14 DAY TRIAL // The holidays are close, Christmas is coming and people should be happy and ready to forgive and forget. But there are some things that, unfortunately, happen. Some things that manage to ruin your day and make you incredibly sad. They make you think about everything you've heard in recent times regarding the "violence and video games" topic and wonder, over and over again, how things like that can happen. So, just to let you know - this is not some Christmas news. This won't make you feel any better.
The story, no matter how you will say it, will sound either "cold" or "too personal". It's pretty hard to find another way of saying it. Because it's about a poor little girl, aged 7, that got killed by her older sister and her boyfriend. And people started to call it "The Mortal Kombat Murder", since the killers said that they were playing and acting out the game. Now, honestly... isn't that the stupidest thing you've ever heard?
Zoe was a "beautiful little girl", as neighbors described her, and her sister, Heather Trujilo was babysitting her, together with Lamar Roberts, her boyfriend. He is 17, she is 16. They both started to drink and think more and more about the Mortal Kombat game. Eventually, Lamar told Heather that his hands are "lethal weapons" and he's a martial arts expert. Probably he thought he should have been a character in the game, since he started to demonstrate his "skill" by hitting little Zoe. The results are exactly what you could call "unbelievable".
A broken right wrist, more than 20 bruises all over the body, bleeding neck muscles and a torn skin flap near the tongue. Lamar said he had performed a back kick on her, then kicked her again as she ran toward him. She fell back and didn't get up. She had stopped breathing, and Trujillo and Roberts waited 15 minutes before calling for help. That was what the 16 and 17 year old Mortal Kombat wannabes did to Zoe.
To me, those various research studies proving that violence in video games makes people go crazy were not something I really believed. But now, I can't help and think a little about this whole situation (which is still very debate-able, since no sane person wouldn't be able to understand that video games are NOT the same thing with reality). But, most of all, it saddens me - a 17 year old boy and a 16 year old girl killing the sister aged 7. Now, that I can't understand, accept or ignore. No matter if they played Mortal Kombat or any other game labeled as "violent".