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.
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Correct.
I am scared to death of this belief that everything is “environment” or “nurture” as opposed to “nature/genetics”.
It is rampant in pet circles, most especially in pit-bull terrier defense. Any time an animal seems very cowardly, it is the owner’s fault for beating him. Whenever he is aggressive, it is the owner’s fault for conditioning him that way. The “nature” part is virtually dismissed out of hand. Cannot possibly be the animal’s fault on her own!
Thus, they say “jail the owners” whenever those PBTs attack. Yet often they themselves are the very owners, who shower (too much) love on these animals and are hardly fighting them or beating them or even daring to yell at them.
There are rumblings of this attitude I see more and more with parents and the child.
Long ago we were told you cannot be racist (e.g.) unless you are “carefully taught” - by those evil parents, of course.
No way. My parents are blameless for any bad attitudes I have. Those were “taught” inadvertently by losers I see over and over again of the same type displaying the same behavior. It’s my experience. So, not everything is by what those parents did.
Next they will blame the grandparents, and siblings, and cousins for all the bad behavior of a single person. That is the logic - and where does it end?
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No. I feel very sorry for this father, but no.
No.
Look at a rather extreme example. There are good hearted people who take on the task of adopting older children. These children have no homes for a reason, and abuse and no bonding or attachment can make these younger people into psychopaths. How could you hold this brave parent responsible for such a child’s crimes? Yet the adoptive parent is the parent.
What about the child who is raised well but falls into a bad crowd outside the home, possibly because his brain is wired to “seek more excitement” than others? What about the child who is raised well, but is passive, usually female, and can be brought under sway by “peers”? The Manson girls, for example. I think one was from a normal middle class home.
What about a poor single parent family where the parent is always at work?
Nope, we can’t blame the parents unless they were truly and provably neglectful. Neglectful only about criminal activity or provable planning for it. Older children need privacy, so neglect would mean things really out in the open.
There is no known cure for Antisocial Personality. Generally they have to get caught killing people before they are locked up and they will continue offending until they are locked up.
Many mental health problems are not curable but can be controlled or the person may be put in a controlled environment. The big hitch in that plan is finding available, affordable help to make this happen.
Many mental conditions can be treated, ASP not so much.
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