This was Tyrone Spellman’s explanation to police: He “snapped” after he thought his daughter had broken a $600 Xbox game console.
Alayiah Turman was only 17 months old, born March 29, 2005. Spellman beat her to death, prosecutors say.
In an alleged confession read at his preliminary hearing yesterday, Spellman, 25, said he was playing one of Tom Clancy’s “Ghost Recon” games – a violent combat epic – in a front bedroom of his family’s Brewerytown home that Thursday morning, Sept. 7. He had taken Alayiah into the room so her mother, Mia Turman, could rest.
“She pulled the cord and the whole game console fell over,” Spellman said in his statement, read by Homicide Detective John Cummings. “I thought it was broken. I popped her in the face. I picked her up and tossed her in a chair.”
I usually don’t use such language as that featured in my post’s title, but this guy deserves it. I mean seriously, if you kill your own child because they knock over something — even if it’s an expensive item — then you deserve to rot in prison for the rest of your life.
If you don’t know, I’m an avid video gamer. I like to play the occasional Halo, your Half Life 2’s, even your Gears of Wars. However, I don’t take things that happen in the games back with me when I return to reality-land. I don’t try to shoot cops on the street, I don’t pick up hookers in my crazy sports car, and then shoot the when I’m done with “the act” to get my money back, and I don’t carry around a large enough arsenal to equip a large army. I know what things are in the normal confines of good behavior, and things that are not, and killing your own spawn is not in the list of good things.
Let’s hope this guy decides to permanently remove his genes from the human gene pool. We should give him a reward or something posthumously if he decides to do that…