Daily News takes the “X gone wrong” formula to new depths

The article in the July 6 New York Daily News (via Big Lie on Parade) opens with this factual account:

A city schoolteacher was found stabbed to death in her Staten Island home Thursday.

Cops said 29-year-old Simeonette Mapes-Crupi may have been the victim of a home invasion-style robbery, cops said.

Her husband, Jonathan Crupi, also a teacher, said he found her face down on the floor in the duplex condo they shared on Forest Hill Road in the quiet New Springville section, police said.

She had been stabbed over and over, and the house was in disarray.

And now here’s the headline:

Woman, 29, stabbed dead on Staten Island; police eye botched home invasion

A “botched” home invasion. A home invasion gone wrong. One of the most terrifying ordeals to which people can be subjected, in which armed criminals invade their home and take them prisoner and rob their goods, is not a bad thing. It’s an ok thing, except that in this instance the home invaders proceeded to kill the woman who lived in the house by stabbing her multiple times. And the Daily News does not describe this as a murder, or as a home invasion and murder, but as a “botched home invasion.” The criminal’s act of repeatedly stabbing the poor woman was not a deliberate crime in itself, but just something that “went wrong” in the course of his primary act of invading her home, which by itself would have been ok if it had not been botched and somehow turned into a murder.

But there’s more to this story than the Daily News’ nihilist headline. The blogger Lucius Somesuch suggests that the husband did it. And the July 7 Daily News reports that that detectives have serious doubts about Jonathan Crupi’s story that he came home and found his wife dead; also, Crupi has hired a lawyer.

Also, many commenters in the July 6 article were already saying they thought the husband did it.

- end of initial entry -

James P. writes:

Very often the perpetrators of home invasions actively intend to commit physical and sexual attacks on the homeowners. Other times, the perpetrators at first intend only to rob the homeowners, but then escalate to physical and sexual attacks once the criminals have the victims at their mercy—a natural progression of criminal violence. Thus the idea that a dead or brutalized homeowner represents a home invasion “gone wrong” is absurd and insane. The baseline assumption should be that this was what the bad guys intended to do.

LA replies:

Very well stated.

And again, what is most distressing is that it is not just brain-dead local liberal reporters and editors who use these these “X gone wrong” formulations, but the police—the police whose job it is to protect society from evil doers. When the police no longer believe that there is such a thing as evil-doers, we are in serious trouble.

July 10

Robert B. writes:

Remember when a book about a true life home invasion became a movie and both the book and movie horrified America? Remember how that book’s author became a legend because of it and lived the rest of his life on that one book? Remember the book, In Cold Blood?

My, how this nation has changed.

LA replies:

America saw those two home invaders / murderers as monsters who deserved the death penalty, even though one of them, the “follower,” Perry Smith, had some sympathetic qualities.

If the murder of the Clutter family took place today, it would be described by police and newspapers as a “botched home invasion.”

By the way, here’s a discussion about another home invasion / murder that took place in a small town in New Hampshire in 2009.

Paul T. writes:

James P.’s analysis of the psychology of home invasion is memorably supported by Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Capote notes that before the invasion of the Clutter home, Dick Hickock boasted to his partner-in-crime, Perry Smith, that “we’ll blow hair all over them walls.” It’s later revealed that Hickock was motivated to drive 400 miles across Kansas not only in hopes of robbing and killing the Clutters, but also of raping their teenage daughter, Nancy.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 07, 2012 09:18 AM | Send