Check this out. A guy inherits his wife’s mom’s assets, after he kills her (the mom). The guy robs his wife’s mom, the mom catches him in the act, so he kills her. Her substantial fortune goes to her daughter, who might have been in on the heist and the cover up. The daughter kills herself in a potential suicide/drug overdose a short time later, and her money is willed to her jailed husband. When he is released in a dozen or so years, he stands to get the cash!???

Talk about coming out on top. This guy must be an inspiration to every guy on his cell block — and to every man outside of prison that wishes he could kill his mother-in-law. It sounds like this thing will be contested. Could we see something like this go to the Supreme Court? I mean there has to be a strong conflict between the integrity of posthumous rights (those of the daughter) and what is just plain wrong. You could make the argument that the mom should have been more careful with willing money to her delinquent daughter. What does the Coliseum think? Also, is this guy a PWSBKTW candidate?

Steven Hayes testified about the 2007 rape and murder of Jennifer, Michaela and Hayley Petit and a robbery that got “out of control.” He is a defendant in the case. We at PWSBKTW see his testimony as definitive proof that there is no truth to the phrase, “There is no honor among thieves.”

Hayes and his accomplice Joshua Komisarjevsky entered the home through an unlocked basement door and beat William Petit with a baseball bat until he was a bloody mess. With dad out of the way, they moved on to mom Jennifer and daughters Michaela and Hayley. Hayes forced Jennifer to go with him to a bank to withdraw $15,000, and “when they returned Komisarjevsky had already sexually assaulted 11-year-old Michaela.”

We at PWSBKTW are pretty sure that this is bad behavior, but what happened next warms our hearts and makes us think that thieves indeed have a sense of fairness.

Hayes says Komisarjevsky told him to “have sex with the mother to square things up.”

Komisarjevsky knew he shouldn’t have raped Michaela, and he wanted to make it up to his partner in crime. That was nice of him. Hayes took him up on the offer. Jennifer was then strangled to death. Also, they set the house on fire and both of the daughters died. Dad survived and now has to live with the horror of losing his family and the knowledge of the terror they experienced, and that part is sad.

But the good news is that Hayes and Komisarjevsky are all squared up. That part is nice. We at PWSBKTW don’t like murderers and rapists, but we can appreciate the importance of things being squared up. What kind of society would this be without some honor among thieves and child rapists? Not one you’d want to live in, we can tell you that.

For murdering and raping Jennifer, Michaela, and Hayley Petit, and despite (or because of) their intense devotion to things being squared up, Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky should be killed this week.

Shamsid-Din Abdur-Raheem pleaded not guilty to murder. He is accused of throwing his 3-month-old daughter off of a bridge. We at PWSBKTW know that Abdur-Raheem might not be guilty. The details of the case certainly paint him as a victim of a misunderstanding:

Prosecutors claim Abdur-Raheem abducted Zara Malani-lin Abdur from her grandmother’s East Orange apartment on Feb. 16, choking and assaulting the woman and then hitting her with his van as she attempted to block his escape.

Abdur-Raheem later parked on the shoulder of the Garden State Parkway over the Driscoll Bridge — which spans the Raritan River between Sayreville and Woodbridge — and threw or dropped the baby from the front passenger window, according to court papers.

Hasty bloodthirsty types might think that Abdur-Raheem is clearly guilty and that a not-guilty plea is an insult to justice, but enlightened folks, like those of us at PWSBKTW, know that a lengthy trial might bring out new information that proves his innocence. There are many rational explanations for how little Zara ended up dead in the river.

For example, Abdur-Raheem might have been acting to protect us all because his daughter’s grandmother was an alien creature from another planet. That would explain why he choked her and hit her with his van. (That’s how Sigourney Weaver deals with aliens, too, and we’re not going to stand here and let you say bad things about Sigourney Weaver.) It’s possible that he was too late and the alien grandmother had already replaced his daughter with a pod creature that looked like his daughter but was really a horrible beast from another galaxy that was going to enslave the human race. These things happen sometimes. If an autopsy shows that the baby’s body does not contain human DNA, Abdur-Raheem could be set free — after all, one can hardly blame him for defending our planet from alien invaders.

