Posted on 12/06/2008 9:05:36 PM PST by HollyButler
Two young boys have admitted to stoning and later killing a kitten in an east Mesa trailer park, and authorities are trying to determine what to do about the suspects.
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, whose Animal Crimes Unit investigated the October incident, said the boys, 6- and 7-years-old, are too young to be charged with animal cruelty. Arizona state law prohibits charging anyone under the age of eight with a crime.
Arpaio said Child Protective Services declined involvement, saying the circumstances of the case were outside the department's criteria.
Nevertheless, CPS reversed course Friday afternoon and said it will look into the matter, saying it discovered a little-used provision in the laws stating that the department can investigate if a child under the age of eight commits a crime.
The investigation began when the sheriff's office received a call Oct. 23 from a neighbor who found the four-month-old kitten hanging by its neck from a tree in a trailer park in the 9000 block of Apache Trail in Mesa.
"I found it in the morning, me and the neighbor," said Anthony Yanez. "He wasn't bloody, he was just, you know, with his eyes shut
.and we called the police."
(Excerpt) Read more at ktar.com ...
Another one......piece of
I wish I could tell you to your face what I think of you.....
(No! Bad Rich!)
i dont really care
You're right. These kids have taken a first step down a bad path...
To be honest, I think that the kids playing GTA a sign of bad parenting rather than bad behaviour on the children’s part. Kids will play whatever they can pressure their parents into buying for them, and they’ll try to pressure their parents into buying whatever’s ‘cool’. I can say from personal experience that there’s nothing inherently bad with playing GTA - heck, you can drive an ambulance around and save people or just explore the city all day in the game if that’s what you feel like doing. Not to say it’s OK for kids to play this game, but there’s a lot of room here, so the in-game behavior (and somehow I don’t think these kdis were heroically saving lives) would be the red flag, and that’s a lot harder to catch on to.
Though, I think the reason that the Sheriff is seeking help is that while killing and torturing a small animal could very well indicate that the kids are just young psychopaths, there’s also a significant possibility that the behaviour is a direct result of some serious abuse occurring in their home, and that would need to be investigated.
Given the nature of the killing and that it was a kitten, I can understand the nature of the upcoming dislike I will be reading for these children.
That said, these stories make me wonder what would have happened to me had I been charged for shooting sparrows on my grandfather’s farm as a kid, or even worse killing a pack of puppies born in the wild. None of us wanted those pups to grow into wild dogs and we couldn’t find homes for them.
I was pretty young when I did these things and I now wonder if in today’s society would I be shunned.....
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