Albuquerque police have announced that they have arrested the man responsible for the killing of Lilly Garcia, 4, in a road rage incident. Tony Torrez, 32, reportedly confessed to the crime and the police hit him with a long list of charges that should guarantee that he remains in jail most if not all of his life. Indeed, even a plea agreement at this point would likely place the sentence near the maximum level but, if Torrez confessed, there is little in terms of a defense to present without striking the confession on some grounds.
Alan Garcia was traveling westbound on Interstate 40 when Torrez cut him off in a Lexus in attempting to exit the freeway. The men exchanged words and Torrez pulled out a gun and fired at Garcia’s truck. He hit the four-year-old girl. With the witnesses and alleged confession, Torrez is toast absent some surprising development.
Torrez is charged with murder, aggravated battery with a deadly weapon, assault with the intent to commit a violent felony, shooting at or from a motor vehicle, child abuse, child abuse resulting in death and tampering with evidence. He was being held on $650,000 bail.
While the actions of Torrez leaves one, again, depressed about our society, it is important to note that Torrez was captured with the help of a tip. Moreover, two nurses stopped and rendered aid to Lilly until she was taken to the hospital. Finally, thousands of people have gone to a gofundme site to contribute to the family.
Just showing the picture below is enough to secure a death penalty.
http://youtu.be/nW23hgUuLP4
Anything wrong with these initiatives?
http://smartgunlaws.org
Ellen – for me the first two CA proposal would be no for me.
Karen, OK, We got it, you live in the country, surrounded by rattlers and rustlers; I myself have agreed that people in your circumstances should have a right to possess firearms. Agreed. Why do you keep yammering on about this? Because I point out your xenophobic impressions of inner cities? Your fear is more palpable than you are aware of, and some of us here are pointing it out.
BTW: shooting rattlesnakes is a particularly foolish and wasteful act. Incidents of rattlesnakes bites are rare and they are an important control on rodents. I’m sure you’ll have a slew of anecdotes about the danger of snakes. Have at it, it’s the night shift.
Child abuse and neglect are terrible; this little girl did not die of abuse or neglect, unless you consider this nation’s dereliction of handgun regulation to be neglectful. She died of a gunshot. Guns are the problem, not rattlesnakes or clay pigeons.
BTW PTII: Obamacare actually does a great deal to eliminate abuse and neglect among children.
T. Hall –
BTW, need a citation for this.
Many mothers, if they lost their long held insurance, would be empathetic to 47 million other mothers who went years without insurance or lost their insurance because a child suffered from asthma or diabetes, or cancer or some other sad mischance.
Sadly, it doesn’t always work that way.
Would Karen and other gun proponents be in favor of Child Access Prevention laws on a federal basis?
http://smartgunlaws.org/child-access-prevention-policy-summary/
With numbers like that, Mike Huckelberry will be very busy.
I wonder if all those bad, abusive, negligent unwed mothers include unwed fathers? And is there a subset of divorced and therefore unwed mothers and fathers? How about widowed and therefore unwed mothers?
I figure that is about 150 million Americans.
A truly awesome cohort.
Karen dismisses the 47 million that were uninsured before the ACA in the same cavalier way she dismisses accidental shooting of and involovling children.
Karen said:
‘Clearly, I have benefitted many times from the legal use of firearms. It might help you understand that there are other sides to this issue if you got to know more stories like mine’.
Somehow I am confident that no one else in this big old country has a story to match Karen’s.
THall:
“Yes Karen, it’s terrible that all those children died from neglect and abuse and…ritual sacrifice? But does that excuse adding one more to the total because of a twisted interpretation of the Second Amendment?
Guns are the problem and they make it exponentially easier for violence to become deadly. The subject of this post is a perfect example.”
No, THall. Guns are not the problem. Criminal and negligent parents are the problem.
I don’t think you understand rural life, by your comments that we’re all scared to death out here. That’s a common Left meme.