We at PWSBKTW realize that the “alien grandmother” theory is a long shot, but Abdur-Raheem is innocent until proven guilty. He’s only alleged to have thrown his 3-month-old child off of a bridge, and he did plead “not guilty,” so maybe he didn’t do it. If the alien invasion turns out not to be the case, there are still other possibilities.

Perhaps no one threw the baby off the bridge. Little Zara might have jumped. It’s true that the suicide rate for 3-month-olds is not very high, but in this economy, fewer and fewer infants are able to find work and some have suffered from severe depression due to unemployment. It’s sad that any would choose to end their lives, but life can be sad. 

The prosecution might contend that 3-month-olds can’t walk, let alone jump off a bridge, and they might be right. But a man has the right to mount a defense, and since Abdur-Raheem pleaded not guilty, and we at PWSBKTW are enlightened, we’re trying to give him the benefit of the doubt and imagine some way that baby’s body ended up in the river after he abducted her.

Probably Zara was not an alien, and it seems unlikely that she jumped off the bridge due to undiagnosed baby depression, but isn’t it possible that Abdur-Raheem wasn’t trying to hurt his daughter when he threw her in the river? We at PWSBKTW want to believe the best about people, so it occurs to us to note that the baby drowned. She didn’t die from being thrown off of a bridge — she died from not being able to swim.

Maybe this whole thing was the result of a miscommunication and Abdur-Raheem thought his daughter had been taking infant swim lessons and he just wanted to let her go for a nice swim. Maybe, if the mother had simply kept Zara’s father informed about the baby’s level of swimming skill, this unfortunate incident could have been avoided. We’re not trying to blame the mother, but surely Abdur-Raheem wouldn’t have thrown his daughter off of a bridge into a river if he thought she might drown. Not if we’re giving him the benefit of the doubt.

On the other hand, we just remembered that we at PWSBKTW are not a jury and we don’t owe anyone the benefit of the doubt — actually, not giving murderers the benefit of the doubt is our standard position. Despite the legal system’s presumption of innocence, because it is clear that he attacked the grandmother and stole his 3-month-old daughter and then threw her off of a bridge to drown and then pleaded “not guilty” like a coward, Shamsid-Din Abdur-Raheem should be killed this week.

“A 40-year-old Racine man is accused of killing a 2-year-old boy, punching him because he was spilling his milk.”

Manuel Garcia “lost his temper with his girlfriend’s son, punching him numerous times in the abdomen on Thursday, killing him.” He “admitted punching the boy at least three times because the child was[...] ’frustrating him’ and spilling his milk.”

We at PWSBKTW understand that two-year-olds can be frustrating. They have terrible table manners. Still, no one should die over spilled milk.

The mother, Lawanda Martinez, “is charged with child neglect resulting in death. Prosecutors said she largely ignored the boy’s injuries and symptoms until it was too late.”

It’s hard to blame the mother. She’s probably had a tough life. She has (had) four kids. They must spill milk all the time. Well, maybe not anymore.

The grandmother kept telling Martinez (the mother) to take the child to the hospital, but was ignored. As someone with the brilliant moniker “NachoBizzness” said in the comments section of the Racine Journal Times:

You people need to stop ripping on Grandma! She could have encouraged the daughter to take the child but since Grandma is not the custodial parent the hospital would do nothing for the child if she took him to the ER. A custodial parent must give authorization for treatment. 

The grandmother is clearly not to blame as much as Garcia is, since she didn’t punch the child. And her authority over and responsibility for the child is not the same as the mother’s. But the grandmother could have called 911. We at PWSBKTW suppose that if you are allowed to call 911 for complete strangers you find injured on the side of the road, you can call 911 for your dying grandson.

