Mother Charged With Murder After Son’s Wii Session Breaks TV

Ever got really mad at someone for causing actual damage while playing games, like breaking keyboards or dropping glassware with contents all over the floor?

This just in from the Bronx, New York, is that Kim Crawford, a 21-year-old mother of two, has beat her 5-year-old son to death after he broke the television while playing on his Nintendo Wii.

How a 21-year-old can be a mother of two, and still afford a Wii for her kids, aside, what on Earth would make a mother do such a thing?

According to Crawford, she smacked her son, Jamar Johnson, on his back and stomach on June 13th “harder than I’ve ever hit him.” She watched him vomit and complain of agonising pain for five days as his internal injuries got worse, not taking him to the hospital out of fears that she’d get arrested.

“I was worried they’d see the bruises and I’d get in trouble,” she said in her statement to police.

Jamar died of an infection to his lacerated pancreas and intestine at Montefiore Medical Center a few days later.

Congratulations, in your attempt to escape battery and child abuse charges, you now go down for murder and manslaughter without bail. How did that work out for you?

Outside court, Jamar’s dad said: “I can’t believe this.”

Well maybe if you were there more…

The prosecutors said that the single mother told police several different stories about how Jamar was injured before she finally admitted the truth, first claiming he simply got sick, went to sleep and never woke up, then that he fell while playing in the park and injured himself, and finally after hours of questioning, admitted that she became enraged at Jamar when he told her he broke the television.

“I hit Jamar twice in the back and twice in the stomach,” she told police.

Fucking hard, at that. To lacerate a pancreas from the outside takes some serious effort.

The night of his admittance to hospital, Crawford said she “held Jamar’s hand and it was cold,” and that “he wasn’t moving.”

Crawford’s lawyer, Camille Abate, said the mother should not have been charged with murder.

“The facts do not establish at all that this mother tried to kill her child,” Abate said. “I have no idea whether hitting someone with their hand causes these kinds of injuries. It’s clear that for two days she was worked over by police.”

Lawyer-jargon aside, she might have a point. But more likely she’s just throwing bones for her client’s sake.

Jamar’s family, heartbroken over his untimely passing, has called his death “inexcusable”.

“Whether or not she did it on purpose doesn’t matter, because my beautiful grandson is gone and he’s not coming back,” said Jamar’s paternal grandmother, Betsy Johnson. “It’s a tragedy. It’s inexcusable.”

Crawford, who has previous arrests for drugs and assault, also has a long history of domestic incidents with the boy’s father.

Police were repeatedly called for domestic incidents between the pair since 2006, and Crawford also had an open warrant for violating probation at the time of her arrest.

Thankfully this isn’t making news for the wrong reasons, and nobody is blaming the Wii for its part in this tragedy.