Suffer the little children (this is getting monotonous!)
1 June 2007 by Naomi
WTF is it with Texas mothers (and one father)? In a relatively small geographical area of the globe, mothers have been killing their children (and sometimes themselves, as well).
Texas mother hangs herself, 3 children (San Jose Mercury News)
HUDSON OAKS, Texas- A young mother who may have been depressed apparently hanged three of her small daughters and herself in a closet using pieces of clothing and sashes, authorities said Tuesday. A fourth child, an 8-month-old daughter, was also found dangling in the closet but was rescued by her aunt from the family’s mobile home. More
And from the last few paragraphs, we get a recap:
[...]Texas has seen a number of child killings by mothers in recent years.
Less than five years earlier, another Hudson Oaks family was torn apart when Dee Etta Perez, 39, shot her three children, ages 4, 9 and 10, before killing herself. [Perez also shot her estranged husband, Fire Capt. Manuel Perez, in the back, before turning the gun on herself; earlier in the week, he had appeared at a divorce hearing, which she had not attended.]
Andrea Yates drowned her five children in the family’s Houston bathtub in 2001. [We are all conversant with Yates' story, including her husband's insistence on her homeschooling the children, and her post-partum depression.]
In 2003, Deanna Laney beat her two young sons to death with stones in East Texas, [According to testimony, Laney led two of her sons to a rock garden and crushed their skulls with heavy stones because she believed God commanded it. She also believed that she and Andrea Yates, the Houston mother serving a life sentence for drowning her five children, were chosen by God to witness the imminent end of the world.] and
Lisa Ann Diaz drowned her daughters in a Plano bathtub. [She was found "not guilty by reason of insanity; in the mental hospital, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia and stabilized with medication; she was released in November/06, much to the consternation of Texans.]
Dena Schlosser fatally severed her 10-month-old daughter’s arms with a kitchen knife in 2004. [Schlosser attended Water of Life Church in Plano Texas several times a week; her mother was concerned about her increasingly "bizarre" behavior; the child bled to death.]
But, wait! There’s more: Man who microwaved baby says he was under stress
Joshua Royce Mauldin, the 19-year-old Arkansas man accused of burning his 2-month-old daughter in a microwave in a Galveston motel room last week, was indicted yesterday on a charge of felony injury to a child — and he’s blaming the incident on stress, police say.
Last Thursday, Mauldin was alone in the motel room with the baby when he called the front desk for help, saying the baby had a bad sunburn and was bleeding. He asked the hotel staff to call 911; when police showed up, Mauldin told them that he had tripped and spilled boiling water on the baby. Later, he decided he was drinking the boiling water and spilled it — needless to say, officials suspected something wasn’t right with the story, but they were shocked to discover that the baby’s burns were actually caused by a microwave.
“I’ve been doing this for a lot of years and actually it brought tears to my eyes,” Galveston Police Sgt. Annie Almendarev told KHOU. “The baby is burned on the left side here, and it’s just really bad. Her hand is so swollen — if you’ve ever touched something hot, you know you get that big boil on your hand — it looks like she’s holding a ball in her little bitty hand. It was just heartbreaking.”
The baby is being treated at the UTMB Shriner’s Burns Hospital, where she’s had two skin grafts and is listed in critical but stable condition. Surgeon Dr. Art Sanford said no one at the hospital has experience with microwave-induced burns on humans; in fact, the hospital staff only found three other instances nationwide in which children were thought to have been burned in microwaves. Police believe Mauldin’s baby was burned for between 10 or 20 seconds, which Sanford said medical research shows can burn skin and muscle.
That article didn’t mention the Devil who made him do it, according to his wife who has set up a MySpace page to counter-act her husband’s bad reputation and to “find support”. Woman Blames Devil, Not Husband for Baby’s Injuries:
GALVESTON, Texas — A woman blames the devil and not her husband for severely burning their infant daughter after the 2-month-old was put in a microwave, a officials said.
Eva Marie Mauldin said Satan compelled her 19-year-old husband, Joshua Royce Mauldin, to microwave their daughter May 10 because the devil disapproved of Joshua’s efforts to become a preacher. Joshua Mauldin is from Warren, Ark. “Satan saw my husband as a threat. Satan attacked him because he saw (Joshua) as a threat,” Eva Mauldin said.
Just in case you’d like to help out this di$traut, $upportive and loving young mother:
She is hoping to be reunited with her daughter, but Child Protective Services is working to have her and Joshua Mauldin’s parental rights severed. A custody hearing for the infant is scheduled for later this week in a Galveston district court. [...]
Eva Mauldin has set up a MySpace page, “Joshua Mauldin is not a Monster,” in hopes of defending her husband and making pleas for people to help her.
