Interesting read. Start suing/holding parents responsible for raising killers? May be a good idea.
Excerpts:
“Where were the parents?” asks Anthony Pasquale, sitting in the back booth of the Liberty Diner in Clayton, where his coffee is on the house now, because, as is the case everywhere else in town, everyone knows who he is. “Parenting comes with responsibilities, and one of those is to raise your kids right, to pay attention and know when they’re a danger to someone else. That’s a parent’s job.”
To fail at that job is a crime, he believes. He’s recently taken his certainty to court, suing Justin Robinson’s parents for, essentially, being bad parents. He has also turned to Change.org and the New Jersey Legislature, advocating for “Autumn’s Law,” which would punish such parenting with prison.
“Parents who ignore the warning signs of their children’s propensity toward violence are direct contributors to their minor children’s murders,” his petition reads. “If the minor who murdered my daughter was properly treated, parented, disciplined and supervised my daughter would probably be alive today.”
Or, as his lawyer put it, “If you’re going to raise a murderer, you’re going to take responsibility.”
By Anita’s description, Justin was trying to overcome and succeed. “Justin did the best he could to adjust to school and those around him in light of his disability, his learning disability,” she said at his sentencing hearing. “He was determined to be independent. He got a job cutting grass with a friend whose family owned a landscaping business. He also cut our next-door neighbor’s lawn who happened to be his math teacher. “
It was the system, she said, that failed him: “I believe that even though he is a special education student,” she said, “Justin was not given the type and amount of help that he needed.”
However hard he was trying, and whatever help he was getting, though, he was also getting into trouble. As he reached his teens he became known to local law enforcement. “The police knew him by name,” Anthony Pasquale’s lawyer, Kathleen Bonczyk, said in an interview with Yahoo News.
A printout of police logs of visits to the Robinson house, several sources close to the investigation say, goes back ten years. The estimated 700 pages of documents include reports of domestic abuse between Alonzo and Anita, as well as accusations against their sons of such things as bullying, shoplifting and theft.
After denial comes anger, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross wrote, and once Autumn’s body was identified, and Justin Robinson was charged with strangling her to death, there was rage enough to go around.
It puzzled them that Justin’s mother used her Facebook page to declare that she was also a victim here. “Its times like this when u see who are genuine, who is not,” Anita Saunders wrote. “Those of you who really know me know what kind of parent I am. So interesting to hear and see how ppl are judgmental. SIN is sin, it doesn’t come in levels. Let he who goes without sin cast the first stone. Nobody on here can bend.”
And it stunned them to learn, first through local word of mouth and then through court hearings and subpoenaed records, that Justin was known to be “a time bomb,” in the words of Anthony’s attorney Kathleen Bonczyk.
He remembers the exact moment when his attention turned to Justin’s parents. At the final sentencing hearing, on Sept. 12, 2013, he listened as those who represented Justin, and those who raised him, asked the judge for leniency.
“My Justin is not a monster,” his mother said. “He is now a 16-year-old boy who was born with a physical deformity and who is emotionally and developmentally disabled. He is a respectful, loving child with a sense of humor and we love him. “
Then she said: “No one knows what happened on that day of the accident. The accident has been mischaracterized.”
The idea that the murder of his little girl could be dismissed as “the accident” had Anthony’s attention. He listened with rising anger as Justin’s attorney rose to speak.
Rest of the story:
http://news.yahoo.com/is-it-a-...ller--190558283.html
Physical deformity?
