In case you haven’t heard, Shawna Forde has been sentenced to death for the murders of Brisenia and Raul Junior Flores:
Ms. Thomas and fellow jurors were told during the trial that Ms. Forde and accomplices gained entry to the Flores home with the expectation of finding drugs there, which could be sold to finance Minutemen American Defense’s border-control operations. Finding no drugs, the intruders made away with inexpensive jewelry but, prosecutors said, not before fatally shooting young Brisenia and Mr. Flores. Both victims were American citizens born in the US.
“I see Shawna Forde as someone who would have liked to have been the face of a movement,” Thomas says.
Arriving at the death sentence was difficult, Thomas says, but it was aided by a picture of Brisenia presented during trial that was etched in her mind: “A little girl, with bright red fingernails; she’s wearing a white T-shirt and turquoise-colored pajama bottoms. She’s on a love seat. It’s a perfect, innocent picture until you realize that half of her face has been blown off.”
Read Terry Greene Sterling’s jailhouse interview with Forde (from last week) here:
I know in her mind,” Forde said of Gonzalez, “I am guilty and she hates me. I know her tragedy is extremely sad.” But on the other hand, she said “people shouldn’t deal drugs if they have kids.” (No drugs were found in the trailer.)
Forde told me she’d “lost a daughter” and she knows from experience Gonzalez will feel pain “the rest of her life” and her “tragedy is extremely sad.” “I wish I could say I was sorry it happened,” Forde said. “I am not sorry on my behalf because I didn’t do it.”
Monstrous. I don’t think anyone deserves the death penalty, but I am entirely unsurprised that the jury decided in favor of it.
Warning: GRAR ahead.
Last month, Slate published an article titled The Decline of the Serial Killer. “Statistics on serial murder are hard to come by—the FBI doesn’t keep numbers, according to a spokeswoman—but the data we do have suggests serial murders peaked in the 1980s and have been declining ever since,” the author states.
Is this really so? I’m not a criminologist. But neither is the guy who wrote this. And of the two “experts” he quotes*, one of them authored a shitty, shitty book that offers little more than pop-psych analysis and “insight” from people like James Dobson and Dr. Joyce Brothers. We don’t have a lot of perspective on what motivates serial killers, which is why the criminal profilers you see on TV are basically snake oil salesmen. Anyhow, I’m not here to discredit these bozos, I’m just saying: Just because the US crime rate dropped overall and you have a shoebox full of clippings that confirms what you already believe doesn’t necessarily prove that there are fewer active serial killers.
But for the sake of argument, let’s say that yes, there are fewer active serial killers now. But here’s where the article gets into some happy horseshit.
Ed note: I posted this over at my tumblr but I’ve been following this case for over a year now and I’m getting angrier and angrier that the media isn’t doing its friggin’ job.
I’m really surprised* that so few people are familiar with Shawna Forde, the leader of Arizona’s Minutemen American Defense vigilante group who murdered Raul Flores and his 9-year-old daughter, Brisenia, in their house.
So here is some long-winded, rambling background on Shawna Forde, murderous right-wing sociopath.
Shawna Forde had by all accounts a lousy childhood, raised in foster homes in Everett, WA, and, as a teenager, became a prostitute and thief.** Somewhere along the way, she married and divorced four times, had a child who died from SIDS, raised some fucked-up children, ran for Everett city council, possibly murdered someone in 1997, reinvented herself as a charismatic (if not uniformly accepted) leader of various Minutemen organizations, was disowned by said organizations, lied about being shot and raped by Mexican drug dealers, moved to Arizona to start her own movement…the story is convoluted and practically endless.
The FBI was told of Forde’s plans to raid Flores’ house and rob him of money, drugs, and guns (they believed he was a drug dealer — which, incidentally, has not been proven***). The FBI chose to do nothing. Then, on May 30, 2009, Forde and two of her henchmen, Albert Gaxiola and Jason Bush, murdered a man, wounded a woman, and shot a 9-year-old girl point blank in the face.
This is some bullshit right here:
Planned Parenthood, a perennial protest target because of its role in providing abortions, has notified the FBI that at least 12 of its health centers were visited recently by a man purporting to be a sex trafficker but who may instead be part of an attempted ruse to entrap clinic employees.
In each case, according to Planned Parenthood, the man sought to speak privately with a clinic employee and then requested information about health services for sex workers, including some who he said were minors and in the U.S. illegally.
Where did she go?
I am lazy. If you're bored, go visit my tumblr, updated daily with other people's witticisms and erudition.Also by me
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