Blame The Video Game?
I didn’t know about this tragedy until I read about it on Kotaku today. Apparently last december, a poor 7 year old girl was brutally beaten to death by her half-sister and her boyfriend who were acting out fights from Mortal Kombat.
Heather Trujillo, 16, and her boyfriend, Lamar Roberts, 17, apparently got drunk and decided to try out the moves on the poor tiny 7 year old girl.
Trujillo told investigators she and Roberts were babysitting Zoe (Garcia) and her twin, 3-year-old sisters, while their mother worked at the Corral Bar about five blocks away.
Trujillo said they were acting out the video game “Mortal Combat” by savagely hitting and kicking Zoe, even dropping her on her side, which broke her wrist. Roberts, who claimed to be a martial-arts expert with his hands registered as “lethal weapons, said Zoe had asked him to stop hitting her but that he didn’t because “…I was drunk.”
Roberts said he had performed a back kick on her, then kicked her again as she ran toward him. She fell back and didn’t get up. She had stopped breathing, and Trujillo and Roberts waited 15 minutes before calling for help.
Here’s what the aunt and stepmother of the deceased girl has to say:
Both Henry and Southern said Trujillo was never violent toward their children, and they never saw her use any Mortal Kombat moves. Southern said she thinks Roberts made up the Mortal Kombat story to look tough. “Lamar changed her. He was a thief and not a very good person,” Southern said.
This is somwhat similar to the stabbing incident in the shopping mall in March, where the stabbing spree was blamed on the assailant playing too much of the video game ninja gaiden.
In this situation, do you think its the negative influence of the video game, Mortal Kombat, or do you think its the fault of the parents and the fact that this Robert guy is just simply an jackass who couldn’t beat up big kids and decided to pick on the tiny poor girl instead?
Thats sad, and figures that the guy was drunk! I am so sick of these people, the day we lose our most amazing games and films because they were banned thanks to people like this and we get stuck with pong again… i might kill someone!!
And oh yea of course he made up the mortal kombat thing for this purpose, notice how im ranting about games and films and not him… i hope he was jailed or raped or summin!
im just angry now >:[
Note: I personally love pong, its just an example, im not saying it bad or nuffin
Yeah and there was that one time there was this kid who died from imitating Gaara’s Sand Tomb attack. For me, it’s really the parents who aren’t controlling what their kids watch or what they do after they watch.
Yeah I remember the Gaara story. Don’t they display disclaimers now before the show or in the games?
I can’t believe they’re blaming it on video games. Honestly, is he that stupid and easily influenced? It’s like the parents who blamed Myspace and Youtube for influencing their kids to beat up some teenager to get famous. Idiots! Someone needs to teach their kids better.
well ive said it on here before and i guess i say it again, the media blame things in bulk, if there is a problem and the media want to make money from it they find a type of entertainment media and blame it on that, its called a moral panic, by causing a panic over something like a game/movie/song they falsfully link other incidents to the same subject therefor creating more of a story, it dies down and then they move on to another story and blame it on something else, its life, get over it. besides mortal combat sucks =]
I’d blame the guy and the girl, and to some extent, the parents, but not the video game. How many instances do you read about other MK fans severely beating up or killing another person? Very few, if any others at all.