Today several readers sent me links to a story about a terrible, senseless crime which took place in Sheboygan WI, where two 13-year-old boys are accused of using a hatchet and a hammer to murder the great-grandmother of one of the suspects. The prosecutor is saying the murder was premeditated and carried out so the boys could ransack the grandmother’s house in search of money and valuables. He has charged the boys as adults with first-degree intentional homicide and set their bond at $1 million each—thus proving that he is probably as brain dead as the two suspects.
“It made it onto German TV today,” Wolfgang wrote. “If true, it’s one of the worst cases I have heard of. We don’t have such cases here in Germany—and we’re not as religious as citizens in the US. I wonder why this is happening only in the US? What’s happening with that society? What’s happening to American kids?”
I’m going to address the questions Wolfgang is raising, but I’ve got to warn you I’m in a very cranky mood. I’m late in publishing this post because I crashed and burned in the early evening from too little sleep and too much nonsense in my day, and I’ve just awakened in the middle of the night from a five hour nap in no mood to suffer fools—and I sense there are a lot of them in Sheboygan.
(So if you’re in no mood for attitude, just skip this post and come back tomorrow.)
Before any opinion, though, let’s first look at the basic facts.
The murder happened a week ago today, on Monday 17 September. The victim was 78-year-old Barbara Olsen. The suspects are Mrs. Olsen’s great-grandson Antonio Barbeau and his friend Nathan Paape, both age 13. Mrs. Olsen’s body was not discovered until Wednesday 19 September, when it was found by a relative in a pool of blood in the garage.
According to the criminal complaint, Paape told police that on Monday, Barbeau told him that they were going to his great-grandmother’s home to kill her and get some money. Paape armed himself with a hammer, while Barbeau had a hatchet, which they hid in their clothing. Paape’s mother gave the boys a ride to Olsen’s home.
Upon arrival, the teens entered the house through an unlocked door to the attached garage. What happened next is unclear, but when Olsen warned Barbeau that she was going to call his mother, Barbeau struck his great-grandmother in the head with the blunt end of the hatchet and knocked her to the floor. Barbeau then delivered several more blows as Olsen tried to cover her head, groaning and pleading for him to stop.
Paape then hit Olsen twice with the hammer, and Barbeau used the sharp end of his weapon to strike Olsen in the head, driving the blade into her skull with such force that it took both boys to pull it out
Once the teens realized Olsen was dead, they dragged her body to the car, leaving a trail of blood through the house. They tried to load Olsen into the trunk of the vehicle but failed, so they left her body in the garage. According to Paape, he and Barbeau then re-entered the house and stole several items, including a purse, loose change, and jewelry. Then they got into Olsen’s car and sped off. They eventually parked the vehicle in the parking lot of a local bowling alley and walked to a nearby eatery, where they shared a pizza and discussed what to do next.
The teens returned to the car and tried to wipe off their fingerprints. They left some of the stolen loot in plain sight, along with the car keys, hoping that someone would steal the vehicle and get blamed for Olsen’s murder. The murder weapons were locked in the trunk of the car, along with a bloody piece of cloth.
Olsen’s body was discovered in the garage of her home at around 1pm Wednesday 19 September.
Police executed search warrants and discovered blood-splattered clothes and shoes inside Barbeau’s locker at the juvenile detention center (where he had been placed on Tuesday on an unrelated matter). They also found quarters and a gold watch, along with clothing covered in gore, in Paape’s house. The police arrested Barbeau and Paape on Thursday morning, almost 12 hours after discovery of Olsen’s body.
Paape was apparently the first to spill the beans while under interrogation. Barbeau initially denied knowing anything about Olsen’s death, but eventually admitted to taking part in it. There have been no reports about whether the kids’ parents or attorneys were present. District Attorney Joe DeCecco said that neither boy showed any signs of remorse.
Obviously there is much more to the story than these bare-bones facts. There’s probably a fat one-legged man over there right now prowling in search of background (and more cash-gifting prospects). Sheboygan is only 147 miles from his home.
Wolfi, you asked what is going on with American kids these days, and I offer this explanation only partially tongue-in-cheek: it’s the stupid wigger hats and everything that goes along with them.
On June 1 a writer named Michael (no last name) published an important story on a website at http://endoftheamericandream.com. The piece was titled “These Two Traps Are Absolutely Destroying The Next Generation Of Young Men In America,” and it describes two of the top five factors that are contributing to outrageous youth crimes in America.
“Have you ever noticed that our young girls seem to be far ahead of our young boys and that our young women seem to be much more ‘together’ than our young men are?” Michael asks. “Have you ever noticed how many young American men almost seem like zombies and find even the most basic human interactions extremely awkward?” Well, this didn’t happen by accident. “Researchers are finding that there are two traps in particular that are absolutely destroying the next generation of young men in America. One is video game addiction and the other is pornography.”
