Eric Tavulares murdered his childhood sweetheart Lauren Aljubouri after watching about half of the overrated Natural Born Killers, a movie he claims to have watched 10-20 times. While it is a titillating part of the crime, it is overshadowing the likely true cause of Tavulares’ senseless murder of his friend, a history of drug use that is buried in the articles about the crime which instead decide to imply his viewing habits caused him to freak out.

From 620 WTMJ:

According to the criminal complaint, Tavulares told police that and Lauren, who he’d been dating off and on since 6th grade, had been watching the movie Natural Born Killers on Friday night. He told police he’d seen the movie about 10 to 20 times. Sometime in the middle of the movie, Tavulares says the two stopped the movie and went into the bedroom.

Tavulares told police that the two got into bed while holding a conversation. At some point, Tavulares says something caused him to “switch mentally” and he rolled over onto Lauren and began straddling her. He says he then started to choke her.

There was a struggle, at some point, Tavulares says he began to choke her from behind.

Tavulares says at some point he realized Lauren was dead and he jumped off her and then got up and started giving her CPR.

If convicted, Tavulares faces up to 60 years in prison.

He has two previous convictions in a case that accused him of drug use and one that accused him of resisting an officer.

Tavulares has a history of violence due to drug use, something that many reports gloss over but is important to understanding the crime. At 18 he already had two convictions for drugs and had resisted an officer; he was a ticking time bomb. A movie didn’t make that happen, a society that winks at drug abuse did.

Which isn’t to say that his obsession with Natural Born Killers, a movie produced by racist harpy Jane Hamsher of the Firedoglake, isn’t important at all. Natural Born Killers, the precursor to Rob Zombie’s awful House of a Thousand Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects, is an immature glorification of drug fueled violence directed and filmed in such a way as to only appeal to people who are high. I’d put forward that all three of the movies are only enjoyable when the audience is high.

Hamsher may claim Natural Born Killers was a social commentary on our obsession with violence but the truth is it’s a movie that feeds into the stunted and misanthropic impulses that are so prevalent in drug abusers. Natural Born Killers may pretend to be art but it’s little more than the Hollywood equivalent of rough sex pron, a niche film made to appeal to those who think violent sex gets a bad rap. And just as Zombie’s films tend to heroicize the villains in an attempt to give a thankfully small section of our society the artistic justification for their misogyny, anger and self-loathing, Natural Born Killers shows audiences a wider world that deserves to have the two main characters attack it. That presentation is designed to appeal to the Eric Tavulareses of the world.

The movie didn’t cause him to murder Lauren, but his love of the movie was a by-product of his devolving personality and drug addiction. Just as you can judge people who think Jackson Pollack was a genius as bleating art groupies who form their opinions by reading the Village Voice, a person who can sit through Killers twice, much less 10-20 times, is probably picturing himself in the Woody Harrelson role and has some issues with the rest of us.

Smoking Gun has the police report. JS Online has another take. Mahalo already has a very handy quick reference.