Criminal law, Society

Teens Beat To Death 81-Year-Old Man Attending Granddaughter’s Wedding

This is one of the saddest stories of the year. George Leroy Baker III, 81, left Tempe, Arizona to celebrate his granddaughter’s wedding in Lynchburg, Virginia. Walking across the street to a diner from his hotel, some teens allegedly beat him to death for fun.

The three teenagers were walking down the street when one allegedly said he would beat the first person he met — to impress a girl. Baker walked right into the dare and died for it.

The teens included two 16-year-olds and a thirteen-year-old. They have been charged with murder but their names have been withheld.

Baker appears to have been a wonderful father and his family must now deal with this tragedy at what should have been one of the happiest times for the family.

Source: AZ Family

Jonathan Turley

600 thoughts on “Teens Beat To Death 81-Year-Old Man Attending Granddaughter’s Wedding”

  1. You’re welcome, LK. DA is a great source for wallpapers and just general interesting art.

    And thanks. I could go the rest of my life without another one of those damned spider bites and it would be just fine with me!

  2. “just too tenuous”

    Pardon. Shepard’s Pie for dinner. That finger was too full to double strike the “o”. 😀

  3. BIL, I haven’t visited DeviantArt in months, I forgot about them, thanks for the reminder. I’m glad to hear that this last outing left you no worse for the wear and you’re back safe and sound.

  4. Blouise,

    “is it possible this and other outbreaks are at the behest of a certain banned player who I never met?”

    It is possible. Supposition as to attack by proxy is just to tenuous to address, but I’ll look at repeat offenders I’ve considered (plus new players).

    I don’t think Wayne has been around in your time although he may have poked his head above water. He’s truly crazy, but I don’t think this is his style of trolling. He’s more of an RCC fanatical papist of the Opus Dei sort with violence and other personality issues. He prefers religiously themed threads. He’d have escalated the physical threats when invited. It would be easier to diagnose a Wayne attack if mespo and/or Gyges were around as he has serious issues with them as well, but again: not his style. He won’t even engage Gyges directly anymore but he usually attacks me or mespo. Plus he usually goes psycho nuts when I (or the others) call him Wayne and then promptly retreats or assumes another non- or semi-threatening guise to lie low for awhile.

    The other banned person that comes to mind? No. Most certainly not her style although most of her arguments amounted to “you’re fat, stupid and I wouldn’t hire you” or “you’re a bad parent”. Still, she could think better than these clowns when her psychotic hatreds didn’t interfere. Plus she spoke English with far greater facility than displayed here and was capable of making lucid arguments. (A trivial aside, Wayne has tried to play himself off as her in the past.)

    A third possibility is the Breitbart crew, but again, not their style. Two reasons: Target and method. Other than weakly defending O’Donnell by ol’ Turdbucket the Tautology there, they’ve stayed here and not strayed into other threads (of which there are several) that would be more to their Neocon agenda. Ol’ TB is stupid enough to be a Breitbart employee (evidenced by the lame “false consensus” attack that failed so hysterically), but I’d say in all fairness, they displayed better game than him. Not much, but still better. Plus I don’t think they got banned, but rather reassigned. They haven’t been back since the media spotlight went off their scumbag of a boss.

    Although my favored theory is it’s one of the recurring paid or unpaid trolls of the bdaman variety (we have a couple of floaters although I tend to think this is not him per se – even he has some limits as to appropriateness and knows which regulars bite back too hard for these kinds of ploys, i.e. he’s been burned enough times to know better than to try this weak crap) plus one – maybe more – teen friends or family of an interested party or possibly teen enemies of the perpetrators. The majority of their attacks are quite unsophisticated compared to past troll invasions. A synergy of stupidity from a confluence of sources. But then again, that’s a teenager for you – all sore balls and no brains.

  5. Blouise
    “Sorry about the “Whales ” thing … no real excuse for that blooper”
    —

    I thought it was a great pun, calling people who come from Wales “Whales” is totally intuitive and less cumbersome than ‘Welshmen’ or sticking them with ‘Welts’. Welt’s is what a whipping with a hickory stick left you with when I was a kid.

    AND you have a blushing smiley. If I knew how to make a green smiley I would do it to indicate the magnitude of envy your blushing smiley evokes in me. 🙂

  6. hahahahahahahaha!

    what the h*ll did you think you were dealing with Blouise?

    goodness sake…..

