Posted on 09/12/2014 10:23:13 AM PDT by TangledUpInBlue
Anthony Pasquale stops to visit his daughter at the Cedar Green Cemetery every morning, then returns once or twice more during the day. He sits on the small white bench and faces the polished granite headstone, etched with a hologram of Autumn on one side and the things she loved on the other — bicycles, soccer balls, cheerleading, skateboards.
From where he sits he can see the middle school, where his 12-year-old girl was a student, and next to that the high school, where the 15-year-old boy who killed her was one, too. When school is in session, Pasquale has even glimpsed a classmate peering out of the ground-floor science-lab windows, which look directly onto Autumn’s grave.
That’s how things work in a small town like Clayton, N.J., where everyone knows everyone else, where lives and stories intertwine. “Because it’s a small town — that’s why we live here,“ says Anthony Pasquale. But it was also why Autumn died.
“She trusted him because she thought everyone was raised the way she was,” he says of her attacker. “That everyone could be trusted. That all parents taught kids right from wrong.”
It has been nearly two years since Autumn went missing and Justin Robinson went to jail, pleading guilty to strangling her after she stopped by his house to trade parts for her brand-new bicycle. In that time her parents have learned that the stages of grief now include another step — finding someone to blame. It’s a stage well known to parents wrenched by a particular kind of loss, a kind arguably more common and certainly more public of late — losing children at the hands of other children. And it is raising questions with few answers in the existing legal system.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Like with islam?
No. Next question.
I also feel for the family, but.
Part of properly raising a daughter is instilling them with caution and "discrimination".
Discrimination is the judgment necessary to tell fast from slow, hot from cold, right from wrong, safe from dangerous, and all the other skills that people must develop to make their way in this world.
Bad things can happen anywhere. Sometimes when you try to protect your children from all the negatives in the world, you set them up for a tragedy.
If you start looking for “root causes”, then what you’re really doing is letting the individual off the hook. As in, don’t blame the thief, blame poverty.
I’ve read of too many cases where parents saw the warning signals and desperately sought help from the system only to be turned away because nothing had happened yet. Many times there is also the issue of not having money or insurance for long term mental health treatment.
Hmmmm... Black on White murder. How surprising...
Exactly. Like in the story, how the Mother says, “he was failed by the system”.....
My solution:
Part the killer out for his organs, and turn the parents out with just their shirts.
What the heck is a 12 year old girl doing describing anything as sexy? It makes me wonder what sort of exposure to inappropriate peer groups she had. Also there is no way a 12 year old daughter of mine would not know it was wrong to go to any house where a parent was not home. Especially if the only one home was a teen boy.
I think it is horrible that she was killed but parental blame can cut both ways.
There’s a very good (but also really disturbing and not at all entertaining) book and movie about this idea. We Need to Talk About Kevin, really delves into what parent do when a kid gets broken.
Only if you raise him to be a killer.
That girl was foolish to go to a home with no parent present and not to tell her parent where she was going. Another good article from Yahoo news, thanks for posting it. And I’ll add that the statements made by the mother and attorney at the trial DO open the door for the lawsuit.
Exactly: in virtually all jurisdictions, a criminal act by somebody breaks the chain of causation in a torts case; i.e., it was his criminal conduct, not his parents’ negligence, which proximately caused the death.
If parents could be fully responsible for how their children grow up, siblings would be nearly identical. I have three daughters and they have vastly different personalities.
This father has a valid complaint but not, I think, with the parents of the killer.
Yes.
Instead the punk got 17 years. He’ll be out before he’s 35. Somebody else will have to put society out of his misery.
That’s ridiculous. Many children endure abuse at the hands of their parents and never turn into killers. I mean, some people go crazy because their parents get divorced and feel “rejected”. Take Jeffery Dahmer, for example. Should his parents have been arrested because Dahmer felt “abandoned” and decided to kill people as a result?
Short answer: no.
Long answer: nnnnnnoooooooooooo.
I wouldn’t sue anyone if it were my daughter but I would ensure if I could that the killer did not get very far alive from the prison once he is released.
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