A 12-year-old girl in Tennessee has been charged with murder, accused of smothering her 8-year-old cousin as the younger girl slept. A relative said they had been arguing over an iPhone.

A security camera recorded the killing, inside the bedroom they shared on July 15 in Humboldt, Tennessee, the county prosecutor said.

The recording shows the older child using bedding to suffocate her cousin as the younger girl slept in the top bunk, Gibson District Attorney Frederick Agee’s statement said. After the child died, “the juvenile cleaned up the victim and repositioned her body,” Agee said.

A relative told WREG-TV in Memphis that the girls had been arguing over an iPhone after coming from out of town to stay with their grandmother.

  • vzq@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    1717·
    5 months ago

    Is it me or is the newsworthy thing here not the phone but the actual fucking murder?

    Children have been arguing about toys for millennia. I got into a few fist fights myself over he-man dolls.

    • FenrirIII@lemmy.world
      462·
      5 months ago

      The fact that murder even became an option tels of a fucked up home life or psychotic personality.

      • Waveform@lemmy.world
        231·
        5 months ago

        Psychopathy, not psychosis. It’s easy to get the two disorders confused.

        From Psychology Today:

        Psychopathy is a condition characterized by the absence of empathy and the blunting of other affective states. Callousness, detachment, and a lack of empathy enable psychopaths to be highly manipulative.

        Psychosis occurs when an individual loses touch with reality—a break that can be terrifying to experience or to observe in a loved one. Psychosis can include hallucinations, delusions, disorganized speech, and abnormal movements.

    • ripcord@lemmy.world
      72·
      5 months ago

      Yes, why would you think anyone thought the phone was the bigger part of the story…?