Texas, not Florida, this time:
… Investigators said the father accused in the shooting woke up to find McCormick in his 16-year-old daughter’s bedroom.
According to detectives, his 16-year-old daughter let McCormick in the house and snuck him into her bedroom.
Her younger brother went to say good night and saw two feet sticking out under the bed, detectives said. He then went to get his father.
The father walked in and asked questions, but his daughter claimed to not know McCormick. The father then called 911, but an argument ensued with the teenage boy.
The father told deputies that McCormick dropped his hands as if to grab something, so the man opened fire. The teen died at the scene…
Lemonade from lemons, I guess we’ve got a new-millenium replacement for that old parental warning about the little dog on the railroad tracks. Do kids these days know about railroad tracks?
YellowJournalism
Will be interesting to see where this one goes since the daughter did give the boy permission to be in the house, despite lying about it to her father. Plus, there’s some sketchiness about the timeline…oh, wait…Texas. He’ll get off.
(Edited for state accuracy.)
MoeLarryAndJesus
Texass. Where America keeps its sphincter and most of its assholes.
NotMax
Why the British spelling?
? Martin
I’m 45 and I don’t know about railroad tracks.
? Martin
@YellowJournalism:
Of course he will. He didn’t miss.
JGabriel
Off-topic, but over on the Newsmax sidebar BJ sports, the top headline reads: Third of Uninsured Refuse to Buy Obamacare.
Translation: Two-Thirds Uninsured Now Have Health Insurance Thanks To Obamacare, Remaining Third Are Clueless Idiots Or Victims Of GOP Governors
trollhattan
@? Martin:
Trains, how the fvck do they work? In Galt’s movie workshop, corner cutting and not asking permission to film lead to more better art and profits.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/midnight-rider-accident-sarah-jones-death-gregg-allman-685976
JGabriel
@NotMax: Because New England?
mai naem
@YellowJournalism: He’s blackity blackity black. He won’t get off.
J.Ty
McCormick, eh? We really should keep those Irish and Scotts and Scotts-Irish away from our fine neighborhoods and businesses.
? Martin
Interesting read on our relations with Russia. h/t Josh.
Another Holocene Human
Never heard about the doggie on the RR tracks–always figured those parental warnings were more direct.
Anyway, that’s depressing, almost as depressing as thinking I had found a fanfic based on Christa Wolf’s The Wounded Sky only to find out I’d misremembered the title, it’s Der Geteilte Himmel, not Der Zerrissene Himmel, given in English as Divided Heaven (?) in the 60s and reissued as They Divided The Sky more recently. And there was a movie, damn professor never mentioned that, pity there was no wikipedia when I was an undergrad… didn’t even know to look for it.
The Wounded Sky is a silly Diane Duane Star Trek novel.
Meh. 1000x meh.
Of course nobody in the English speaking world wants to get into Germanistik. There was that recent unpleasantness, after all. Even the Germans themselves aren’t sure if their post-war Dichter are to be trusted, or if it’s all just an elaborate exercise in boot-licking. Reading Grasse’s defense of Wolf but he himself had a little, er, youthful indiscretion he never revealed, a little stint in the Hitlerjugend he’d been holding back from us all these years. A little regret. A little unmentionable.
Anne Laurie
@? Martin: The shaggy-dog story that ends “… be careful where you sleep, never lose your head over a piece of tail’? I thought everyone over 40 had heard that story, from a friend of their youth if not their parents.
Baron Elmo
Where do news organizations get their writers these days, from middle school? She “snuck” him into her bedroom?? My 4th grade teacher, saintly old Mrs. Hill, is surely spinning in her grave.
NotMax
@Another Holocene Human
But Mutter, all the cool kids are doing it…
Another Holocene Human
@trollhattan: disgusting
this is why railroads have it in for trespassers
sorry, foamers
NotMax
@Anne Laurie
Nope. I’m with ? Martin; never heard of it.
Another Holocene Human
@NotMax: In The Tin Drum, Grass writes about the cool kids forcing a kid they were picking on to drink pee…
? Martin
@Anne Laurie: Nah. Though I probably should have as I was snuck into a few 16 year old girls bedrooms in my day. Now that I have a 13 year old daughter, I’m a fair bit queasy about it.
My parents weren’t ones for parables like that, nor are we. We’re… blunt. There are no euphemisms. We don’t risk misunderstanding and we don’t shelter the kids. I don’t know if that’s the best way, but it’s what I got, and it’s what Ms Martin wishes she had gotten herself.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Anne Laurie: Never heard that one, and I’m 54.
NotMax
@Another Holocene Human
The scene most remember from the film.
Fair warning: possibly disturbing content.
@Baron Elmo
Where he done got shooted.
/imagining what did get blue-penciled.
J.Ty
We all saw that we just confirmed how the big bang went ‘bang’, yes?
