When A 10-Year-Old Kills His Nazi Father, Who’s To Blame?

A 10-year-old boy suffers abuse growing up and murders his sleeping father, a member of the National Socialist Movement. What led to the killing, and did the system fail him?

“Inside the police station, Joseph sits in the interrogation room with a blanket on his lap and a McDonald’s meal on the table. Krista strokes his hand as Detective Hopewell interviews him. Joseph tells Hopewell that he was ‘tired’ of his dad hitting him and his mom. ‘I didn’t want to do it,’ Joseph tells Hopewell. ‘It’s just that he hurts us.’

“He says his dad is cheating on his mother and he’s afraid if there would be a divorce, he would have to live with his father. ‘That really scared me,’ Joseph says. He tells Hopewell that Jeffrey threated to kill the family. ‘He hates everybody, even my baby sister. When someone says that about someone I really care about, I get really mad.’ Every day, Joseph says, he and his father ‘are hating each other more and more.’

“Joseph tells Hopewell that the night of the killing he woke up in his bedroom — ‘crazy in my thoughts. I think that if I shoot him then maybe he wouldn’t be able to hurt us… I started thinking I should end this father-son thing.'”

Source: BuzzFeed
Published: Feb 12, 2013
Length: 25 minutes (6,408 words)

Bath Salts: Deep in the Heart of America’s New Drug Nightmare

[Not single-page] A new lab-brewed drug epidemic has law-enforcement officials scrambling to contain it.

“The last four decades have seen plenty of whipped-up hysteria about various fad intoxicants of the moment. But the fear generated by bath salts seems well earned. Dr. Mark Ryan, director at the Louisiana Poison Center, called bath salts ‘the worst drug’ he has seen in his 20 years there. ‘With LSD, you might see pink elephants, but with this drug, you see demons, aliens, extreme paranoia, heart attacks, and superhuman strength like Superman,’ Ryan has said. ‘If you had a reaction, it was a bad reaction.’

“Starting in late 2010, an influx of violent, irrational, self-destructive users began to congest hospital ERs throughout the States. A 19-year-old West Virginia man claimed he was high on bath salts when he stabbed his neighbor’s pygmy goat while wearing women’s underwear; a Mississippi man skinned himself alive while under the influence. Users staggered in, or were carried in, consumed by extreme panic, tachycardia, deep paranoia, and heart-attack symptoms. (Perhaps the most infamous incident tied to bath salts is Rudy Eugene’s horrific naked face-eating attack in Miami in May, although conclusive toxicology reports have yet to be released; still, the fact that this feels like the closest thing to a credible explanation for chewing a homeless man’s head for 18 minutes speaks volumes about the drug’s reputation.)”

Source: Spin
Published: Jun 14, 2012
Length: 20 minutes (5,173 words)