  7. Woosty’s still a Cat,

    Teen trolls … oh god … that’s no fun at all … yuke! Get ’em a box of Kleenex and a magazine … I am sooo gone!!

  8. Buddha,

    Okay … I served my 5 minutes … I’m moving on … is it possible this and other outbreaks are at the behest of a certain banned player who I never met? Just a question … I have to go make a peace offering to HenMan … he’s in his room … I told him you’d bring him milk and cookies.

  9. “But because ur not one urself ar u? that’s why you arent capable of “making it up as you go along” are you, or deviatin from the mainstream. ur too busy readin yo dictionary son, if yo going to try to pile your self indulgent standards on the heads of me an mine, ur gonna need a loooooong ladder son”
    ——————————————-
    ok, this makes me angry…

    …these nasty little teen troll turds think that logic=guy.

    nasty buttscootin turdmuffins crawl back into your cells where you belong

    [and as far as the self indulgent nonsense goes…you keep on eatin the nasties you dish out won’t you….I’ll be checkin the Enquirer for pictures of the first certifiable turd with human appendages…]

  10. Rhubarb
    1, September 18, 2010 at 6:23 pm
    Chesty is a 24 carat, genuine legend

    not many come close

    ===========================================================

    Bet you were never tasked to the SITE ….

  11. HenMan
    1, September 18, 2010 at 2:26 pm
    turdwilligar- If it weren’t for Dwight D. Eisenhower, you Limeys would be posting your crap in German.

    =========================================================
    Shame on you, HenMan … this dude is our ally in the war on terror … show him some respect … he wasn’t alive when Ike saved his daddy’s hide … he’s not responsible for his parents’ failures … IT IS NOT HIS FAULT!!!

    He is trying very hard to be a good Marine waanabe … let him be … give him space to grow … anyway, it’s time for meds and he has trouble after meds so give him/her a break (he may still go green) … gosh, your expectations are too high, HenMan … go to your room and Buddha will bring you milk and cookies later.

    Look dude, I’m sorry for HenMan’s attack … some times he’s just too much of a patriot … you know what I mean? You’ve been there, right? I know it’s a lot to ask but give him the benefit of the doubt he didn’t grant you … deep down, he’s a bird watcher, you know … he walked into this biker bar and got carried away by all the machismo … what can I tell ya?

  12. Buddha Is Laughing 1, September 18, 2010 at 1:56 pm

    Oh, I’m not the one flailing here, sport. But since you mentioned infinity (another concept I’m well versed in) . . .

    FAIL(∞): Doesn’t substantively refute the argument as presented.
    ————————-

    ROFLOLCOMN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    this cracked me up, still laughing……..hahahahahaha

    [I am becoming tranfixed by this nonsense….]

  14. I have heard that has a helper monkey to hold it for him when he needs to pee,

    Although I have also heard that the right arm of his monkey is significantly more developed than its left arm, I would have to conclude that the monkeys activities include more than three shakes

    and we all know what more than three shakes become

    maybe that’s why he likes the pretty patterns, because his eyesight is so shot he can only make out shapes

  15. Hope this was helpful – I’m going to work on my program to estimate fractal dimension of phase space orbits now. Technically it works, but I’ve got computation cost issues with my brute force method – if my more elegant solution doesn’t solve them then my calculations will take longer than it takes to make a baby

    This translates to read that his gerbil has a nosebleed and can’t power his treadmill any more

    Oh and he only knows about the gestation of a baby because he read about it in a book and he proudly tells his mom that his genitals are as yet untouched by human hand.

  17. ^..^ = (many) said,

    Slarti, Correct away, by all means. Thank you. I have more questions. They are probably more trouble to answer than your time is worth. I’m asking some basic stuff here – boooring. If it’s a drag to answer just say ‘it’s a needless complication to even think about it, just strive for the visual beauty’. LOL.

    But I think it’s a wonderful and fascinating complication to think about – the visual beauty is just icing on the cake – Fatou and Julia knew that…

    The infinite coastline aspect I’m familiar with. The use of fractal images to fill in areas of maps for which data did not exist (mountainous regions, coastlines) was something being explored by a previous employer of mine. I stuck my head into a presentation being given to a group of cartographers on the subject of this ‘revolutionary, new tool’ but left after a short period. The presentation was so dry and uninteresting that even a hard core, motivated fan of both fractal geometry and mapping couldn’t take it. I couldn’t do the math but I could follow the theory and explanation of how/why it worked. The Gummint could make even a seminar on sex boring.