Maybe we’re wrong. In that case, we bow to the expertise of NachoBizzness. Surely anyone smart enough to come up with a name that sounds like “not your business” and at the same time makes us hungry for a truly impressive plate of tex-mex nachos (extra guacamole!), must be smart enough to be a medical professional with great knowledge of emergency room protocol. NachoBizzness says it, so it’s true — if you carry a dying child into a hospital, a strange kid you found bleeding to death on the sidewalk, for example, certainly the doctors would refuse to stop the bleeding because you aren’t the parent. 

So we at PWSBKTW have to agree with NotYoBiz that the grandmother was right to do nothing. As the grandmother said, her daughter “should’ve took him to the hospital like I asked her to do.” Fortunately for the grandmother, we at PWSBKTW are not grammar snobs. (If we were, we might also have some words for the copy editor of the Racine Journal Times.)

The boy’s father told the Racine Journal Times that “he had seen signs of abuse with the child, but didn’t know how to report it.” We shouldn’t judge him. It’s not his fault. If only there were a section at the beginning of every phone book with phone numbers for local authorities and child services.

And if only people had invented a way to type in “racine wisconsin child abuse” and find out information. If one day they did invent some kind of machine that was connected to other machines — let’s guess they’d call it an inter-network of computing machines — and then someone invented something we might call a searching engine, and then someone created a really good searching engine that they would name after a large number, a number with lots of zeros, well, in that science fiction world, the father might have found a phone number right there on the searching page to a “Child Abuse Neglect Access Line.”

No, they probably wouldn’t name it something that obvious, even in the future (unless you passed your mouse over it). Yet it probably would be pretty easy to find. If this were the future and there were computers and such. We at PWSBKTW can only live in the present, so don’t know when or if we will ever have these miracle devices. In the absence of this advanced technology, perhaps the father could have called the police, or city hall, or asked a librarian, to find out how to report the abuse of his son. If it wouldn’t have been too much of an inconvenience.

In addition to the boyfriend’s violence and malevolence, there is an awful lot of stupid and neglect floating among this twisted family. We at PWSBKTW usually reserve judgment for the perpetrator of the crime, and in this case that’s an easy call: For punching a two-year-old in the abdomen over and over hard enough to kill the child, Manuel Garcia should be killed this week.

We at PWSBKTW will leave it to our readers to decide how much of a lightning bolt, if any, the mother, grandmother, and father deserve.

We at PWSBKTW know that kids these days are often coddled. They don’t have to work and their parents give them whatever they want. Some parents, though, understand the importance of pushing their children to have a strong work ethic. They know that their kids need skills that are valued in the marketplace, and they demand that their kids contribute to the family’s income. This can only build character. Even 14-year-old girls need character. Fortunately for one of them, her parents gave her plenty of character, good and hard. As wsbtv.com reports:

The couple bought a minivan from a used car dealership in Eastman, about 140 miles southeast of Atlanta, in March 2008 but has not made a single payment on it… They made their daughter perform sex acts on the dealership’s manager in lieu of making the $281 monthly payments on their minivan [...] It appears the parents may have offered sex with their daughter to as many as six other adults in exchange for money and drugs…

The parents’ names are being withheld to protect the identity of the girl. And that’s too bad, because parents who give their child this kind of work ethic deserve more attention. How many 14-year-old girls can say that they paid for a mini-van? By themselves? Not that many. She’s probably going to have an excellent credit score.

Still, while we at PWSBKTW think it’s good for kids to learn to value hard work, we acknowledge the possibility that it might be wrong for parents to treat their 14-year-old daughter’s vagina and mouth like an ATM. Being the people the girl relied on for safety and nurturing and moral guidance, being her parents, it could be argued that they had a responsibility to care for her, and, failing that, to offer her to no more than four adults in exchange for money and drugs. Six was clearly going too far.

