NOTE: due to the depressing content of this post, we present you with an adorable kitty to look at. You’re welcome.
We feel comfortable denigrating the intelligence of 16-year-old Malik Jones for several reasons:
- First, he and two friends beat a disabled man, Delfino Mora, to death.
- Secondly, he thought mugging a disabled man who was looking for aluminum cans to turn in for the deposit was somehow a good use of his time.
- Thirdly, upon deciding all of this, he thought it would be a great idea to hand his friend his cellphone and tell him “Hey, I’m going to beat the ever-loving crap out of that guy who can barely walk over there! Do me a favor and record a video of it!”
- Fourthly, after videotaping himself severely beating a guy who had no hope of fighting back, he posted it onto Facebook.
There’s a whole string of bad decisions here that thankfully have landed this kid in court on a first-degree murder charge. Unsurprisingly, everybody expects the jury to convict, what with that whole “total lack of remorse” thing, and also that whole “the guy you beat to death was disabled and was collecting cans because his family desperately needed the money” thing.
It is horrible that somebody just sat there with a cellphone while this happened and did absolutely nothing whatsoever to help (we’ve seen the video: it’s every bit as awful as you think it is), but at least in this case our tendency as a culture to film everything we do has caught somebody before he gets worse.
image courtesy gumayunov on Flickr