A gun is just a tool to be respected out here. It’s just not gangland Chicago here. Just a couple of months ago, I spent an hour cutting two gopher snakes out of the bird netting they were hopelessly tangled in. I didn’t call someone or sit on my hands. I handled it. When I find a gopher snake, I pick it up and put it where I’ve had rodent problems. When our dirt road washes out, my husband takes his tractor out and fixes the road. If you find a rattler, you shoot it. My aunt and uncle get 20 to 26 rattlers out at there place every year. It’s not something to get upset about. It’s just reality. Just like city people have realities to deal with in their everyday life.
It’s admirable to want to prevent children from getting harmed, but you need to attack the root cause – negligence, abuse, and unwed mothers. That might not be PC, but the statistics are what they are.
Tom, Thanks for the info. Interesting to know. His case might provide some suggestions for some reasonable, commonsense restrictions on gun possession.
Ellen: Good point about accidental shootings. I mentioned them above as a rationale for coming up with restrictions on gun possession, along with suicide. But I agree,much of the conversation has centered on crime related shootings. I surmise that’s a result of the fear permeates our society.
The corporate-political alignments in this country have become very adept at spreading this fear, whether it’s Muslim terrorists and their Sharia law or inner city gang members with their baggy pants and drugs or illegal aliens.
The fear and hatred produced by these master behaviorialists, along with the stress induced by the economic pressures squeezing the working classes, is why flooding our society with firearms is insane.
Ellen:
“@Karen,
What if you had no insurance? What if you had a prexisting condition and were denied insurance? What if you were charged more for insurance merely because you are a woman? Oh well who cares about all those who had no insurance before the ACA anyway.”
Actually, I HAD insurance, but lost it due to the ACA. Twice. The first time, my policy was terminated because it was no longer ACA compliant. It had the coverage that I WANTED, at a price I could afford, and I never found a doctor who did not accept it. But the government decided I didn’t know what I wanted, because I’m just a girl who didn’t realize I needed 26 free forms of birth control. Granted, all of us girls actually pay net more, because all the freebies they added on made our deductibles and premiums go through the roof, which is also why the insurers restricted our doctor network, and gave doctors a 30% pay cut. Those “freebies” are actually quite expensive.
Does the Left and the government think girls can’t add?
The second time was when someone stole my bank info online and my bank blocked fraudulent charges. Sadly, they blocked all charges. My insurance premium was on auto pay, and I never thought about it. Until I got my termination letter. You see, the ACA mandates that non subsidized people only get 30 days to pay their bill from the time it’s due before it gets cancelled. Subsidized people get 90 days. If we’d closed our business, we would have had plenty of time to discover this problem. But since we middle class actually support all those subsidized people, we’re screwed.
I fought this termination up to contacting the CEO of the company directly but was told they fulfilled the legal requirement of the ACA to give 30 days from the date it’s due, regardless of the reason. I could have been tied up, literally, for 30 days, and they would have terminated me just the same.
Now, normally, if an insurance company was unreasonable, I would just vote with my dollars and buy from someone else. But the staggering costs of the ACA drove almost all of the insurers out of CA. We are literally down to just a few mega-insurers, fast approaching a monopoly. And we all know how wonderful monopolies are at customer service. Also, the wonderful, kind, and loving people behind Obamacare, who cared about us so much more than the mean conservatives, wrote Open Enrollment into the bill. Because of Open Enrollment, I CANNOT buy a new policy until the next enrollment period. People who lose their insurance at the beginning of the year are really screwed. If you go to healthcare.gov, there is a list of those who qualify for a special enrollment period. It includes those who have delivered a child (but NOT those who found out they are pregnant, yeah, pro-woman ACA!), those who lost insurance due to a divorce or losing their job. Losing your insurance because of not paying our bill, for any reason, is NOT INCLUDED.
My own doctor’s office has several people in the exact same boat as me.
Since identity theft is so common, this could be a real headache.
Now let’s talk about all those poor people this monstrosity “helped.” Well, they have huge deductibles, restricted drug formularies, no off formulary drug benefits, restricted doctor networks – how does that spell excellent healthcare? The two people I know who get subsidized ACA plans now pay more than they did before because they have to pay out of pocket to see a doctor and to get their prescriptions.
I don’t think “help” means what you think it does.