As much as we admire their effort to teach this girl the ways of the world, there are few things as heinous as parents betraying their own children. The people this girl needed most to be her protector were the ones victimizing her. For drugs, for money, for a mini-van. A used mini-van. But yes, even if the car were a nice one, a new one — maybe had a sunroof and heated seats — the anonymous parents who made their child into a sex slave should be killed this week. 

We at PWSBKTW usually describe some particularly heinous act and explain, with wit, when we can muster it, just how terrible the actions of some murderer or child abuser were. We are sorry to say that this week, we have nothing — no sarcasm, no punchlines as we point out who should be killed this week. We have catalogued horrible cases in past columns, managed maybe even to amuse as we shared outrage with our readers, but we’re at a loss for this one. Our column this week probably isn’t even necessary, since by now most readers are familiar with the case and have reached similar conclusions about a just end, but if we’re going to have a column called “People Who Should Be Killed This Week,” it would seem we’d be remiss to not mention the person who perhaps has most earned it. Dr. Earl Bradley is a pediatrician who is accused of sexually assaulting and raping more than 100 children, his patients, over the course of many years, while their parents sat in waiting rooms. Apparently there are videotapes. There is no end to disturbing details. Your day will be better if you don’t read the linked article. There isn’t anything we have to add that isn’t obvious from this column’s title and graphic. A lightning bolt and quick death would be a kindness Earl Bradley doesn’t deserve.  

Young children sometimes cry. We at PWSBKTW know that this can be annoying. There are several appropriate ways to address the problem of children crying. This is not one of them:

Thirty-three-year-old Aaron Pace, a friend of the baby’s mother who was babysitting the boy, put Drano on a cloth and rubbed the poisonous cloth on [the] baby’s skin because he had been crying, police said.

Rubbing Drano on his skin was supposed to make the 20-month-old stop crying? We at PWSBKTW might suggest that Aaron Pace should be killed this week for his stupidity alone, if we didn’t have a much better reason. The boy, Suliaman Orrell Kirkland, had “burns on the upper part of his body” when Philadelphia police came to the scene on February 2. Suliaman died on February 7.

Aaron Pace should be killed this week.

The headline in Louisiana’s Daily Comet is “Accused Baby Killer May Face Death Penalty.” We at PWSBKTW, masters of language that we are, know that this also means that the accused baby killer may not face the death penalty. The victim’s family seems to be unsure and conflicted about the punishment. As a matter of policy, we at PWSBKTW have no policy on the death penality itself or the role family members should play in such decisions. We do, however, as readers might guess, have slightly strong opinions about who should be killed this week.

Allegedly, William Henderson broke “the arms of his girlfriend’s infant son before killing him [...] Authorities said he smothered 10-month-old Kaleb Nelton in October while trying to quiet the child’s crying.”

Again with the crying? Toddlers and infants have no self-control, apparently, and for reasons that remain unclear, breaking their arms doesn’t stop them from crying any more than rubbing their skin with Drano stops them from crying. These babysitters are trying everything they know, and still the babies cry. 

Henderson pleaded not guilty to charges of first-degree murder. We at PWSBKTW are assuming that the accused baby killer just might be the actual baby killer, and whether or not this becomes a death penalty case, William Henderson should be killed this week.

It isn’t all about children crying. Hard as it is to believe, children can commit even more serious crimes. 

Children sometimes steal food and cheat in home school. We don’t know how often these terrible offenses occur, but according to her father, that’s why he and her stepmother kept a 14-year-old girl ”locked in a room with no running water for about two months.”

While she was in “lock-up,” the girl says her father gave her a few cans of food, crackers and bread every one or two days — but it wasn’t ever enough to satisfy her hunger.

The girl told police that while she was in lock up, she was forced to exercise until exhaustion, beaten with belts and metal rods, and pulled up by her hair if she stopped exercising.

