A 12-year-old girl in Tennessee has been charged with murder, accused of smothering her 8-year-old cousin as the younger girl slept. A relative said they had been arguing over an iPhone.
A security camera recorded the killing, inside the bedroom they shared on July 15 in Humboldt, Tennessee, the county prosecutor said.
The recording shows the older child using bedding to suffocate her cousin as the younger girl slept in the top bunk, Gibson District Attorney Frederick Agee’s statement said. After the child died, “the juvenile cleaned up the victim and repositioned her body,” Agee said.
A relative told WREG-TV in Memphis that the girls had been arguing over an iPhone after coming from out of town to stay with their grandmother.
I definitely agree that whatever decision the courts make, this person is not going to be properly rehabilitated via the sentence.
I obviously have no expertise in the matter, but I really do wonder what the appropriate “consequence” would be for something like this. They’re still a child, basically at 12. But they committed to doing something VERY permanent. Do they have any understanding for what it is they’ve done? I would think they have a semblance of it. Emotions, hormones, and everything about a pre-pubescant can run hot at those ages, but this was an egregious failure for self control.
I’m very likely just being a fence sitter about it. Murdering someone over something petty like this would be an obvious charge for an assumed adult. Just hard to wrap my head around it when I see news like this I guess.