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What more evidence do you need that Americans are easily imprinted then by the stories now popping up about murderers who’ve suddenly decided that decapitation is a method of choice. Before the screeching headlines showcasing the world’s biggest and most successful producer of snuff videos — ISIS — cutting off the heads of journalists and other hostages, decapitation wasn’t as often the method of butchery chosen by those murders who aren’t trying to hide their sadism behind religious or political proclamations.
Here’s the latest grim story.
OLDSMAR, FL (WFLA) -A man has been arrested for murder after deputies say he
decapitated his mother at the family’s Oldsmar home on New Year’s Eve, all because of a chore he didn’t want to complete.
The County Sheriff’s Office has charged 23-year-old Christian Jose Gomez of 1924 Sheffield Court in Oldsmar with first-degree murder.
Investigators responded to the home Wednesday at 7:24 p.m. where they found the decapitated body of the victim, who deputies say is Gomez’s mother, 48-year-old Maria Suarez-Cassagne.
According to Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, Gomez hit his mother over the head with an axe, then cut her head off in the garage and dragged the body to the garbage outside the home.
The Sheriff says Gomez had been planning his mother’s murder for two days.
According to investigators, Gomez was angry over his mother “nagging” to put boxes away in the attic.
Hey, that explains it, doesn’t it?
If nagging was a justification for slicing someone’s head off, there would be an awful lot of mothers of teens and adults lying around with a big empty spaces between their shoulders.
What has changed is the societal imprinting: people see news and images and even go to the Internet and watch videos of beheadings and now it’s planted in their minds as a way to do things.
FOOTNOTE: To be sure, Al Qaeda after 9/11 did some high profile beheadings but later reportedly pulled back on them because it was causing backlash. In the case of ISIS, it’s helping them get recruits. Religion and politics may be the declaration, but the bottom line is that to some total control is cool.
The stories about non-terrorists using decapitation as a method to murder shows that EVERYONE is a potential role model.
graphic via shutterstock.com
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.