The horror came to an end on January 24, when she escaped by crawling up a linen closet, climbing into an attic crawl space, kicking out a loose board and fleeing out the back door. She had been wearing the same clothes for two weeks.

Scott and Andrea Bass are facing multiple charges. We at PWSBKTW wonder why they didn’t try the rubbing-Drano method that is all the rage these days. It might have kept the girl from making her valiant escape, even if it doesn’t stop toddlers from crying.

Although they have other children who certainly need their loving guidance and stiff discipline, Scott and Andrea Bass should be killed this week.

We at PWSBKTW were going to write a witty set-up to amuse our readers this week. But can anyone, even an anyone with our great skill and sense of humor, top this, the first lines of the news story itself?

A Brazilian man has admitted trying to kill his two-year-old stepson by pushing 30 sewing needles inside him after doping him with wine.

That’s hilarious.

The merriment continues.

Speaking from his jail cell 30-year-old bricklayer Roberto Carlos Magalhaes said he wanted to murder the boy to get back at his ex-wife.

He said he inserted the needles two or three times a week.

The boy was too drunk on the wine and water mixture to cry but felt the pain after the alcohol wore off, Magalhaes said.

“It was truly an unbearable suffering,” the stepdad said.

“It was to get back at the boy’s mother. I thought the needles would work their way through his body and kill the boy.”

This Magalhaes is a comedic genius. Where does he come up with this stuff?

We at PWSBKTW have on occasion been accused of bad taste. But we know a good satire when we read one. There’s no way a story like this could be true. A man could not possibly have been sticking needles into a two-year-old boy over the course of weeks. It’s too funny. And there’s no way that doctors removed four rusty needles that “had lodged near his heart and in his lungs.” That’s just silliness.

And just when we might be thinking it isn’t satire, but a real horror, it gets sillier. Magalhaes’ lover was also arrested. Angelina Ribeiro dos Santos, also seeking revenge against the ex-wife, would “enter into trances and give [Magalhes] commands to insert the needles.” That’s good stuff, practically a sitcom.

The ex-wife — for surely someone is to blame for this, and it can’t be the guy who inserted the needles — must have been some piece of work to drive a kind-hearted woman to enter into trances and command an innocent stepfather to insert needles into a two-year-old boy. That is, if any of this were not satire but actually true. It can’t be. We at PWSBKTW have chronicled some heinous behavior in the last few months, but even we don’t believe that human beings would do this to get back at an ex-wife. It can’t be true. We hope it isn’t.

Because if it were true, we’d have to change the name and direction of this very column. Normally, we’d end our pithy remarks with some variation on our usual call for justice: “Roberto Carlos Magalhaes and Angelina Ribeiro dos Santos, for inserting 30 needles into the body of a two-year-old boy, should be killed this week.” That alone might upset some people, who on occasion write in to tell us that we are no better than the criminals we say should be killed, that we have sunk to their level, that wanting them dead makes us as bad as the murderers and rapists.

Imagine then if this story were true and not hilarious satire. Imagine how much worse than Roberto Carlos Magalhaes and Angelina Ribeiro dos Santos we at PWSBKTW would be if this satirical news article were not a work of comedic genius, but a real news story. If it were true, we would have to note that mere killing wouldn’t remotely approach what these people deserve. If they actually did this to a little boy, our pleasant and friendly column, which simply tells readers who should be killed each week, might devolve into a demand for specific and truly horrendous varieties of torture. Then what would people think of us? We at PWSBKTW could be thrown out of polite society altogether. We would never be invited to cocktail parties.

Fortunately, our column can go on, as originally titled and conceived, since certainly no one inserted 30 needles into a two-year-old, hoping that it would slowly kill him.

That just isn’t the world we live in.

We at PWSBKTW are on the verge of going insane.

“The second trial of Seattle Jewish Federation gunman Naveed Haq is now in the hands of a King County Superior Court jury.”

