Earlier this week Robert Maher Jr., age 14, was murdered by Dominique Antonio Richard Harris, born in 2008, and Jarreth Joseflee Sabastian Plunkett, born in 2009. The killing seems to have been planned for several days prior to the assault in the Eastridge Mall that lead to Maher's death. Plunkett did the actual killing, with Harris slamming Maher to the ground beforehand.
The technical origin of the fight was that Maher had called Plunkett and Harris "freaks" during Spring Break (something that didn't exist when I was in school) and that enraged the two of them. He called them that has they went into a porta potty at a local park together, which is odd, but insulting them wasn't very smart. This raises the specter of the Matthew Shepherd killing, which had elements which never really seemed to be accurately reported. More likely, however, in the exaggerated juvenile maleness of the rootless and (I'll bet) fatherless mid teenage boy, that was an implied insult that had to be addressed.
Maher never seems to have gotten in a single punch in the assault. The two assailants, who had stolen their weapons along with Red Bulls and candy that day, acted in such a fashion that, whether Harris intended it or not, gave Plunkett the opportunity to viciously knife him.
There's no reason here, we'd note, to use the classic "alleged" assault language. The two teenage boys killed the third. They're going to be tried as adults. They ought o be put away, forever.
But what else does this event tell us?
Casper's a rough town.
One thing that I saw soon after the murder was a comment by somebody on Facebook noting how they have moved from New Mexico, where their son had been knifed in a fight, to Casper under the belief that this was a quite safe town.
In another context, we've already spoken about immigrants into the state being delusional about it, and this is one such instance. Casper has never been a nice town.
Casper was founded in 1887, and it was violent from day one to some degree. It was, however, originally a rial stop in cattle company, although it always had its eye on oil. It was the jumping off spot for the invaders in the Johnson County War, which at least gives it a bit of a footnote in that violent event. Casper's first murder occured on Saturday, September 20, 1890, when bartender John Conway shot and killed unarmed A. J. Tidwell, an FL Cattle Company cowboy in Lou Polk's dance house, following a round of fisticuffs. The blood has been flowing ever since.
Casper really took a turn towards the wild side of life starting in World War One. 1917, as we've addressed here before, is when the Great War Oil boom really took off, and with it came a lot of men and a lot of vice. One of the things that created was Casper's infamous Sandbar district, in which prostitution was carried out openly and prohibition flaunted. Repeated efforts to close it down utterly failed, until finally a 1970s vintage urban renewal project (yikes, the government taking a hand!") destroyed it.
With the booze and the prostitutes came murders (and no doubt disease) but it went on and on. By and large, however, as odd as it may seem, people just acclimated themselves to it. You got used to a town having a red-light district, and as there were some legitimate businesses in it, you'd go into it for legitimate reasons. As a boy, we walked into the Sandbar in the early 70s to go to the War Surplus Store, which nobody seemed to think was a big deal. The America and Rialto movie theaters were just yards from the district, and the district's bars lapped up out of it into downtown Casper, with some of them being places were to walk around, rather than past, if at all possible.
Casper had quasi ethnic gangs when I was young, and at least in the schools that I attended, that was a factor of attending them. You were careful about it. It was impossible to get through junior high and high school without having been in a fight. Most fights were hand to hand, but a teacher was knifed when I was in junior high breaking up a knife fight, so not all of them were. In high school we all carried pocket knives and none of us were supposed to. They were for protection. While I was in high school, one of our classmates, who had been held back more than once, was killed outside a bar in a shooting, the result of a fight he provoked, which resulted in an ethnic riot at the school in which shots were fired. The father of one of our classmates was killed by our classmate after he turned his molesting attention on her sister, having molested her for years. Neither of these crimes resulted in prosecution.
The point is, for those who are shocked by the arrival of violence in Casper. . .well, it's been here since 1890.
The abandoned males
I keep waiting to hear the circumstances of the murderers' family lives and have not read any yet. I'm sure it'll come out as the story advances. While It's dangerous to speculate, there are reasons to suspect a few things, one being the killers likely had no fathers in the picture. We're going to hear at some point that they were raised by their mothers, or in irregular homes. I could of course be wrong, but I'll bet not.
Fatherless males are a major societal problem. Fatherless males that are raised in an environment of sexual license are an even bigger problem. Indeed, they're often fatherless for that reason in the first place, and they'll go on to spawn further fatherless children, who grow up in poverty and with little societal direction. A minority will find that structure in the Old Law, the law before the law, which reaches back to tribalism in the extreme. It's in the DNA.
The Old Law demanded death for transgressors too, something modern society has moved away from in large measure. I've already heard it suggested that Harris and Plunkett should receive death, but due to their ages, I think that not very likely. It'd be ill-advised, no matter what. But tribalism spawns more tribalism. The real personalities are lost of both the assailants and the victims.
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