This story is absolutely awful. I think drug users are inherently dangerous to those around them (just as drunks are) so legalization advocates will need to explain to me why a case like this would have ended better if drug prohibition ended:
BAKERSFIELD, Calif. — “It was pretty bizarre,” said neighbor Ramon Rodriguez.
Rodriguez was one of the first to discover 34-year-old Angelo Mendoza on April 28 after police said Mendoza bit an eyeball out of his 4-year-old son’s face and ate it.
“The guy was crazy. Real bug-eyed; he had to be on drugs,” said Rodriguez.
Court documents said neighbors checked on Mendoza’s son, Angelo Jr., after they noticed the father acting nervously and fleeing from his east Bakersfield apartment in his wheelchair. Inside, they found little Angelo naked and bleeding. Police said the boy had numerous bites to his hands and his eyes were swollen shut. Doctors said the boy’s left eye and muscle were completely missing. His other eye was mutilated beyond repair. The boy told them, “My daddy ate my eyes out.” Rodriguez said meanwhile Mendoza approached him at a neighbor’s vacant house down the street.
Rodriguez said the boy’s father wheeled himself into the front yard and asked Rodriguez to play with him and a pet dog. He was wearing boxers and a sweater. When Rodriguez refused, Mendoza got off his wheelchair and dragged himself into a back yard, where he found an ax.
By then Mendoza had stripped naked. He chained himself to a tree in the back yard and began hacking at his leg with a pickax while yelling incoherently.
“He told me to look into the sun and pray with him. I was kinda scared for a minute,” said Rodriguez.
Then Rodriguez jumped on Mendoza and wrestled the ax away.
Rodriguez goes on to say he would have let this degenerate hack himself to death had he known what had happened to that poor little boy.
The “let’s stare at the sun and pray” thing is interesting (to Comparative Religion nerds like me) because although it’s likely just the drugs talking California is home to a resurgent Aztec style folk religion movement. Asatruar from the area have often noted this, most famously Stephen McNallen whose short essay on the subject was gleefully reprinted by pro-Aztlan racists as evidence of their ancestral demon gods (like Tlaloc to whom children were tortured to death in a gruesomely evil festival called Atlcahualo) are overtaking Christianity/Paganism/Afro-diaspora religions (like Voodoo and Santeria) the latter two of which have enjoyed decades of prosperity on the West Coast.
Clearly drugs and babies don’t mix, and if you throw Chicano nationalist Aztec revivalism into the mix you have a recipe for disaster. It is more likely though that this fiend was working purely off the drugs and whatever fevered dream of Lovecraftian horror they produced. In any case the idea that decriminalizing drug use as a way to lesson crime clearly ignores the truth about drug users and how much damage they inflict on those around them, sometimes literally. Had he had an intervention of some type before this, his boy would never have went through this.
Update: Via Dreamin’ Demon we have a video report that does the seemingly impossible. It makes the story seem worse.
Stick with it until the end where they talk about the fathers long history of criminality including charges of Cruelty to a Child in the recent past. Worse, the child’s mother showed up before the assault and was begged by the child to take him away because he was terrified of his degenerate father. She left him there obviously:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsSSpPZbFtY[/youtube]
Update: Via StephenLoneWolf another report with an interview with Mendoza
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3fuuj3d1YY[/youtube]