    As with many things, doing is more interesting that talking…

    ————-

    Iterations. OK. I had first written something to indicate a ‘positions behind the decimal point’ explanation but rummaged deep into my old musty mental data storage unit and said,’no, you have it exactly backwards’. I understand from your correction that I may have been on the right track originally … or not.

    You were on the right track. The reason that Fractint was is so fast compared to other solvers is that it uses integer arithmetic (much faster than floating point) – you convert the real (or complex) decimals into large integers, do the arithmetic and then convert them back. It saves time until the integers get too large for the computer. It’s also how the program got its name.

    Sooooo, I’m still struggling here, are we talking about accuracy = iterations = detail = places behind the decimal point (number of numbers behind the decimal point). I always set my program at 1000 iterations for a final image on some classes of images I did (more computation = more detail being my governing assumption) when a choice became available. (Previews around 100-150.)

    Okay, let’s look at how the process works – we’re trying to determine how to color the pixels on a grid in the complex plane. The grid points are of the form (x+n*l, y+m*l) where l is the spacing of the grid (I’m assuming the same horizontal and vertical spacing for convenience – they can be different), and m and n range from zero to the number of vertical and horizontal pixels respectively. We iterate the function and when the result gets big enough, we decide that it will eventually escape to infinity and therefore it isn’t in the M-set and we give it a color according to the number of iterations it took to reach our escape criteria. However, there are points near (but not in) the M-set that take an arbitrarily high number of iterations to escape, thus if the maximum number of iterations is too low, we will be labeling many points incorrectly as members of the M-set. For abstruse reasons owing to numerical accuracy, we don’t see many points escape after a couple hundred iterations, but if you set the number of iterations very low (like 10) and increase it, you will see that the calculated M-set shrinks (fewer pixels mislabeled as members). On the other hand, when we zoom the image (decrease l), we are doing this calculation on points that are closer and closer together. Eventually, the numerical accuracy of our calculations isn’t good enough to distinguish between neighboring points and we lose detail in the image.

    I also assumed that zooming was the same process, more iterations were being done as a function of dealing with increasingly smaller bits of detail to begin with. That the recursive nature of the equation required more iteration farther out the equation was carried. “Farther out” = deeper on was zooming.

    Hopefully the explanation above was understandable – to summarize:

    More iterations = less M-set (and more pretty colored pixels)

    More accuracy = more detail (and hence the ability to zoom deeper).

    With Fractint iteration did equal detail, you could fill in ‘holes’ in the image with a higher iteration designation. Selection of iteration level was a serious concern based on what level of detail was needed (or desired for a specific effect) for the final image. I used as little as 35 and as high as 2500+ depending on what I wanted and needed.

    You know, my background is originally photography so I used iteration like I would use an F/stop or some other tool for producing detail or lessening detail. That may be where I’m off track, thinking of iterations as ‘like’ something, when they are not.

    It is a tool for increasing or decreasing the size of the M-set (which has a side effect of more apparent detail), but thinking about it as a parameter that can be adjusted with certain effects is exactly right.

    ————-

    If there are 2 sets (both of which I used regularly), what were the other 34 equations available in Fractint?

    The ‘standard’ M-sets and J-sets come from iterating the function:

    f(z) = z^2 + c

    but the mathematical definition for M-sets and J-sets can be applied to any function (family of functions, really since there’s a constant in it). If you refer to the M-set you are referring to the one associated with the equation above, but if you refer to a M-set you may be referring to the set associated with any map of the complex plane to itself.

    A little digression here about how you get the M-set and J-Sets. To get the M-set you iterate the point z=0 in the equation f(z)=z^2+(pixel), to get the J-set associated with the complex value ‘c’ you iterate the point z=(pixel) in the equation f(z)=z^2+c.

    There were other equations built into Fractint and in addition you could enter your own equations (my favorite was the Julia set of a complex sin function). However, while all M-sets and J-sets are fractals (not quite true, but I’m glossing over an unimportant technical point here), all fractals are not M-Sets or J-Sets and Fractint had a bunch of other types.

