Monday, March 7, 2011

MS-13 gang member yelled 'the beast has eaten!' after murder of man he mistook for a Blood: witness

An MS-13 gang member whooped it up, shouting "The beast has eaten!" after murdering a Queens man he mistook for a rival Blood, a government witness testified Thursday.

Julio Chavez is charged with emptying his revolver into Maurice Parker on May 18, 2007, in Flushing.

Chavez then hopped into a SUV, flashed gang signs and yelled in Spanish, former MS-13 gang member Jose Molina said in Brooklyn Federal Court.

" 'Yeah, homie, that's how you're supposed to do it,'" Chavez said, according to Molina. "'You see the blood coming out of his head?'"

Molina said Chavez then uttered, "The beast has eaten!"

Assistant U.S. Attorney Ali Kazemi asked the witness to translate the meaning of Chavez's rant.

"That he had just given a soul to the devil," Molina said.

Parker, 21, was not a Blood and was mistakenly targeted because he had on red sweatshirt. ...

via MS-13 gang member yelled 'the beast has eaten!' after murder of man he mistook for a Blood: witness.

I usually skip the stories like this, but this one is really weird. I can't figure out how a person's mind could get so messed up. I imagine that he was ritualistically beaten as a kid, that he was a witness to one or more murders, and that he did a lot of drugs and that the drugs fried out his brain so all that was left was a psychopathic  lizard knot.  But that doesn't explain it, because not even cold blooded reptiles enjoy killing? After looking a bit, I think the following very particular kind of brain malfunction could be involved:
Kent Kiehl... Both psychopaths and the average person rank the KKK with a burning cross as a moral violation. But there's a key difference: Psychopaths' brains behave differently from that of a nonpsychopathic person. When a normal person sees a morally objectionable photo, his limbic system lights up. This is what Kiehl calls the "emotional circuit," involving the orbital cortex above the eyes and the amygdala deep in the brain. But Kiehl says when psychopaths like Dugan see the KKK picture, their emotional circuit does not engage in the same way.

"We have a lot of data that shows psychopaths do tend to process this information differently," Kiehl says. "And Brian looked like he was processing it like the other individuals we've studied with psychopathy."

Kiehl says the emotional circuit may be what stops a person from breaking into that house or killing that girl. But in psychopaths like Dugan, the brakes don't work. Kiehl says psychopaths are a little like people with very low IQs who are not fully responsible for their actions. The courts treat people with low IQs differently. For example, they can't get the death penalty.

"What if I told you that a psychopath has an emotional IQ that's like a 5-year-old?" Kiehl asks. "Well, if that was the case, we'd make the same argument for individuals with low emotional IQ — that maybe they're not as deserving of punishment, not as deserving of culpability, etc."...

- NPR

2 comments:

kevin said...

I don't know if there is any one thing I blame but as a man I know the difficulty of wrestling with our dark hearts. There is something primal and violent in a lot of our hard wiring that if left unchecked can lead to a lot of empathy problems down the road. Repeated exposure to dehumanizing imagery, video and real life experience can push a person far enough where they flip that switch and in their hearts accept that all is left is meat and anger. My opinion of course, but it's an awesome one! :)

Xeno said...

Powerfully said Kevin. "Meat and anger" sums it up. That primal violence (sex too) is always there, normally safely restrained. These beasts sit waiting in the brain stem, suppressed minute by minute by protective layers, by folds of soft self referential neurons that grew around them, concocting guilt, gods and greed to tame the high voltage. This allowed us to evolve.