Come on, now. How about a little ca$h for a young chri$tian $pou$e? After all, it’s Texa$, ferchri$t’$$ake! You know the judge will give that little baby back to her - what will she live on? Or rather: who will she live off? (Am I getting cynical?)
Body count: 17 children dead, one child grievously wounded, one child survived hanging, three mothers dead by suicide; three mothers tried for murder, and one father for microwaving his infant daughter. Humans dead: 20; Gawd dead: 0. Children are becoming an endangered species in Texas. And, in four of these cases (Yates, Laney, Schlosser and Mauldin), belief in gawd is directly implicated! You have to be insane to believe in him.
Maybe Phelps is right - and gawd is starting with the children…
(h/t to JJR. Thanks for bringing the last one to our attention.)
1 June 2007, on 9:46 am
Imagine for a moment that these were muslims from detroit. There would be no end of stories on the news mag shows and calls for armageddon from our own fundies.
Imagine for a moment that these crazies were atheists. The rest of us would be in internment camps by now.
1 June 2007, on 12:19 pm
Its clear that anyone who does any harm to thier childern on purpose like in these cases have severe mental problems. When you mix people with these problems and then throw them into religion as well it becomes very easy for them to rationalize such actions.
I never will understand the whole murder-suicide path. What the hell does it matter when it comes to who is alive if your dead?
1 June 2007, on 12:33 pm
exactly, look at Denmark, and everywhere that had Muslim riots, that went on for months saying “it’s not safe to believe this” and “it’s a religion of hate” now we have 20 dead in Texas with religion as a major factor and yet is gawd blamed? The thing that pisses me off about religion the most is the hypocrisy, if you believe in murdering children, don’t say “i love everyone and turn the other cheek”
1 June 2007, on 2:10 pm
Most, if not all, of these cases can be directly attributed for a lack of concern — even outright scorn — for mental health issues. As I’d said on my blog, people need to stop treating depression as just another case of the “fill-in-the-blank blues.” Religionists are notorious for their scorn of mental health treatment. Praying to gawd is the only mental health care they need. This mantra is drilled into the congregation over and over again. It is sinful weakness that causes depression (or other mental health issues) and only gawd can cure your sinful mind.
The thing is, if you’re praying to a figment of your own delusion, exactly what kind of help do you expect to get from it?
As a mother, I want to see justice done for these children. I mean, I see the look of complete and utter trust in my son’s eyes when he looks at me. To think that a mother would abuse that pure trust so viciously makes me ill. However, as a rational thinking person, I believe that the mothers in question were deluded even beyond simple religion. They had placed (misplaced?) a similar kind of trust in a religion (including its leaders) that was abused as well. These women need serious medical assistance. They also need to be locked away for their own safety — safety from more religious quackery.
1 June 2007, on 2:33 pm
wow, just fucking wow…
And who are the witches???
Jess Wundrun brings up a damn good point.
The clincher is the fact that
Mauldin was trying to become a preacher. This really shouldn’t surprise me…
1 June 2007, on 4:24 pm
And yet every single person here is/will be a bad parent because we don’t believe in gawd, which also means we have no morals.
I don’t know about you, but unless teaching your child to never lose their sense of wonder and imagination is immoral and will make me a bad parent, then I don’t want to be a good one.
1 June 2007, on 5:37 pm
Yes, I’m an atrocious parent
— a godless witch, an anti-capitalist bitch, indoctrinating my kid through home education to think about my values, his father’s values, the values of society in general.
Yes, I’m a horrid parent according to the fundies. But you know what? I’m not parenting the fundies. I’m parenting my own kid, my own happy, friendly, sweet little boy. And he thinks I’m the best. I believe him when he says that because he says it unprompted and without ulterior motive.
I’ve long since given up on giving a flyin’ fuck what other people think of me or my lifestyle. We’re a very happy little family just the way we are. No god need apply.
1 June 2007, on 6:04 pm
Thank you so much for posting on this, Naomi; I’d been following the most recent case and thinking along the same lines for some time now, but I’ve got deadlines again so it’s hard to post right now.
Gawd sure hates little children; he only cares about them when they’re in the womb, and even then he lets so many millions of them be slaughtered every year, no matter how hard his True Followers (TM) try to save each and every zygote…
2 June 2007, on 5:02 pm
I think that Jess in the first comment drives the real point home. If you’re in The Club, there can always be forgiveness. Because that’s what Christians do, right? Forgive even the most heinous crimes, as long as you repent to their invisible friend. It’s funny; according to the Book, one should forgive even their worst enemies, especially the unsaved. But in practice only those who drink the kool-aid are worthy.
Jess pointed out the muslim or atheist possibilities, but consider these others. Many people outside christianity share these prejudices, but many if not most religious types usually display all of them:
What if just ONE of these murders had involved gays? How long would we hear the rhetoric on the wages of sin and the abomination of homosexuality? Same would apply to swingers, polyamorists, fetishists, etc. Probably interracial couples as well, in some places.
