Teen ’sport killings’ of homeless on the rise
Killing Rex Baum was never part of the plan that day in 2004.
“It all started off as a game,” Moore said.
The 15-year-old and his friends were taunting the homeless man — throwing sticks and leaves — after having a couple of beers with him.
No big deal, Moore says, but he’s sorry for what came next.
It was a mistake, he said, a sudden primal surge that made him and his friends Luis Oyola, 16, and 17-year-old Andrew Ihrcke begin punching and kicking Baum.
“Luis says ‘I’m gonna go hit him,’ We’re all laughing, thought he was joking around,’” but he wasn’t, Moore concedes. “We just all started hitting him.”
They hurled anything they could find — rocks, bricks, even Baum’s barbecue grill — and pounded the 49-year-old with a pipe and with the baseball bat he kept at his campsite for protection.
Ihrcke smeared his own feces on Baum’s face before cutting him with a knife “to see if he was alive,” Moore said.
After destroying Baum’s camp, the boys left the homeless man — head wedged in his own grill — under a piece of plastic where they hoped the “animals would eat” him.
Then, Moore says, they took off to grab a bite at McDonald’s.
Just a game ‘eh… kicking people when they’re down.
It’s things like this that almost make a fella want to reconsider his position on the death penalty.
I’ve never reconsidered my stance on the death penalty — I’ve always been for it, under certain circumstances.
This is one of them.
A couple of years ago, three teenagers beat an old man to death in the public bathroom of a popular park. Their excuse was that they hadn’t realized they were going to actually kill him — they just wanted to “have some fun.” They had so much fun, they came back the next night and did it again to another old man.
When they were sentenced to short time (minus double time already served awaiting trial) and probation, their parents screamed about how unfair it was to send young people to such a horrible place as a prison. After all, the men were old, and would have died soon, anyway…