<p>I always click on news stories about children who’ve gone missing. I don’t know if I had an idea who the killer was, but I definitely didn’t think it would be teenagers in both these cases…</p>
<p>The first is a 17-year-old boy preying on a 10-year-old girl he didn’t know. That smacks of pedophilia. And when you hear that he probably tried to chloroform a random jogger a few months ago, you get a sense that a nascent serial killer has been caught, I hope with only this one victim.</p>
<p>In the second, the principals are a 15-year-old boy and a 13-(almost)-year-old girl who could well be peers, socially and intellectually. They lived a few blocks apart in a small, close-knit rural community, and probably either knew one another or knew who one another was. There was no evidence of sexual assault. Clearly something awful happened, but it doesn’t seem like the same kind of awful as the Colorado case.</p>
<p>I would be careful about drawing conclusions about cases like these, about it being an ‘epidemic’ or something, it sounds like two killings with little to do with each other. It is very easy to go off the rails with horrific crimes like this and assume it is a trend, etc, when this is likely just statistical variation. When I was in high school in my safe, nice suburban town, a 14 year old kid shot and killed another one, that same day a teenager in another part of NJ viciously raped and killed a 15 year old girl…that was prob 35 years ago…</p>
<p>I felt like I needed to collapse when I saw the news report last night about the arrests of the neighbor boys in Autumn’s death. Horrible. Does it even make sense to try to look for an answer why these boys allegedly killed with no hesitation or remorse? Brings back thoughts of the sibling murder trial in Long Island, NY years ago, wherein two brothers similarly lured a young neighbor girl into their home.</p>
<p>The preliminary reports on the south NJ case is the 17yo & 15yo brothers were known neighborhood bike theives, especially BMX bikes, which is what the girl was riding. </p>