I don't know the case other than the depiction of it in the first Amityville Horror and in brief descriptions.

In familiar mass murders like that, sometimes the killers put the victims back in bed (or otherwise arrange them), although that is incredibly easy for the investigators to see.

Did DeFeo use a silencer?

I'm guessing he shot his parents first, since they were the adults who could fight back and posed the biggest physical threat to him carrying out his plan. (Parents will almost all of the time fight to the death to protect their kids in a situation like this.)

I'm reading the ages of the other child victims as: Dawn (18), Allison (13), Marc (12), and John Matthew (9).

The younger children were probably too scared and might have frozen in their beds, paralyzed in fear and with little choice but to comply and do what they were told to do. Children in general sleep more deeply than adults and less likely to awaken due to noises.

The parents were each shot twice. The children were each shot once, almost like he was in a hurry to finish the heinous act, not wasting time on a second shot. Not to be morbid, but he likely killed them in a particular order of most-to-least physically threatening to him personally, which may not necessarily be by age. At 18 years of age Dawn is basically an adult but not knowing anything about her personality or assertiveness or her relationship with Ronald, I can't really imagine how she would react to a situation like this.

I'm assuming toxicology was performed and the investigators ruled out that any of the victims had been sedated in advance (say, at dinner)?

Haunting case.

https://observer.com/2016/04/how-the-kremlin-manipulates-europes-refugee-crisis/

The movement to destroy a democracy is also a reaction against meritocracy, waged by people who cannot seem to do very well in the countries in which they find themselves, preferring an arrangement where loyalty and unquestioned obedience to the autocrat gets you farther than ingenuity, skill, hard work or education. (Paraphrasing a concept from her new book).

I glimpsed Twitter this morning and saw "Dementia Joe" was trending.

It's like criticizing the allied soldiers liberating the concentration camps in WW2 by saying, "Their uniforms were wrinkled."

In 2019, the Jair Bolsonaro administration approved 474 new pesticides for use — the highest number in 14 years. Pesticide imports to Brazil also broke an all-time record, with almost 335,000 tons of pesticides purchased in 2019, an increase of 16% compared to 2018.

https://news.mongabay.com/2020/03/brazil-sets-record-for-highly-hazardous-pesticide-consumption-report/#:~:text=In%202019%2C%20the%20Jair%20Bolsonaro%20administration%20approved%20474,2019%2C%20an%20increase%20of%2016%25%20compared%20to%202018.

There was concern in the United States over this as well. Maybe the Biden administration should look at our Brazilian imports and see if we are importing produce that is contaminated with these controversial pesticides Bolsonaro pushed through. Just speaking for myself, that reckless orgy of pesticide approval scared the hell out of me.

There are some revelations in Bob Woodward's second Trump book Rage having to do with the US/China relationship and the coronavirus that, when I read it, I thought would cause a reassessment of this subject, if not some headlines, but it was ignored, maybe because of all the other bombshells in that book (and I didn't want to write about it either). At the time of the outbreak, China completely shut down domestic travel in and out of Hubei province, but it continued to allow people inside Hubei province to fly to the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States. So, while I really really don't want to believe any of this, there are some strange things.

Lindsey Graham is a lot like the character Tom Ripley in the movie The Talented Mr. Ripley.

He selects people he thinks are powerful, idealized figures and wants to become them and vicariously share their power by hanging around them and becoming their best friends.

Spoliation Sanctions Are a Discovery Issue, Not a Last-Minute Trial Tactic

Act, don’t wait, or the court can refuse to consider an untimely spoliation motion.

https://www.americanbar.org/groups/litigation/committees/pretrial-practice-discovery/practice/2019/spoliation-sanctions-are-a-discovery-issue-not-a-last-minute-trial-tactic/

Russian intelligence reportedly used fake news sites to spread misinformation about coronavirus vaccines

https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/7/22318113/russia-intelligence-fake-news-spread-misinformation-coronavirus-vaccines



I despise Putin.

It's so hard to pick but just off the top of my head I can't resist...

Delay Hitler's 1939 speech at the Bürgerbräukeller by a mere 13 minutes and potentially prevent nearly all of WW2. (Poland had already been invaded). Without a war in the European theater to distract the United States, it's unthinkable Japan would have bombed Pearl Harbor.



Accompanying Hitler that night were Goebbels, Heydrich, Hess, Himmler and others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Elser

It's a bit of a roll of the dice since we can't know for sure Hitler would have been killed, but you said we could change one event, so I'm changing it to "Hitler and his entire entourage were killed."