Two 12-year-olds are being tried as adults for stabbing their friend 19 times, including in the heart. Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier face up to 65 years in prison after carrying through with a plan to sacrifice their friend to an internet myth known as Slender Man. Their victim, Victoria Mendez, was a millimeter away from death.
The two girls plotted her murder for several months to prove their worth to Slender Man. They believed after killing their friend, Slender Man would take them to the forest to live in his mansion.
Nancy Kaser-Boyd, a forensic psychologist at Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, called the alleged actions by the girls extremely rare.
“You just don’t see it at that age and especially not in girls,” she said. “It just hardly ever happens.”
Statistics from the U.S. Department of Justice show girls accounted for just 9% of all homicide arrests among children ages 10 to 17 in 2011.
Kaser-Boyd said typical 12-year-old children know that killing a person is a permanent action, but that they might not fully understand the consequences.
“By the age of 12, they certainly have a basic understanding of right and wrong, but they can get caught up in a fantasy world,” she said. “Their thinking is not yet mature.”
As for Slender Man, he’s an urban legend created by Something Awful forums user Eric Knudsen in 2009. The character is often shown as a tall, faceless man dressed in a black suit. “Slender Man is commonly said to stalk, abduct, or traumatize people, particularly children,” says Wikipedia.
Attorneys for the girls hope to try them in juvenile court where the maximum sentence is 13 years. However, as Nancy Kaser-Boyd concluded, “Plotting such an action over many weeks, and whispering about it on the bus, as one of the girls told police they did, demonstrates a malevolence. There is a sadistic quality to that.” Nancy Kaser-Boyd must have a PhD in “Stating the Obvious.”
I really wish we had a society where these two, if found guilty, would face the same crime they inflicted.