OK. About the Georgia murder of the toddler.

[IdaBriggs]

196. Hmm. Perhaps I watch too much Law & Order.

Random muggings and robberies make sense - you certainly don't want Uncle Billy tattling to your mom about your "after school job" of holding up the local convenience store - but the murders and such usually seem to be "personal"; the detectives (on television) always seem to work to find connections and relationships, even to the point of patterns (and right now, there isn't one being displayed with our teenage hoodlums).

Sometimes the relationships/motivations are emotional - "you were cheating!" - while other times they are financial - "now *I* will inherit the family fortune!" - and even with the "stranger" killings, there is usually some kind of pattern - "he only killed red headed short women who looked like his dead mother!" - but motivation is kind of a big deal to my fictional heroes (which are usually based loosely on real live cases, then fictionalized a bit).

Perhaps that is why we are all so interested in this case - the "motivation" is unclear. "You don't have any money, so I will kill your child, which won't magically make money appear (?), and now I will run away leaving you free to testify against me because I am an idiot. Oh, and I picked you randomly because women with babies *always* have money, especially in a neighborhood with public housing on either end of the street?"

Want to mug someone for money? Do it near an ATM or something.

If the young people killed the baby after being promised a share of the insurance money, then we can write the whole story off to greed on their part. Once she "proved" she didn't have any money even after she was shot, then (if you want money from her) why not just go looking for another victim, which killing a baby / leaving a witness alive is going to make difficult / impossible?

And there is one other thing that I think is really bothering the parents in this thread: there was an entire conversation, and apparently she never once put herself (subtly) between someone with a gun and her child. Granted, the whole thing probably happened really fast, but as a mom of young twins, it just strikes me as "off." I am lucky enough to live in relatively safe neighborhoods nowadays, but even so, when I was out with my children when they were still stroller age, I have to confess I was hyper-vigilant about their safety, even when doing something as simple as going into the local Babies-R-Us store for diapers. (I felt vulnerable - I totally get that predators go after the young!) She only had one baby - and she couldn't or didn't try to flip the stroller around behind her as soon as the incident BEGAN? She didn't start screaming her fool head off the second she saw a gun, thus *preventing* the conversation from even starting? She didn't run away? She just acted like it was a normal occurrence? (Maybe it was shock?)

It just really grates as a parent that she didn't *try* to put herself between a stranger-with-a-gun and her own child. I don't care if she was shot - I *expect* the heroic mother in this type of situation to pull up the adrenalin and be POUNDING THE LIVING SHIT out of someone who *threatened* her child. I would be expecting her to put on her "momma voice" (the one she probably used on her own teenage son) and tell him to knock it off. (I use the "momma voice" on other people's children at the swimming pool, for heaven's sake - "Uh uh uh! Walk, don't run!" - lol! I have even nodded my appreciation when other moms have given the same type of "reminders" about appropriate behavior in public places: "UP the stairs, DOWN the slide!" is a favorite for playground mommies everywhere - lol!)

Again, I am a paranoid person, and I am sure the whole situation probably happened pretty quickly; but flipping a stroller containing just ONE child around behind her for safety would have only taken a split second as soon as the first sentence was out of his mouth.

We all probably ask ourselves "what would I do in this situation?" and because her responses seem inconsistent with how we expect a "mother tiger" to behave in defense of her young, it is suspicious.

It is tragic.