Haq stormed the Jewish center in July 2006, fatally shooting one woman and wounding five others. His attorneys acknowledge he did it, but say he was insane at the time and should be committed to a mental hospital for the rest of his life. [...] Haq’s first trial ended with jurors deadlocked over the question of his sanity.

Wikipedia provides plenty of reasons to believe that Haq was generally nutty. His behavior was sometimes bizarre, and included exposing his penis to a woman in a mall. One of his friends said that Haq was taking medicine for being bi-polar. It sounds like a tragic case of mental illness. But Haq was not its primary victim. Others were:

On July 28, 2006, Haq is alleged to have gained access to the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle building by holding a 13-year-old girl hostage with a gun to her back and ordering her to dial the intercom and request to be buzzed into the building. After entering, he allegedly began shooting. Pamela Waechter was killed. Layla Bush was critically wounded. Dayna Klein, Cheryl Stumbo, Carol Goldman, and Christina Rexroad were wounded.

At the time of the shooting, it was reported by witnesses that Haq stated, “I am a Muslim American, angry at Israel.” During the incident, Haq also talked to 911 operators, saying, “These are Jews and I’m tired of getting pushed around and our people getting pushed around by the situation in the Middle East.” He also demanded that the United States withdraw its military forces from Iraq. Eventually, however, he calmed down and told the operator he would surrender. He then walked out of the building with his hands on his head and was arrested by the police outside.

This was clearly not only an act of murder and attempted murder, but of terrorism. Haq had a political motive, using violence to try to influence policy — he demanded that the US withdraw forces from Iraq. He specifically targeted Jews and shot a bunch of unarmed women. Yes, it was an insane sort of terrorism — a rational person would not believe that these actions would cause the US to shift policy in Iraq.

There are many things we at PWSBKTW don’t think a rational person would do. These include crashing planes into buildings; raping and murdering women and keeping a collection of corpses in the house; buying a Britney Spears CD. All of these are still crimes even if only crazy people would do them. There’s no accounting for the reasons people do what they do, try as we might to separate the sane from the insane, the malicious from the merely disturbed, the evil from the people who do evil.

Yet here we are, three years after the crimes, still without even a conviction. While the lawyers build up their billable hours debating the finer points of the legal meaning of sanity and confusing the jury by focusing on something other than the actions of the murderer, we at PWSBKTW will simply note that Haq knew what he was doing and that it was wrong, and acted with forethought and malice when he committed murder and terrorism. And even if he was as crazy as this guy/girl/other, Naveed Haq should be killed this week.

We at PWSBKTW were once young ourselves, so we appreciate juvenile pranks as much as anyone. We’re not too old to remember how fun it is to steal a bicycle. And we can’t tell you how terribly we miss those innocent days of our childhood when we would douse someone with rubbing alcohol and set them on fire if they stopped us from stealing a bicycle. Wait, that wasn’t us. That was Matthew Bent, Denver Jarvis, Steven Shelton, Jesus Mendez, and Jeremy Jarvis.

Five teenagers were charged with aggravated battery Tuesday for allegedly dousing a 15-year-old with rubbing alcohol and setting him on fire because he stopped someone from stealing his father’s bicycle.

Aggravated battery isn’t enough for those of us at PWSBKTW. We “aggravated” our knee the other week. Being set on fire somehow seems worse. “Mendez was also charged with attempted second-degree murder because authorities say he flicked the lighter.” Before we pass judgment, some might note that the accused are kids, just children, really — boys will be boys, you know. We’re thinking about a different boy:

Michael Brewer was hospitalized with burns on more than three-quarters of his body after the attack at a Deerfield Beach apartment complex Monday. [...] He was burned on his torso and arms, sheriff’s spokesman Jim Leljedal said. Family members said most of his hair, including his eyelashes, had also been burned off.

Some might be saying that teens who douse people with flammable liquids and set them on fire deserve a second chance, but we wouldn’t know because we can’t hear anything over the sound of burning flesh. Anyone who sets a person on fire should be killed this week.