The other key factors? Bad schooling, bad food and drugs, and bad parenting.
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Let’s briefly review these Top Five things which are destroying our kids:
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#1 Addiction to Video Games Says Michael: “In the old days, the parks and ball fields of America would be flooded with young boys after school was done for the day, but now our parks and our ball fields are very quiet. So where did all the boys go? Well, they are all sitting at home staring into computer screens.”
One study discovered that 88% of all Americans between the ages of 8 and 18 play video games, and that approximately four times as many boys are addicted to video games as girls are. The average American child spends 44 hours a week with television and other electronic media, which some child psychologists including John Rosemond say interferes with the proper development of neural connections and causes physical brain damage. The average boy today spends 13 hours every single week playing video games. The average girl spends 5. The average young American will spend 10,000 hours playing video games by age 21. That’s twice the time it takes to earn a bachelor’s degree.
I would put it another way: children are becoming alienated from the natural world and its healthful effects. Parents are keeping children indoors in order to keep them safe from danger, but they are “protecting” children to such an extent that it disrupts a child’s ability to connect to nature and is actually harming kids.
In his 2005 book Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv states that human beings, especially children, are spending less time outdoors, which results in a wide range of behavioral and physical problems including ADHD, lower grades in school, and childhood obesity and diabetes. Louv proposes that “Nature Deficit Disorder” should be a recognized malady and addressed in our parenting, education, and health care practices.
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#2 Addiction to Pornography “The Internet has improved our lives in a lot of ways,” Michael says, “but one of the very negative things that it has done is that it has unleashed a giant flood of filth into our homes. Our boys have more access to sexual content than ever before, and this is having some horrific consequences.”
Sadly, the United States is the pornography capital of the world. An astounding 30% of all Internet traffic now goes to pornography websites, and the US produces more pornography than any other nation has in the history of the world. Many American men are so addicted to it that they cannot wait to get home to look at it. One survey discovered that 25% of all employees that have Internet access in America visit sex websites while they are at work.
The average high school boy spends two hours every week watching porn. American men can’t escape porn: 13,500 full-length commercial porn films were released in 2011, compared with 600 Hollywood films. Researchers claim that Internet pornography is hurting young boys’ ability to form meaningful romantic relationships because they objectify their partner.
With the proliferation of camera phones, the potential danger of amateur pornography to teenagers and children has recently become apparent. Unaware of the consequences, a growing number of young people are using their phones to make “sexting” videos and images which are then shared with their friends. Images initially meant to be shared between couples can now be spread around the world. The result is now a growing amount of online amateur porn depicting underage models, created by the young people themselves. Websites featuring free user-uploaded amateur pornography have become the most visited pornography websites on the Internet.
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#3 Bad Schooling I could write a whole book on this subject (which, in fact, is something I’m helping someone to do), but for our present purposes I’ll keep this super-short.
Since the inception of the public schools in the late 1840s, the purpose of the schools has not been education but social control. From the beginning they were based on the Prussian model, which was designed to turn out obedient workers, soldiers, and bureaucrats. With each successive wave of immigrants to the US, the public schools became more repressive as the Protestant power elite sought to suppress dangerous new ideas and shape the teeming masses into a cheap and compliant workforce—and later, into a “consumer” market that buys whatever it’s told.
Today the schools are governed by “zero-tolerance” policies and patrolled by police armed with pepper spray and Tasers. Nonconformists and other troublemakers discover that the schools are big intake drains in a school-to-prison pipeline that is creating a gigantic population of prison slave laborers who create a wide array of products for American corporations more cheaply than Chinese and Indonesian workers.
The schools are so bad that on virtually every international assessment of academic proficiency, American secondary school students’ performance varies from mediocre to poor. American students are dropping out of school in numbers so great that no one really knows the dimensions of the dropout epidemic (though it’s at least 1.3 million students a year).
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#4 Bad Food and Drugs A growing body of evidence indicates that there’s a reason it’s so hard for so many kids to stop eating junk food—it’s just as addictive as street drugs. Researchers have studied the effects of highly processed, mostly artificial foods on the brains of humans and animals and have found that consuming high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), monosodium glutamate (MSG), hydrogenated oils, refined salt, and various other chemical preservatives found in processed junk food does the same thing to a person’s brain as cocaine does.
One study found that lab rats high on frosting were more likely to choose sugar than cocaine, if given the option. Another study conducted by researchers at both the University of Texas in Austin and the Oregon Research Institute found that prolonged consumption of junk foods results in reduced activity in the striatum, a section of the forebrain that registers reward. In other words, just like with illicit drugs, those addicted to junk food require ever-increasing amounts of it to get the same “high.”
