground tubes staring down their phones instead of giving their kids any attention.
Yeah but you can choose to not post.
We as a species love to judge people based on their age. And it goes both ways. Us millenials will be as reviled as boomers are by the younger folks soon. And I’m sure more and more millenials like OP will make dumbass comments about those same young folks in return. It’s the circle of life.
I too wish we could all judge people based on their actions rather than their age. But it’ll never happen
Who was the genius at apple who came up with a remote-smothering feature?
Obviously they’re holding it wrong!
Leonard ‘Pillows’ Anocksia
We really shouldn’t let elementary students watch CSI. They’re learning the wrong lessons.
Stop using the “why won’t someone think of the children!” Fear mongering. This kid is a psychopath, it wasn’t caused by then watching CSI.
I didn’t, but you did. We know the kid has issues, thank you for pointing that out.
But even though my comment is a sarcastic, throw-away response to cope with the heinous news, I do have a point. How did a 12-year-old know to “fix” the crime scene?
That’s just basic skills of deception. I’d say most kids figure out at some point in their youth that they can make things appear differently for their own advantage.
Be it raiding the fridge in a way their younger brother does it sometimes to get them in trouble, or even more likely, they are at some point at the receiving end of it. Hence most people dont need to be taught deception, the actual disturbing thing to me here is the calculated murderous intent.
Not a rage fit heat of the moment thing, a planned murder including the forethought of deniability. At 12 years old.
That’s just basic skills of deception.
And according to you those are gained through osmosis.
🙄
Where am I saying that? Just that kids aren’t usually taken aside by their parents and learn about lying and trickery. They figure that out on their own eventually, which doesn’t mean they do not learn from example obviously.
Kids learn by example, and that includes lying. If parents are always honest with their kids, that’s what the kids learn to do. When parents lie - either to or in front of the kids - they’ll learn that as well.
Is it me or is the newsworthy thing here not the phone but the actual fucking murder?
Children have been arguing about toys for millennia. I got into a few fist fights myself over he-man dolls.
Yes, why would you think anyone thought the phone was the bigger part of the story…?
Where do you think the story of Cain and Abel came from?
The fact that murder even became an option tels of a fucked up home life or psychotic personality.
Psychopathy, not psychosis. It’s easy to get the two disorders confused.
From Psychology Today:
Psychopathy is a condition characterized by the absence of empathy and the blunting of other affective states. Callousness, detachment, and a lack of empathy enable psychopaths to be highly manipulative.
Psychosis occurs when an individual loses touch with reality—a break that can be terrifying to experience or to observe in a loved one. Psychosis can include hallucinations, delusions, disorganized speech, and abnormal movements.
Why was a security camera in the bedroom? Or was it somewhere else bit could see in the bedroom? Am I the only one who finds this odd, or is this a common thing to have for 12 and/or 8 year olds?
I have them in my young kids’ rooms but it’s mostly just to make sure they’re in bed and not screwing around. Once they get a bit older, they’ll be removed. I don’t know how you’d justify a camera in a 12 year old’s room without very explicit needs and communication.
The kids were at grandma’s house, visiting. So not their own bedroom.
Maybe it was a baby monitor?
They’re often cheaper and better than “video baby monitors”
Some people are surveillance’d out. I personally find it weird when people have fuckin Alexa or Google assistant in their house. Like u really want Bezos listening to your every word so u don’t have to walk 3 feet to the light switch? Different strokes I guess, but I don’t want a doorbell cam n I for sure don’t want cam(s) inside my fucking house especially ones connected to multinational conglomerates that are going to use it to spy on me n sell me ads.
I aways get “but it only listens when you say the trigger word” when I talk about how much I hate spy speakers
That makes no fucking sense
Only if you choose to ignore the explanation.
The device listens locally for the trigger word. When it hears it, it wakes up and starts processing what you’re saying, sending that to Google or whoever and getting a response back. It isn’t constantly processing or what you’re saying beyond “was that ‘hey Google’?”.
I will never trust that ever
That’s because the explanation is often a bit disingenuous. There’s practically no difference between “listening locally” and “constantly processing what you’re saying”. The device is constantly processing what you’re saying, simply to recognise the trigger word. That processing just isn’t shared off device until the trigger is detected. That’s the claim by the manufacturers, and so far it’s not been proved wrong (as mentioned elsewhere, plenty of people are trying). It’s hard to prove a negative but so far it seems not enough data is leaving to prove anything suspect.
I would put money on a team of people working for Amazon / Google to extract value from that processed speech data without actually sending that data off device. Things like aggregate conversation topic / sentiment, logging adverts heard on tv / radio for triangulation, etc. None of that would invalidate the “not constantly recording you” claim.
“after coming from out of town to stay with their grandmother.”
I’m assuming this means this was the grandmother’s house they were staying at?
I work in hospice and and it’s not uncommon for a family member to have multiple cameras set up in an elderly loved ones house for safety reasons. Maybe she wants to remain independent, but is a fall risk. We’ve had patients refuse in home caregivers, but allow family to put in cameras to watch for falls.
They don’t need to listen to your every word. They have so much information on you that they can pinpoint you pretty well. They would like to, but it’s too risky. However making it easy for you to give them information willingly, yes please they are on board.
There is no evidence they are actually always processing everything, and people have been trying to prove it for a long time now. But it seems like they do what they say they are doing: listening for wake words.
I wonder if say a country with some less scrupulous agencies with names like “NSA” and “CIA” and “FBI” could pay or force amazon to also key in at trigger words like “bomb” or “protest,” or even just in an effort to get the ads that much closer to inside our brains Chevy pays them to key on “Truck” and “Ford” to attempt to sway customers who discuss it.
Who knows if the trigger words you know are the only trigger words, there’s no reason it would need to alert you, it could do it quietly in the background.
You can always go and test this instead of just assuming it’s true because it’s what you already believe is true.
No I can’t, because I don’t allow google on my phone much less in my house. GrapheneOS 4 life.
You can, you’re just unwilling.
Nope, can’t. Physically incapable of subjecting myself to spyware intentionally. I’ll continue the inconvenience of typing it myself when I have to search something on a google alternative, no use for those dumb machines for me anyway.
My TV is a 2007 LCD dumb tv, I still have a VCR, an OG xbox, and an NES hooked up to it. Take yer technologies, I don’t need em.
I was also surprised by that, but I’m still surprised people have them in their living rooms. I guess it’s like upgrading from a baby monitor??
It’s getting hard to find a baby monitor that doesn’t have a camera.
No idea, glad it’s not just me I guess.
12 yrs old? over an iphone?
I get the enshitted society weight in all that, but what the actual fuck her parents raised her to?
I’m so sad for her, and for her cousin too of course, but she’s going to die a thousand times in her life trying to cope with what she has doneSmothering? There’s an app for that!
SmugleBug.
Ohhh. Because of an iPhone, not over the phone. It seemed like an odd feature; would have been impressive, though.
JFC
If it’s a recent model iPhone, it has NFC.
Not Fucking Christ?
Nearly Fungineering Christ
FFS.
