Not a “sudden” savage, but a known threat

Several days ago we had a post on the murder of 92 year old Thelma Steele, a white woman living in Prince George’s County, Maryland, by her neighbor and special friend, 15 year old William Fitts, the black adopted son of a white family. I characterized the murder as “sudden savage syndrome,” i.e., a sudden outbreak of murderous violence by a person who previously had shown no such tendencies. One of the reasons I said this was that the Washington Post article on the murder minimized William’s behavior problems, quoting his 42 year old white adoptive brother to the effect that William “took money from his parents and occasionally lied, but he had never been in any serious trouble.” A reader informs us that the special Seventh Day Adventist school that William was attending at the time of the murder, Miracle Meadows, was in fact the only school in the Adventist system for “aggressive” youth, and is very expensive, especially for a family of modest means like the Fittses. She says there were less expensive Adventist schools he could have attended. She concludes that the reason he was sent to Miracle Meadows was that he was seen as a threat and that his family and teachers were afraid of him.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 25, 2011 06:38 PM | Send