"He was a very good child. He's never done anything like this"

That is a direct quote from Robyn Parnell, the adoptive mother of Jacob Jett, the Independence teen charged along with Joseph Garcia, of hiring two men to kill Jett's parents. She also went onto say what a good boy he was and had always been. Au contraire Mrs Parnell young Jacob is far from a good boy, he is an ungrateful sociopath. This woman's clueless profession that Jacob was a good boy is proof positive that his parents and intended victims just weren't paying attention. I don't need to know the family history first hand to tell you that Jake was a coddled over indulged little prick. The proof is in his attempt to have these people who adopted him killed, and further proof is in the fact that one of his intended victims still sings his praise. You can argue that she is in shock, it hasn't really hit her yet, she cant just stop loving him, he is her son, et. al. And when you get done, I still say bullshit. He wanted his parents dead. If someone tries to have me killed, regardless of who it is, how we are related, then all bets are off, no glowing remembrance of better days will be forth coming.

Which leads me to the long line of recent school shootings and the killers who committed these unthinkable acts. Take your pick from the Columbine killers to the most recent , Steven Kazmierczak. One of Steve O's professors called him a gentle even guy. Again folk's try to make a silk purse out of a sows ear. Every time we hear of another whacked out kid using the school as a shooting gallery, almost without fail, stunned family and friends will say how totally out of character it was . How they were good kids, blah, blah, etc. With the exception of one recent school shooter. Cho Seung-Hui , the Virgina Tech shooter. Cho's family said from the git go that he wasn't right in the head. The media couldn't show the now infamous photo of Cho enough, a pistol in each hand, mugging for the camera. I don't recall the media or anyone for that matter, trying to show a kinder gentler side to Cho.

Cho's family knew that their kid wasn't right. I'm sure they had no idea he would end up going on a shooting spree, but when he did, to their credit, the family didn't try to paint some idealic picture of their son. And the media, never made any real effort to portray him as anything other than a ticking time bomb. We also don't have a problem portraying some 15 year old gang banger who kills another 15 year old gang banger as evil incarnate, when the truth is, many of these gang killings are a matter of kill or be killed, almost an act of an ongoing battle of survival. I'm not saying that the end justifies the means, or that these kids are somehow less culpable. I'm just making an observation, and it rings true, like it or not.

So why is it when one of our kids, and by OUR I mean a white kid, why is it we feel the need to paint a tragic picture of a good kid who just had a bad day? Listen, I'll be the first to admit, as a kid, and later as an adult, I was as fucked up as a soup sandwich. Anyone who has read this blog with any regularity, is aware that I spent time in a boys reformatory and later prison. You would be totally naive to think that I only committed 2 crimes in my life, and was promptly punished. So this isn't a case of my being some bleeding heart liberal, defending the actions of one group while making excuses for another. As rough as my childhood may or may not have been, it doesn't excuse my actions. As rough as being a young inner city kid may be, it doesn't excuse them of committing crimes like random drive by's and the taking of innocent lives. Rarely does the media or the public try to portray those acts or the actors as anything other than cold blooded killers.

This is where I have a problem with the media, the families, and to some extent the public in general. We are completely shocked time and again, when some over privileged, over indulged white kid goes postal and kills innocent people. Granted the most recent killer was in his twenties, but he was coddled and over indulged just as much as the two punks from Columbine.
Without fail, the parents or school employees will say that he was a good kid, or some other bullshit. Slowly details will come to the surface, young Biff had a penchant for torturing puppies or playing tic tack toe on his leg with a razor blade.

There are people who read this blog, and whose blogs I read that have kids. And every single one that I am aware of talks about interacting with their children. They do stuff together, they are tuned in, and you can bet if their child showed signs like plugging the family cocker spaniels ears into a wall socket, or etching their foreheads with 666, these people wouldnt blow it off as a phase the kid was going through. They wouldn't make excuses or try to fix the problem by dropping a few hundred on the latest video game or whatever. I assume, and correctly I might add, that they would get the kid some help. The pay off for actually dealing with these problems would be 3 fold. The kid would hopefully get better. The kid wouldn't try to pay a couple of losers to punch mom and pops ticket. The kid wouldn't go on a killing spree at school or some mall.