Geoduck
My local public radio station runs a PSA that essentially says DON’T WALK ON THE RAILROAD TRACKS, so evidently some people need to have it explained to them.
NotMax
@,a href=”https://balloon-juice.com/2014/03/18/late-night-open-thread-another-nra-home-defence-victory/#comment-4922424″>Geoduck
Wonder if kids still place pennies on the rails as we used to do back in the day.
Ian
The historical blip that was the 20th century has faded. We have returned to the time honored tradition of honor killings, all that compassion and justice nonsense safely set aside.
? Martin
@J.Ty: Maybe. This isn’t the boldest of scientific claims (such as ones that overturn established theories) but it’s right up there. Always, always, always view these with skepticism, not because the scientists aren’t first-rate, but because these kinds of things are always difficult to validate. There’s always the possibility that the results were misinterpreted, or that some other phenomena is at play. It was a year ago that a landmark claim of faster-than-light neutrinos was announced, and that turned out to be a measurement error. Science at this level is complex and risky.
That said, this looks promising. If it’s proven out, its going to keep a lot of people busy.
burnspbesq
This is like a law school exam question, except that law school exam questions normally come with hypothetically dead teenagers instead of the genuine article.
I’m not sure it would be the answer that gets an A, but I like the answer that says trigger-happy dad gets life without parole.
J.Ty
@? Martin: Yeah, I know enough that I didn’t post the obiously dubious neutrinos thing anywhere. Not that I’m an expert, but that didn’t even pass my smell test. This one feels more like the Higgs boson confirmation, providing experimental evidence for overarching theories finally.
I also saw a really promising paper about time on arxiv a few months ago, ran it by some physics friends and got a “seems legit, let’s see what happens during review”, so I’m generally chuffed about the state of the universe & research thereof, I suppose.
burnspbesq
@J.Ty:
God got bored and decided to blow some shit up. All of history is just the shards of a divine M-80.
J.Ty
@burnspbesq: America can, should, must, and will blow up the moon.
NotMax
@J. Ty
Preliminary results do point to fitting Guth’s design of inflation theory (which evolved from Wilson & Penzius’ discovery of uniform cosmic background radiation) and to providing evidence of existence for Einstein’s proposed gravitational waves.
Lots of work still to be done to study and replicate the findings and rule out other causes for what is being measured.
Nice run-downs here and here.
J.Ty
You people who know what you’re talking about are such spoil-sports. Thanks for the links! Snark to follow
Fine, then. They had one successful experiment about who put the bang in the chitty chitty bang bang, and the scientific method shall roll along and possibly confirm it through result replication, or maybe not, and once we’ve reached some arbitrary level brought to you by the letters p and/or r, we’ll decide it’s settled.
? Martin
@J.Ty: Yeah, science isn’t nearly as thrilling and sexy as the movies make it out to be. Mostly it requires superhuman levels of patience.
John Revolta
@NotMax: What’s a “penny”?
J.Ty
@? Martin: Oh, I know. I do a lot of data mining and it’s 94% correcting other people’s formatting errors, and 5.9% realizing you have the wrong dataset afterwards.
agorabum
Seriously: what is the story of dogs and railroad tracks? I hit the google, and there were just a lot of stories about a blind guy falling on some tracks and being saved by his guide dog.
Great dog story…but totally unrelated to the issue.
Enlighten us, old ones…
Anne Laurie
@agorabum: Not a true story, just a vulgar old folk parable.
Short version: You’re old enough to start paying attention to the opposite sex, kid.
Once there was a little dog, romping & playing in the railroad yard. Eventually, he fell asleep in a patch of sunlight.
But he didn’t notice his tail was hanging over a track… and when a train came through, the pain and shock of having his tail run over caused the little dog to wake up shrieking and run right across the next several tracks… until another train came speeding down another track, and cut his head off.
Don’t be like that little dog, my child. Be careful where you sleep, and you won’t lose your head over a piece of tail!
J.Ty
@Anne Laurie: Why does Anne Laurie’s story hate people who are attracted to the same sex?
=D
Cheryl from Maryland
Two families ruined because of a lie and a gun.
NotMax
@Anne Laurie
Now am glad to have never heard it.
Lame to the nth degree.
Not your fault, you’re just the messenger.
Anne Laurie
@J.Ty: I tell it as it was told to me… and my dad was an old-school Irish Catholic. He only dimly understood there was such a thing as same-sex attraction, and certainly couldn’t comprehend the possibility of such a thing in his own family.
J.Ty
@Anne Laurie: Sorry, I still haven’t learned what snark tags look like on BJ so I’ve been using
=D
Wasn’t saying anything about you
ETA: Or yours.
Anne Laurie
@J.Ty: ;}
J.Ty
@Anne Laurie: Phew, now I can go to sleep knowing that I didn’t upset you.
