WHITE PINE, Tenn. (AP) — An 11-year-old boy has been charged with murder after he killed his 8-year-old neighbor, police said, and witnesses say it was because the girl wouldn’t let him see her puppy.
Deputies were called to the neighborhood in White Pine, about 40 miles east of Knoxville, on Saturday night. The boy shot the girl from inside his home with his father’s 12-gauge shotgun, said Jefferson County Sheriff Bud McCoig.
Latasha Dyer told WATE-TV her daughter was playing outside when the next-door neighbor asked to see the puppy. McKayla told the boy “no,” and he shot her, Dyer said. A neighbor, Misty Edwards, said her niece was playing with the girl and saw what happened.
“She was a precious little girl. She was a mommy’s girl. No matter how bad of a mood you were in she could always make you smile,” Dyer told the station. “I want her back in my arms.”
The sheriff would not discuss the motive with local media, and the sheriff’s office did not immediately return messages from The Associated Press.
The shooting happened in a neighborhood where all the kids knew each other and played together, McCoig said.
The two children went to the same school, where McKayla was in second grade and the boy in fifth grade. Dyer said the boy had bullied her daughter before, when they first moved to the neighborhood.
“He was making fun of her, calling her names, just being mean to her,” she said. “I had to go the principal about him and he quit for a while, and then all of a sudden yesterday he shot her.”
The boy was scheduled to appear in court on Monday on a charge of first-degree murder. The hearing was closed because he is a juvenile, and authorities have not released his identity to the public.
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“The Horror, The Horror”.
Col. Kurtz seems to have supplanted Bugs Bunny in the minds of some of our youth.
And his parents were doing…what?
Words fail.
If only the eight-year-old had been armed.
More responsible gun owners…until they’re not.
Which is really the point here. As far as I know, in no other industry or context is responsible compliance with best practices and safety procedures presumed when so much is at stake. NONE. We do not wait for a chemical or pharmy company to dump thousands of gallons of VOCs and PCBs into a river to regulate them, presuming all along that they were a “responsible contaminant manufacturer.” We don’t presume nuclear power plants to be “responsible radiation producers” until they have a melt down. We don’t presume doctors, nurses, hospitals to be “responsible medical care providers” until we find out they’ve caused numerous deaths for failed sanitation and sterilization practices. Those in possession of dangerous substances such as said chemicals, or bio-hazard material or pharmaceuticals must register their possession, bills of lading must track the chain of possession, they must comply with regulatory requirements about the storage, transportation and handling of such materials…and they must prove said compliance on a regular basis through a detailed oversight process. The list is fucking endless.
And yet, any fucktard can waltz into Walmart, purchase an arsenal (and some stylin’ fatigues) to bring home to their house full of children and there is absolutely no effort to assure that they’re properly trained and using best practices and safety procedures to prevent those firearms from falling into the hands of their children…or any other number of disasters that can occur when you have introduced a tool for which there is no other purpose but dealing death into the home environment. And to add insult to injury, there’s almost no effort to at least retroactively criminalize and prosecute any failures in that regard. Because why? Because this country is stuck on stupid. Period.