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The Story:
Thursday, May 14th 2015, Chihuahua, Mexico. A group of five children aged 11 to 15 knock on the door of their neighbour, Christopher Raymundo Márquez Mora, 6 years old. They ask Christopher if he wants to come play with them and gather some firewood. Christopher obliged. The children told Christopher that they wanted to play a game of kidnapping. Christopher Márquez was never seen alive again.
Days later, the Missing Persons Unit started questioning the youths, as they were the last people seen with Christopher. Their stories quickly became contradictory, and soon they were confessing to an awful crime. They had tied Christopher up, nearly suffocated him with a metal bar, stoned him to death, removed his eyes from his head, stabbed him several times in the back, and buried him in a shallow grave. The children covered the grave with weeds and a dead animal, presumably to mask the smell and stop any predator from digging up the corpse.
This case is particularly shocking in its brutality. On the whole, the world is becoming less violent. But a lot of violent cases still occur. In Australia, tens of people die per year as a result of being hit with no warning – what’s now known as a “coward’s punch”. Then there are reported cases of college students killing homeless in the USA as a sort of game.
What could have inspired these young boys and girls to murder Christopher Márquez? What cultural factors might be involved in producing such deadly games? Do people really know what morality is, or do they just think of what they can get away with? Do people know what it means to have a moral compass? We ask these questions and more in this exciting chapter of … The Paradise Paradox!
The Links:
The Girl Next Door book (Amazon affiliate link)
The Girl Next Door movie (Amazon affiliate link)
Sylvia Likens on Wikipedia
Steven Pinker TED talk – The Surprising Decline in Violence
Sucker punch on Wikipedia
Teen ‘sport killings’ of homeless on the rise
Cassidy – B-Boy Stance
Elephant Delinquents
The Bomb in the Brain – The true roots of human violence
COPS takedown
Cover image used and modified under Creative Commons. Original image by Walt Stoneburner.