So far, the ONLY THING I like about the ACA is the no pre-existing condition exclusion. Although, really, that’s not really insurance I’m asking for. It’s not insurance if you take your wrecked truck to the insurance company and say you want a retroactive policy to cover the accident you were in last week. That means that people cannot afford the cost of health care without insurance footing part of the bill.
What would have been more helpful would have been to enact a series of small, tightly worded bills, no more than a couple of pages each. Each bill would deal with very specific aspects of the healthcare industry. That would create a system that would be very agile and responsive to adjustments. If something’s not working, you just need to unwind one tiny bill and tweak it or throw it out and start afresh. Now we keep hearing that this monstrosity is too big to fail. It sucks, but it’s so huge that it would cause more headaches than it’s worth to unwind it. This was by design. Gruber admitted it was written in tortuous language to make it is impenetrable as possible to take advantage of the stupidity of the American people in order for it to pass. This is because it never would have passed on its merits. They architects knew it and have admitted it.
Are you one of the people that Gruber not only took advantage of, but persist in supporting a bill whose authors called you stupid?
The constact efforts to draw the attention away from gun accidents speaks to the refusal to take responsibility for being a part of the gun culture. It’s not a healthy culture and the fierce defense of it anytime anyone mentions another child or parent being killed by an accidental shooting is not rational.
According to what I read today, the shooter in the New Mexico road rage case had been 6 times.
Two of those arrests involved assault with a firearm.
He was never convicted….there were no details given as to why there were no convictions.
Yes Karen, it’s terrible that all those children died from neglect and abuse and…ritual sacrifice? But does that excuse adding one more to the total because of a twisted interpretation of the Second Amendment?
Guns are the problem and they make it exponentially easier for violence to become deadly. The subject of this post is a perfect example.
@Karen,
What if you had no insurance? What if you had a prexisting condition and were denied insurance? What if you were charged more for insurance merely because you are a woman? Oh well who cares about all those who had no insurance before the ACA anyway.
Karen,
You views on eliminating gangs are overly simplistic. The City of Los Angeles began arresting gang members for simply congregating, and the gangs still find a way around this oppression.
As far as I know, the shooter in this story was a legal, law-abiding gun owner in possession of lawfully registered firearm until he shot the little girl, and the little was a…well, a little girl.
Ellen:
Wouldn’t it be just lovely if you were hit with a bill that cost you many thousands of dollars and you lost most of your doctors, and if you complained about it, someone who clearly had zero understanding of your situation called you hysterical?
Please explain to me how this would be OK if you were the one suffering. Or is just OK if it happens to other people?
Again, the Party of Tolerance is an oxymoron.
From near hysteria over the ACA to a cavalier dismissal of children being injured or killed in accidental shootings is an interesting study. How does one think this way. I don’t understand it.
I also support freedom of religion, and yet I find it criminal when people sacrifice their kid to some religion. I support battered women, and yet despise women who stay in abusive relationships where their kids get hurt.
If you really want to ruin your day, here is this tidbit: 1520 children died from abuse and neglect in 2013 alone. That is 1520 too many. There are ALREADY laws on the books against this, but some people are just reprehensible or just make bad decisions. And you know who are the most common victims? The most helpless among us – children under 1 year old. Simple neglect caused almost 75% of the deaths, more than deliberate abuse. How do you fix that? And Parents were responsible for almost 80% of these deaths. Fathers and boyfriends were the most common perpetrator of abuse, while mothers were the most common perpetrators of neglect.
So don’t tell me anyone who wants to keep our Constitutionally protected right to bear arms doesn’t care about kids. It’s the parents out there and their boyfriends who are the real danger to kids through abuse and neglect. And most often those parents are undereducated, poor, and too young to have kids. I’ve often said that the surge in unwed young mothers is a disaster to the kids they produce. It automatically throws the kids in the highest risk category for abuse, neglect, poverty, drug abuse, criminal behavior, jail, and an early death.
Look at this very case. The parents were not together. The dad was an ex-gang member. The kids had extra hurdles from the very beginning.
Stop fixating on a particular tool and focus on the actual cause of violence, abuse, and neglect.
https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubPDFs/fatality.pdf