(My personality type is an exhausting thing to have…)
PurpleGirl
@Anne Laurie: I never heard that story. My mother’s advice to me was “if you can’t be good, be careful.” Her other dicta was “Be Prepared.”
JGabriel
@J.Ty:
We have snark tags?
I always assumed snark was the default setting here – although I suppose that means we may need a tag to indicate sincerity.
Aimai
@BillinGlendaleCA: me too. Never heard it. My family erent in to demonizing sex or calling women “tail.”
tt cews
That story is new to me. Have you met people outside your own family that have heard it?
tt cews
That story is new to me. Have you met people outside your own family that have heard it?
Ash Can
I haven’t heard the dog story either, and I’m 50-something. It’s evidently a regionalism.
Paul in KY
@Baron Elmo: I know! That should be ‘snucked’.
Snarki, child of Loki
@Baron Elmo: ” She “snuck” him into her bedroom?”
They needed that for the rhyming version of the story, later to be used in a CW song. Or a limerick.
Bobby Thomson
@Anne Laurie:
Nope.
Omnes Omnibus
@Anne Laurie: No.
Gopher2b
I think we need a dramatic re-write of our gun laws. Background checks, mental health tests, bi-annual certifications, and assault rifles kept at local armories. That being said, Dad isn’t at fault here. The daughter is.
SiubhanDuinne
@Anne Laurie:
I’m considerably over 40 and I’ve never heard that in my life.
Tractarian
A man wakes up to find a strange boy in his daughter’s bedroom.
This is exactly the reason we have the Second Amendment, people.
Rob in CT
@Gopher2b:
Um, no. The daughter is to blame for her lie, but daddy’s the one who shot & killed somebody. FFS.
Jack the Second
I foresee a jury acquittal.
Seriously, what fraction of the jury pool do you think hasn’t fantasized about shooting their daughter’s boyfriend, hasn’t carefully arranged to be cleaning their gun collection when the boy came over to pick her up for a date, and given him a meaningful look while saying “home by 9”?
locoyoko
@Gopher2b: Waaaalll yeah, but the daughter wan’t the one w/the gun.
dp
@Jack the Second: I foresee no charges being filed.
Ruckus
@Gopher2b:
Daughter is at fault? Are you fucking kidding?
Daughter was doing what nature and hormones drives us to do.
Dad fucking killed someone. He could have called the police. But no, he killed the guy.
Teresa
I’m sick of adults shooting the shit out of kids for being kids these days.
daveNYC
@Rob in CT: For better or worse, this sounds like a semi-legitimate shooting.
1) Strange man was found hiding under daughter’s bed.
2) Daughter denies knowing the guy.
3) Dad calls cops.
4) Argument ensues.
5) Guy makes a move that the dad considers threatening.
The devil is in the details, but from the article, this seems like it could be legitimate self-defense.
proterozoic
By the way, the vast majority of the top comments on the article talks about how the daughter got him killed, and she shouldn’t have LIED TO HER DAD AND GIVEN HIM SASS etc etc. The fact that this guy killed his daughter’s boyfriend barely registers.
Bill in Section 147
@JGabriel: Will be 27% soon.
celticdragonchick
@daveNYC:
If these are the facts, then I don’t see how charges would even be filed, much less stick in a trial. Every state in America has a castle doctrine allowing lethal force on an intruder in your home.
gopher2b
@Ruckus:
He did call the cops. Read the article. And hormones don’t drive you to lie about knowing someone, especially when the implication of that lie based on the context of the situation is that this guy was raping you, and your dad is holding a gun.
LongHairedWeirdo
@daveNYC: Hm. Are there tags to show you’re using a term of art? It’s not legitimate “protection of the self” by any stretch of the imagination, but I agree that, lawfully, it probably falls under the “self defense” protections that say “the *big* tragedy would be if the guy who shot him went to jail just for killing someone. Can’t you agree that he *might* have been afraid? And isn’t being afraid enough of a reason to kill someone?”
Regular Reader
@proterozoic:
That might be significantly due to this news story having been quite popular on Reddit lately. The discussion there has been exactly as would be expected.
ChrisB
So the victim was identified in the news story but the father wasn’t.
boatboy_srq
@daveNYC: Agreed. Unfortunately.
And somehow this will still be the daughter’s fault. Because sluts, and because she lied to her father!!!11!!1!
Plus we’ll get another argument for abstinence-only sex ed, and No Birth Control For You.
steverinoCT
…”Drowning On Dry Land”:
“My mother told me a story/
A little dog who couldn’t see too well/
She said he crossed the railroad track one day/
You know the train cut off a part of his tail/
He turned around and never looked up/
Just to peep over the rail/
And she say he lost his whole head/
Trying to find a little piece of tail.”
Albert King:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LkousIbBtQ