According to prosecutors, 17-year-old Jason Beckman, who suffers from Asperger’s, shot his father in the face with a shotgun, allegedly because the father had made a joke about Megan Fox. The offending joke? The father supposedly told the son “you wouldn’t know what to do with that.”
Jeez, that’s barely even a joke.
Jason Beckman, on trial for killing his politician father in April 2009, confided to fellow jail inmates that just before the shooting, the young man had asked his father about the raven-haired Transformers star.
“His father told him he wouldn’t know what to do with that,” the inmate, Michael Nistal, told Miami-Dade jurors.
Beckman, who prosecutors say talked openly for years about hating his father, grew enraged. “So he went and got a shotgun and blew his head off. He missed his head and shot his face and part of his neck,” the inmate said.
As the inmate testified, Miami-Dade prosecutor Gail Levine showed jurors a glamour shot of Fox.
That’s good lawyering. Clearly the most effective visual aid in this situation was a picture of Megan Fox. How else would the jury understand the gravity of murder without a picture of Megan Fox? “And now, I shall illustrate the defendant’s guilt with a 12 gifs of Kate Upton jiggling.” Nice going there, Buzzfeed S. Lideshow, Esq.
Beckman, 21, is accused of fatally shooting Jay Beckman, a South Miami city commissioner, as he showered inside their house in April 2009. Prosecutors say Beckman, then 17, also admitted to a neighbor that he planned to one day use the shotgun to kill his dad.
He is charged with first-degree murder. Defense attorneys have suggested that the shooting was accidental. [MiamiHerald]
You can read about all this and more in my new book, “The World is Terrible and People Are the Worst.”
At the very least, I think we can all agree that we need an injunction against the release of any and all Transformers movies to keep this from ever happening again.
[photo from Miami-Dade Corrections via NBC Miami]