Crime scene tape football

You may or may not have noticed that I have been serving up MM lite lately. Over the past couple of weeks Ive come down off my soap box regarding crime on the East side of the city. While there have been killings, shootings and stabbings aplenty, to be honest I get tired of writing about it. I mean I haven't really been doing more than stating the obvious and peppering it with snide remarks. Which is not to say that I don't care or take lightly the constant war zone atmosphere east of Troost.


I was going to write about the woman and her brother who were shot, the woman killed, in the front yard of their home, while the woman's 2 children looked on. Anyway you slice it, whatever the motive, that is some horrendous shit for a kid to deal with. This would normally be the point where I spend a couple of hundred words expounding on the contemptuous scum bags who perpetrated this heinous act. Again stating the obvious.


This time is different for a couple of reasons, and of those two reasons there is a common thread that links one with the other, Inundation. The truth is every single day there is someone in the city either being killed or seriously fucked up, and after so much news of it, it just looses its sting.
There just isn't anything left to say that hasn't been said. So I was sitting here looking at the lit screen in front of me, trying to figure out some new way of saying the same old thing, and coming up blank. Then the news came on, KCTV 5. It was breaking news out of some piss poor apartment complex on the east side, someone had been killed. Nothing new there, but it was the shot from the news camera that caught my eye. it apparently didn't dawn on the reporter or the anchors, they failed to mention it or comment on it, but there it was. Inundation in action.



The shot from the camera showed an area wrapped in yellow crime scene tape. Cops were milling about, the reporter was doing his or her best to sound like a real journalist. Notice I cant even tell you if the reporter was male or female. The shot from the camera, at least in my minds eye, was so arresting that it had my complete attention. Just feet in front of the crime scene tape, about a half dozen kids, 10 or 12 years old,were tossing a football around. Now that is inundation at work. These kids have seen this shit happen day in and day out, to the point it doesn't even merit moving away from it. It reminded me of news footage from some war torn country. You know , the scenes on the news of some kid in the middle east playing next to a building pockmarked with bullets.



And it was that short blip on the news that pretty much sums up the crime problem today. It is here to stay and probably only going to get worse. If you ever found yourself wondering how a particular perp could commit a particularly heinous crime, you need look no further than the example I've just given. When you grow up in the midst of violence in what is tantamount to a war zone, it's just business as usual.

Plot to kill Jesus revealed ! !

Remember when you were just a pup and you had lofty visions of being a _______, (whatever) when you grew up? Then somewhere in your 20's reality hit and you settled for something attainable? Perhaps you are one of the rare few who actually went on to work for NASA, or invented the tampon and got rich. It happens, just not to most of us. There is a young man in the news of late, a young man who holds lofty goals, an over achiever who is shooting for the stars.

I first came across this article on Crime Scene Kansas City , and I've got to tell you, it gives me hope for youths everywhere. Just when I thought the world was full of kids content to watch Hannah Montana or play Grand Theft Auto, along comes an 18 year old straight A student who wants to one up all the school shooters and mass murderers. Ryan Schallenberger wasn't just planning to blow up his High School, which has really become passe now days. No young Ryan wanted to die, go to heaven , and kill Jesus.

School shootings aren't a laughing matter, however goofy spoiled chuckle heads like Ryan Schallenberger are. What is even more laughable is the reaction of the justice system to Ryan's contention that he was plotting to kill one third of a triune god, or whatever your personal dogma might be. At any rate, killing an omnipotent and all knowing god seems like a bit of over reaching to me. Apparently being a straight A student doesn't necessarily make you smart. Someone should have told Ryan that the whole kill Jesus thing had been done, and it didn't stick then.

Meanwhile back at the jail, our hero is being questioned by the local Sheriffs department. It seems that our boys parents picked up a 20 pound package that contained Ammonia Nitrate, (bomb dust) and "got nervous". So the folks go through his room and find a cassette tape , not sure what it said, but it was enough to convince them to turn the little prick in to the cops. So, while Ryan is being questioned he drops the I want to kill Jesus bomb on the cops. The cops want the feds to take the budding young whack job off their hands. Which they have done, and are now asking for a psych evaluation. And here is where it gets a little tricky. The defense attorney is saying the call for psychiatric evaluation is premature.

Why you ask would the defense not want to see if this kid is nuts? The answer is simple, they need time to coach him how to play crazy. This wanna be bomber is already trying to play the crazy card. He is well aware that he faces a life sentence for possessing bomb making material. Not for nothin, but life under the Feds is all day, you leave in a box when you quit breathing, LIFE. Look, this little creep isn't crazy, sociopath, yes, crazy, not so much. That said I imagine his interview after waiving his Miranda rights might have gone something like this.

Ryan: I want to die and go to heaven so I can kill Jesus.

Cop: How's that?

Ryan: You heard me, this was all part of my plan to wack J.C.

cop : How were you planning to get to him, security is probably pretty tight in heaven, and there is the whole preordained thing. Wouldn't they have known in advance , since the beginning of time that you planned to bump Christ?

Ryan : Yea, I didn't think of that.

Cop : So were you going to use a bomb, a gun, what?

Ryan: Poison.

Cop : Come again?

Ryan: I was going to show up at the pearly gates with a cake. Devils food cake, its the Alpha Omega's kryptonite.

Cop: Take this idiot back to his cell.

The reason that we see so many of these young morons of late, who think it is perfectly acceptable to shoot up a school or kill their parents, is because they live in an alternate reality. Their parents will tell you they are good kids, they just have some issues, or they were abused by uncle Joey on a camping trip, or some other horse shit that excuses the kids actions. The truth is for the most part they aren't clinically crazy, they are just spoiled and don't have a grasp of reality, because they never heard the word NO. Hopefully the Feds will lock this little shit up for the rest of his natural born days. While that may not stop the truly insane kids who do insane shit, it will send a message to the spoiled , suburb dwelling, video game playing, I hate my parents, coddled punks that think it's okay to kill a bunch of random people.

"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.