evawhite on September 8th, 2008
If you recall I had done a post about horrifying headlines not too long ago, and I came across one more headline that also completely horrified me. Honor killings for falling in love with the wrong person, a woman beating up her quads, serial killings by psychos are of course truly horrifying, but for some reason, this one really turned my stomach:
A woman killed her baby by putting it in a microwave oven! This is so unthinkable that my first reaction to it was disbelief. But it turns out that one China Arnold got so drunk that she did not know what she was doing and put her one month old baby girl in the microwave oven. She took the child to the hospital when she found that the baby was unconscious. Investigators and medical practitioners found the child’s condition very puzzling and could not at first figure out what it was that caused the child’s internal burns when the outside skin was unmarked and there was an absence of external burn marks. When the mother was told all of this she was shocked because she had no recollection of having done this, having been so inebriated!
Apparently this is not the first time that this has happened. In a similar story, in the year 2000, a Virginia woman was sentenced to five years in prison for killing her month-old son in a microwave oven. Elizabeth Renee Otte also said that she could not remember cramming her son in the microwave and turning on the appliance in 1999. She suffered from epilepsy and that her seizures were followed by blackouts, this being the supposed reason for her actions.
In yet another episode involving a microwave and an infant, a Texas man put his 2 month old daughter Ana Marie Mauldin in the microwave because he was ‘under stress’. Thankfully this did not result in the child’s death but the mother of the child had the most facile excuse of all for the event: she blamed the devil for what happened, saying Satan compelled her husband to put the baby in the microwave! This child suffered burns that were treated with skin grafts and she was released from hospital after some days.
I think that there is no fate in the world worse than losing your own child, so what point does a person have to reach to attempt to kill his or her own flesh and blood? I really cannot fathom this.
evawhite on June 26th, 2008
Recently I seem to have come across an inordinate amount of horrifying headlines, which I thought I would share with you; not because I have some ghoulish interest in all things horrible but because when you read something that horrifies you, it makes you think and speaking personally, it always makes me resolve to be a better person and to manage my anger more effectively.
This one I first read over at the gin blog, and that got me thinking about honor killings: “17-year-old girl, Rand Abdel-Qader, was stabbed to death last month by her father for becoming infatuated with a British soldier serving in southern Iraq.” The father, reportedly stamped on, suffocated and stabbed his daughter. Not only is he unrepentant about his heinous act, he is still a free man and was supposedly congratulated by the police for his act instead of being arrested! Then a few years ago, a Pakistani father killed his daughter for marrying against his wishes; the father then proceeded to kill his other three daughters aged 12, 8 and 4 so that they may not dishonor him and his family by doing the same as their sister!
Apparently honor killings claim some 5000 lives a year according to a UN report and honor killings apply mostly to the women in the poorer countries where they are the most impoverished and the least empowered.
Now this one seems to be one that appears all too often in the Western Media, rather than honor killings, it is serial or other psychopathic killings: “a 15-year-old girl wearing her school uniform was found in the lift of Matheson Lang House on Baylis Road in Lambeth with at least 10 knife wounds to her front, neck and back.”
Another malaise the seems to stalk western society, perhaps because of breakup of the traditional family structure and the lack of support that is therefore available to young mothers, is characterized by this horrifying headline: Mother of Quadruplets charged with beating! “She was arrested on fourteen counts of child abuse. One son was hospitalized in a near-vegetative state. The other three children suffered skull fractures and broken bones. They were placed in foster care.” Apparently she was a single mother, who already had a six year old suffering from Downs when the quads were born.
Are these horrifying stories signs of a sick society or are they just aberrations that will help you and I check our own behavior and perhaps make us strive to be better people? Your thoughts?
