“I think this is probably the first case of text rage we’ve ever seen,” Broward County (Fla.) Sheriff Al Lamberti told ABC News. “We’ve had road rage before, but never text rage.”
Yep, you heard him right, rage facilitated by texting. It appears that instant connectivity has opened the door for a new form of insanity. The story behind the officer’s declaration is wince-worthy. Here’s what happened:
A 13-year-old girl borrowed her friend’s cell phone to text her 15-year-old boyfriend, Wayne Treacy. Somehow in the course of a flurry of messages, the phone’s owner—8th grader Josie Lou Ratley—was drawn into the communication, and she and Wayne didn’t hit it off very well. It seems that Josie thought that Wayne was just too old to be dating a 13-year-old. And things quickly heated up.
About the time that Josie brought up Wayne’s older brother and his recent suicide, Wayne boiled over. He hung up the phone, put on his steel-toed boots, jumped on his bike, peddled over to the middle school, and proceeded to kick Josie “in the head, soccer style” until a teacher pulled him off.
Neither of these two had any disciplinary problems before. They’d never even met before. In fact, Wayne had to get another kid to point Josie out. And now the young girl is in a coma with a chunk of her skull removed to “allow the swelling in her head to go down.”
Now, when I read about this tragedy, I started feeling the first twinges of rage myself. How can something like this happen? And who or what is to blame? What combination of crumbling morality, mental illness, feeble parenting, technological evils or full moon tidal effects came together to cause this to happen?
I don’t have all the answers. But I know one thing: It just stinks.
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