Turlock, California man kills baby and is shot to death by police

[sweetness]

Originally Posted by crumpet

I don't give a fuck how crazy this person is; they're like a dog that bites and need to be put down.
I'm fucked up like that; some people just need to fucking die.

I agree. An animal can't help being rabid anymore than aperson can help being 'crazy' but they still put them down, don't they? If you're that fucked up then you should consider it an act of kindness for someone to put you out of your misery and keep you from hurting others.

I completely agree with you and JKM.

[bellini]

Originally Posted by TonjaLasagna

That's why I keep an old-fashioned wood baseball bat in my car.......just in case I come across someone like this guy.

I was reading about this story at another board. A lot of posters said they had stuff in their cars to defend themselves. It made me think because I don't have anything. I have no idea where my tire iron is.

Poor children and animals who get into the clutches of the insane.

[twitchy]

Originally Posted by crumpet

You can't be that sheltered. All kinds of people exist, even hard core 'no one is ever to blame for what they do because there is always an excuse' types. They may not be the majority, but they do exist.

Neither sheltered nor naive enough not to recognize a straw man argument when I see one, no.

[celeb_2006]

Experts defend witnesses' inaction to father's brutal slaying of boy

Experts defend witnesses' inaction to father's brutal slaying of boy

(06-17) 19:07 PDT TURLOCK (STANISLAUS COUNTY) -- The town of Turlock and much of the rest of the nation was shocked when a 27-year-old man beat and stomped his 2-year-old son to death on a rural road. But what was nearly as stunning for many people was that none of the motorists and their passengers who stopped and saw the attack tried to tackle the man.
Police officers and psychologists familiar with violent emergencies, however, said they weren't surprised at all.
A volunteer firefighter and at least five others saw Sergio Casian Aguiar assaulting his son Saturday night, but it wasn't until a police officer arrived in a helicopter that the attack finally ended. Aguiar refused to halt the attack and raised his middle finger at the officer, who shot him to death, authorities said.
Bystanders are justifiably scared and confused in such situations, the experts said Wednesday, and they lack the experience needed to respond with force. They can also be mesmerized by shock.
John Conaty, a veteran homicide detective and former patrol officer in Pittsburg, said that in interviews of witnesses to violence, "the common thing you hear is, 'I was frozen in fear. I just couldn't take action.' "
Conaty questioned whether the witnesses had even been capable of stopping Aguiar. "If they were physically able, you have to take a look at whether they were psychologically prepared to intervene," he said.
"I would not condemn these people," said John Darley, a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University who has studied how bystanders react in emergency situations. "Ordinary people aren't going to tackle a psychotic.
"What we have here," Darley said, "is a group of family and friends who are not pre-organized to deal with this stuff. They don't know who should do what. . . . If you had five volunteer firefighters pull up, you would expect them to have planned responses and a division of labor. But that's not what we had here."
Darley said he was also not surprised that people who weren't at the scene of the killing believe they would have been heroic Good Samaritans.
"It's an aspiration," he said. "They hope they would have done differently."
One of the witnesses, Deborah McKain of nearby Crows Landing, said she was the first to pull up to the beating scene with her boyfriend, a volunteer fire chief who is 52, as well as her 20-year-old son, her son's wife and her son's male friend. They called 911 at 10:13 p.m., police said.
Over the next seven minutes, McKain said, Aguiar kicked his son at least 100 times as he calmly stated that needed to "get the demons out" of the boy.
"It was like I was on some type of drug or something," McKain recalled Tuesday. "I couldn't believe what was going on. It was like a dream."
She said her boyfriend, Dan Robinson, forcefully argued with Aguiar in an effort to get him to stop, but that he would not. At one point, another woman, 23-year-old Lisa Mota, pulled up in her car, but stayed inside.
"We were looking for rocks or boards on the ground, just to knock him out, get him under control. But we couldn't find anything," McKain said. "We didn't know if he had a knife or any kind of weapon on him."
McKain said she wondered whether Aguiar was on hallucinogenic drugs and whether fighting with him might lead him to hurt several of the witnesses.
She also said it appeared the child was "gone."
People who are second-guessing her and her family can "never know until they're in that situation," McKain said. "We would have loved to knock his head off too, but we had nothing to knock it off with."
Deputy Royjindar Singh, a spokesman for the Stanislaus County Sheriff's Department, acknowledged there was some "Monday morning quarterbacking" taking place, but said his agency had no problem with the actions of the witnesses.
"Your headlights are shining on a person taking the life out of an infant, and not just shaking and slapping but punching and kicking," Singh said. "Everybody reacts differently."
Sheriff's investigators are still trying to determine why Aguiar, a grocery store worker who recently split up from his schoolteacher wife, killed his son so savagely. The boy's name still has not been released.
Investigators have learned that Aguiar left his home near downtown Turlock before the beating, but they don't know why he drove about 10 miles into an area of corn fields and dairy ranches, Singh said. He said investigators had found no evidence of drug use at Aguiar's house or in his pickup truck, though results of toxicology tests have not yet come back.
Aguiar's wife, who was in Southern California at the time of the slaying, and others have told investigators that Aguiar "wasn't acting differently than how he normally acts," Singh said. Aguiar's family members, who live in Mexico, were traveling to Stanislaus County to talk to deputies, Singh said.
"As of right now," Singh said, "nobody's saying he was having problems at all. It's baffling. It sounds like there was nothing anyone could have done."

[Charlotte]

Originally Posted by crumpet

You can't be that sheltered. All kinds of people exist, even hard core 'no one is ever to blame for what they do because there is always an excuse' types. They may not be the majority, but they do exist.

I don't believe looking for a reason is the same as looking for an excuse. I look for reasons, but that doesn't mean i'm anti-punishment or that i think the crime is justified.

The police did absolutely the right thing, no doubt about that.

I'm not particularly against the death penalty anymore than i'm for it. I do agree, on one hand, that if a person is rabid then they need putting down. On the other hand i believe that killing isn't punishment, because all it gives the criminal is oblivion, whereas the victim's family has to live with the consequences every day of their life. So i'm undecided.

[buttmunch]

Well, I'm a bleeding heart liberal who is adamantly opposed to the death penalty but I also understand that there are situations where deadly action needs to be taken and this is one of them. I also figure the guy was a loon and probably fell through the cracks in teh system. It doesn't excuse what he did but gives an explanation.

[AliceInWonderland]

^ this from someone whos farts were killing tons of innocent flies yesterday!

[Sarzy]

Sheriff's investigators are still trying to determine why Aguiar, a grocery store worker who recently split up from his schoolteacher wife, killed his son so savagely.

Well, I think that could be a clue as to why he did it. There have been loads of cases of fathers murdering their kids to get back at their ex partners.