    Just other equations that can be visually modeled and share a fractal ‘nature’?

    Saying something is ‘fractal’ means that it has a fractional dimension (more or less) i.e. it has a non-integer dimension. Fractals can be strange attractors of dynamical systems (orbits of systems of ordinary differential equations like the Lorenz Butterfly or, my personal favorite, the Rössler attractor), curves specified by recursive algorithms (like the Koch snowflake where you start with a triangle and replace every ‘___’ with ‘_A_’ (without the crossbar on the ‘A’, of course) and then repeat ad infinitum or similarly, the Serpinski gasket where you take a solid triangle and remove the upside-down inscribed triangle from its center and repeat the process with the three smaller triangles that are formed), sets that are the fixed points of iterated function systems (you can make these look like anything you want them to, but the classical example are sets that look like ferns), Dendrites resulting from diffusion limited aggregation (pixels diffuse freely around the screen until they they hit a edge (or some other ‘seed’) or another pixel in which case they ‘stick’ resulting in irregular branching filaments – when I was an undergrad working in a physics lab, I made DLA slides (a microscope slide with sliver dendrites, not a figure for a presentation) for another lab to experiment on), plasma fractals (I don’t remember how they’re generated), and others that I can’t think of right now. Fractint could generate all of the types that I mentioned and more besides. In addition, there are things in nature that exhibit self-similarity over a range of scales (but not the infinite range of scales that mathematical fractals do) like clouds and plants and coastlines.

    Is that what you meant by the Mandelbrot set being the starting point for trippy fractal art.

    Yes – the Mandelbrot set is a versatile instrument, but there’s a whole orchestra out there…

    All cacti are succulents but not all succulents are cacti. That’s a rule. Cacti are a FAMILY with many TRIBES (columnar, etc.)

    That’s right. You can think of a taxonomy of fractals showing relationship of the different types of fractals to each other. Each fractal could be identified as belonging to a particular species, genus, etc.

    What is the essence of a fractal?

    A non-integer dimension.

    Must all fractals have equations that are recursive?

    No, but many do (I might say ‘most’ here, but there are issues with using that term in regard to infinite collections).

    Are fractals a separate tribe of equation within a branch of mathematics. or a shared trait occurring in many tribes of equations within or across many branches of mathematics?

    Mathematically speaking, a fractal is, in general, a set of points in a metric space* (the equations generate the points, but the sets of points are the actual fractals – I can’t go much farther than this without getting into hardcore measure theory).

    *R^n is the typical metric space that fractals live in.
    ————

    I know generally about the relationship of the Julia and Mandelbrot sets but I didn’t know why there were whole Julia’s v. fragmented ones.

    The J-sets associated with points outside the M-set are not just fragmented, but what’s known as ‘totally disconnected’. This means that if you look at any piece of the J-set it is made up of infinitely many sub-pieces. Also, there is a general resemblance between the J-set and the region of the M-set its constant comes from.

    I had noticed in Fractint that some of the “Mand-other name” types would not produce Julia’s and there were limits to how much I could change the parameters (I think I recall) even on the Mandelbrot set and still get Julia’s.

    Yes – probably due to either technical limitations or the fact that the associated Julia sets were not very interesting. I really like the feature where you could switch from the M-set to the J-set associated with the center of your image at the press of a button.

    I used other manipulation functions pretty routinely like the inversion function so I never managed to puzzle out why Julia’s didn’t always work. I see now that some of the “Mand-xxxxx” probably were not actually the Mandelbrot set, or shared enough characteristics of the original equation to produce Julia’s. That’s a guess.

    They were M-sets for different equations – they had associated J-sets, but they most likely either didn’t have the code to generate them in place or they were much less interesting than the J-sets from f(z)=z^2+c.

    Hope this was helpful – I’m going to work on my program to estimate fractal dimension of phase space orbits now. Technically it works, but I’ve got computation cost issues with my brute force method – if my more elegant solution doesn’t solve them then my calculations will take longer than it takes to make a baby…

  18. Bakersfield:

    then all of you, it’s been great.

    Gen. Puller is smiling down on you from heaven.

  20. a most enjoyable thread, I hope you 2 stay around and post on other threads, why limit your talents to this one alone?

    There is so much bullshit here, you can make merry for years.

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