Howdy --
Screaming headlines greeted readers of Boston newspapers this morning. Apparantly, some 14 year old killed another student in the bathroom at the highschool.
Turns out that the alleged killer is an Aspie.
The news coverage in the paper I read makes the kid look like a total freak.
http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegion...eid=178138
http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegion...eid=178137
"A family that moved to Sudbury to put their kids in a “safe” school lost their straight-A son to a knife-slashing teen misfit yesterday..."
As a parent who has lost a child, my heart breaks for the victim and his family. But, as a parent of an Autistic, I am angry at the disgraceful coverage in the paper.
Has this story broken nationally, yet? If so, how is the coverage?
There's plenty of histrionic crap being written:
"Fortunately, the school and local authorities were well prepared and responded immediately," Driscoll said. "As a result, no one else was injured, the school was put into temporary lockdown quickly, and the entire student body was sent home safely soon after."
(As if there was a band of maurauding Aspies with machine guns roaming the campus)
"Massachusetts Education Commissioner David P. Driscoll said what happened today, 'defies explanation.'”
(I'll bet it doesn't -- but right now they're offering only one explanation: Asperger's.)
"Classmates at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School today described the 16-year-old who is accused of stabbing another student to death as a social outcast whose inappropriate behavior rang alarm bells. "
(Fear the Outcast! -- and GOD I am sick of the word "inappropriate." Let's pre-emptively [/size]cage the inappropriates, so the appropriate people can be safe...)
And of course, it all comes down to headlines, since that's all most people ever read: [url=http://wbz1030.com/pages/186787.php?contentType=4&contentId=292209] " Asperger's Patient Held in School Murder "
00m... I also dislike straight A pupils.
It seems he did it deliberatly as he stabbed the guy in his heart. I think this aspie have been quite isolated, knowing too little. Also it could be that the guy bullied him, which the guy's parents would never tell about and supposedly not know of either.
This article from The Globe is somewhat more balanced than the one from The Herald.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/article...peers_say/
What is not said though, is what psychiatric medications he was on. In the US, it's fairly common for psychiatrists to over medicate people so that they can be 'managed'.
On another note, in 2005, William Freund shot several people, and quite a few of us wondered whether his behavior could have been aggrevated due to the fact that his psychiatrist prescribed Geodone for treatment of Aspergers. -- I wonder if Jack Odgren had been prescribed the same medication to make him more 'managable'.
Erkolos, please don't hate straight A students... if you hate anybody, then hate the people who look down on people who don't get straight A's. But being good at schoolwork shouldn't be a reason to be hated. The nerds of the world get persecuted enough as it is without out and out hatred.
(Yeah... I got straight A's in high school. And yes, I was bullied for it.)
I'm upset at how the media is making people with AS out with this story as well.
I can see myself in that. I could've been that kid if I hadn't made one friend.
Hey what's the link/email to write to their Letters page?
It seems to me that it was just a case of a really unfortunate and kind of creepy obsessive interest in death and weapons. The description of the things he said when he came out of the bathroom after the stabbing makes me wonder if he basically just wanted to see what it was like to stab someone and didn't mean any harm- which would indicate that there's probably something other than Asperger's going on there. There are other disorders where people feel a strong, irrisistable urge to do something they know they shouldn't, and do it anyway because they can't help themselves.
So I think this kind needs psychiatric help.
The way this is being covered, though, is absolutely shameful. The Aspergers really does seem to be thrown in there just to make readers think "Oh what a dreadful condition, it made this kid psycho".
The second article's coverage was much better.
I'm too lazy to find the link right now, but apparently the kid who was killed was a pretty shy type and got a bit of teasing and bullying too, although probably not extreme. He also had been for speech therapy classes when younger. So whatever led to his murder, it is very unlikely that it was because he was bullying Odgren.