Since processed foods are loaded with synthetic chemical additives, they are technically drugs themselves—and as we know from the study of drugs that come in pill form, all drugs have side effects.
Researchers in Holland have discovered that restricting the diets of children diagnosed with ADHD can reduce symptoms such as “oppositional defiant disorder” in as many as two-thirds of the cases. In a study of 100 kids aged 4 to 8 years, researchers at Radboud University restricted the children’s diet to rice, water, white meat such as turkey, and some fruits and vegetables that are generally considered as unlikely to cause allergies. (Foods such as wheat, tomatoes, oranges, eggs and dairy products were kept out of the diet as they are often linked with allergies or food intolerances.) After five weeks, children who reacted well to the restricted diet went into a second phase in which different groups of foods were gradually added to their diet and their symptoms monitored to see if they worsened. The foods were different for each child, based on blood results.
Many pediatricians and child psychologists who are in the thrall of Big Pharma have resisted these findings, believing that it is too much effort to get at the cause of ADHD. They prefer instead to expose children to the often disastrous side-effects of psychotropic medications, which include violence.
(Shooter Eric Harris was taking the antidepressant Luvox at the time he and Dylan Klebold opened fire at Columbine High School, killing 12 students and a teacher and wounding 26 others before killing themselves. At least one public report exists of a friend of Klebold who witnessed Klebold taking the antidepressants Paxil and Zoloft. Officially, Klebold’s medical records remain sealed.)
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#5 Bad Parenting God knows, bad parents come in every stripe.
Overly protective parents can create as much harm as neglectful parents. Parents who physically, sexually, or emotionally abuse kids can create as much harm as parents who spoil and coddle their kids. On one hand we see that 1.3 million kids run away from home every year, and on the other hand we see that we are raising a generation of young people who do not have the capability of handling adult responsibilities and still live with their parents. Among males aged 25 to 34, 19% live with their parents today, a 5 percentage point increase from 2005. Meanwhile, 10% of women in that age group live at home, up from 8% in 2005.
Finding the “sweet spot” of parental responsibility takes a level of attention, wisdom, and self-responsibility which too few parents exercise or exhibit.
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Folks, we need to be doing a lot better by our kids in so many respects. But if we can do something about these five factors, everything else will fall into place. Let’s face it, parents. There’s an even chance your kids are smarter than you are. It will take a little more effort to keep up with them and provide what they need to turn out straight.
I’ll bet Mrs. Paape is feeling a little slow on the uptake about now for chauffeuring the boys to the crime scene. I would have acted sooner, cut off the Mountain Dew, and knocked that stupid gang-banger hat off my son’s head.
Wiggers in Sheboygan. How ridiculous. It makes me cranky as hell.
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Groove of the Day
Listen to Paul Lynde, Marijane Maricle in Bye Bye Birdie performing “Kids!”
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(postscript)
Please be sure to read Frank Manning’s insightful comment to this post.
(post-postscript)
On August 12, 2013, 14-year-old Antonio Barbeau was sentenced to life in prison for killing his great-grandmother 78-year-old Barbara Olsen. Barbeau will be eligible for parole in 36 years when he’ll be 50 years old.
Barbeau’s friend Nathan Paape was convicted of murder on June 20 for helping in this attack. He was sentenced on August 13, a day after Barbeau. Like Barbeau, 14-year-old Nathan Paape was sentenced to life in prison; however his eligibility for parole is five years earlier than Barbeau, on December 2, 2043, his 45th birthday.
“Mr. Paape is the follower in this case,” Judge Timothy van Akkeren said. “I do find there is less culpability.”
Paape and Barbeau were convicted of first-degree intentional homicide, but they can’t be sentenced to life in prison without parole because of their ages.
I’m half-Italian, on my mother’s side. Grandma was from Bari. Grandpa was from Calabria, having left the town of Sersale for Brooklyn in 1906. In mia famiglia when you get really mad about something you erupt. You bellow curses (in Italian for better effect), you jump up and down, turn bright red, gesticulate wildly. If the cause of the rage is especially outrageous you throw things. The reason for this uninhibited display is not to harm anyone or to communicate a volatile stream of emotions to an audience. It’s to rid yourself of the corrosive mix of anger, sadness, frustration, disappointment, and betrayal that you feel when something has savaged your sense of what’s right and fair and just.
I can’t get the image out of my head of James utterly alone in a locked prison cell far removed from any friendly soul. I’m hoping he doesn’t feel utterly abandoned as well. That’s not the case, of course—we’re all out here for him. Hope he can feel the vibes. I set up the phone account so he can call me from where he is now. I don’t know if or when they will let him call out. I do know that you do not need to be approved by the prison before writing to him.