What if just ONE of these murders had involved a marijuana farmer, regular user, or pot activist? Many americans and most xtians would consider it hard evidence on the absolute evil of pot.
And unlike the muslim or gay scenario the media would play on it forever, no evidence required.
What if just ONE of these murders had involved an outspoken socialist. The virtues of capitalism would get extra play in every church in every red state, and even the media would probably look for connections.
Same goes for any more extreme lefty; the greens, anti-globalists, health food junkies, peta members. While not directly blamed, it would certainly be used as anecdotal evidence of being “odd.”
But somehow, nobody even mentions the elephant that’s been shitting in the corner for two thousand years. Once again, for all the talk of forgiveness and understanding, the only one who gets a free pass is jesus.
Amazingly, even when there is direct evidence of religion’s role, no one will come out and say it. If they hadn’t spent their whole lives being fed unbelievable bullshit as holy truth, they might have fared better. If they hadn’t been encouraged to lay all their problems on an imaginary being, they might have got real help. If the mentally unstable were not heavily encouraged to breed, those kids wouldn’t have been there to murder. But hey, it can’t possibly be the fault of christians or their fairy tale, can it?
3 June 2007, on 7:12 pm
On the microwave baby case…some interesting updates…
1) in the original AP story, basically “stress” was the reason given by the accused. The whole “devil made him do it” crapola came later. The original AP story did note, however, that the accused “felt called to come to Galveston to found a ministry”. If I were a resident of Galveston county, though, the mere fact that I KNOW that difference between the original and later news accounts would be sufficient grounds to have me barred from serving on the jury that will try that case eventually. However, since I’m a resident of Fort Bend County, unless there’s a change of venue, I’m not going to be part of the potential pool of jurors anyway.
2) Before he stuck the baby in the microwave, he FIRST put her in the hotel room freezer for several seconds, then locked her in the hotel room safe for another several seconds, THEN the coup de grace with the microwave…
Texas CPS has stepped in and put the child into foster care, and the mother has given up the custody fight for the time being. If only these folks had used effective contraception (probably something against their religion), none of this horror would’ve happened.
Instead, now CPS has to do what they didn’t have the guts to do on their own–realize they were unfit to be parents and put the child up for adoption.
I agree there’s some heavy duty mental illness at work here…the problem is, in a religious community/context, it is a lot easier to “hide” mental illness; Indeed, extreme “piety” and extremely f*cked in the head are hard to tell apart, and not infrequently one-in-the-same. Where in a more secular context, these people’s mental disorders/disabilities would become quickly apparent such that appropriate counseling/medication could be administered, in a religious setting, it goes undetected for so very much longer, often with fatal or at least violent results.
4 June 2007, on 1:38 pm
Hey guys, I have to agree that killing your children is as sick as anything I can imagine. But I do have to say that in no way does murder EVER agree with Christianity. The problem is that some people are so diluted, and often as a result of those who led them into their religious beliefs, that they think that’s what God would have them do. This, indeed, is a mental (and likely social) problem, but not God’s doing. And, not to be a jerk, but about the statements that the mentally ill should not breed “If only these folks had used effective contraception (probably something against their religion), none of this horror would’ve happened.” “If the mentally unstable were not heavily encouraged to breed, those kids wouldn’t have been there to murder.” wasn’t that part of Hitler’s plan?
4 June 2007, on 2:00 pm
Aaron, do you even know your own Bible? Start from the beginning and read carefully. The god of Christianity is big into murdering.
The word here is “deluded” as in thinking that a sky daddy is real, and “diluted” is what you do with cleaning chemicals with water to make them not as strong.
And again, if you read your Bible, you will see that this god of the Christians does indeed want people to kill others and many times even their own children, family and friends. (But most often this god commands believers to smite the enemies he doesn’t get around to drowning or causing some other catastrophic event in order to destroy.)
You can make your imaginary friend’s will any way you choose…how convenient.
Why does this god “put life into” freaks who he supposedly knows will be evil parents?
7 June 2007, on 7:16 pm
If god as Aaron believes in him exists, then he’s perfectly content and/or willing to stand by and do nothing while helpless children, often mere babies, are abused and killed in the most horrific of ways.
And if this great mysterious plan of his that I’m supposed to just accept as his will purposely includes such atrocities as the global plight of children, then his plan sucks and by extension, so does he. When his followers use this lazy thinking as a response to this issue, and deceive themselves into believing they’re actively working to end it by simply praying about it, they suck too.
No all-powerful, -knowing, -present, -good, -perfect god of mercy who supposedly knows our suffering because he experienced it in the flesh would come up with a plan so inefficient and inhumane as to purposely or accidentally include the horrors kids go through on a daily basis around the world.