Thirty-seven-year-old Rashida Anderson had decided enough was enough.
After her son was accused of stealing a laptop from his school, they argued for over an hour on November 26, 2010, before she finally took away his Play Station, according to the NY Daily News.
Two days later, her partially charred body was discovered in an alley behind their South Philadelphia home.
According to his confession, 16-year-old Kendall Anderson paced the floors for three hours while his mother slept before deciding to murder her:
"I couldn't stand the arguing," the teen said in a statement read by Philadelphia police homicide Detective Thorsten Lucke during a preliminary hearing.So he struck his mother with a claw hammer 20 times before attempting to "cremate" her in the oven.
When that failed, the 11th grader at Daniel Boone School in North Philadelphia repeatedly smashed her head with a chair leg before dragging her bloodied corpse in to the alley, where it remained undetected until family members became suspicious.
In December, Philadelphia Municipal Court Judge Karen Yvette Simmons ordered the youth to stand trial for murder, possession of an instrument of crime and abuse of corpse.
"If I could, I would not do it again," he said in his confession. "I really miss my mom. ... She was the only person who cared for me."
Kendall is not the first child to ruthlessly murder his mother over a game.
In 2007, 17-year-old Daniel Petric shot both his parents, killing his mom, after they refused to let him play the violent video game Halo 3, leading some experts to suggest a rapidly growing phenomenon known as video game addiction as the true perpetrator of these crimes.
Symptoms, such as loss of appetite, depression, anxiety, lethargy and withdrawal, are all signs of this addiction, which is similar to the addiction with drugs and alcohol.
While the American Academy of Pediatrics suggests two-hour maximum screen time daily, most children are allowed far in excess of that number, oftentime sitting transfixed before a screen for eight hours or more.
And it's not just the children who are unraveling due to technology overdose.
- In 2008, Tyrone Spellman of Philadelphia killed his 17-month-old daughter, after she broke his Xbox.
- In 2010, Alexandra Tobias of Jacksonville, Florida, plead guilty to second-degree murder, after shaking her baby to death for interrupting her while she played Farmville, a game popular with Facebook users.
- Also in 2010, Alejandro Morales stabbed 9-year-old Anthony Maldonado to death while playing a Tony Hawk video game.
We can speculate that Anderson was in the throes of this addiction when he murdered his mother, and that's probably the politically correct direction this conversation should take.
However, there's another equally plausible reason:
He's just another spoiled juvenile delinquent who didn't consider the long-reaching ramifications of his barbaric actions.
We've seen it before.
Child gets in to trouble, parent attempts to tighten the reins after years of allowing the child to run fancy free, child then responds to parent in disrespectful and previously accepted way.
Sadly, that disrespect sometimes turns fatal, and the horrific irony of a Mother giving birth to her death is impossible to escape.
I cannot begin to imagine the dynamics of a parent-child relationship that allowed this heinous crime to occur - or the depths of the mental instability present in the child - but I have no problem presuming that it was a perfect storm of unhealthful behavior that culminated with Rashida Anderson being bludgeoned to death by her own son and dumped in to an alley in South Philly.
As I look at this child's mugshot, I am reminded that he could be my son, or your son, or our neighbor's son. There is no them, there is only us, and we have to figure out where we're going wrong.
Where was Kendall's father? Why was Kendall being accused of theft? Were there issues inside the home? Were they struggling financially?
While there are too many unresolved questions to play this child's judge and jury, I do know you can only get out of a child what is put in to them.
In this young man's case, violence, selfishness and rage seemed to emboldened him to kill.
His actions were unconscionable, and inexcusable, and hopefully he receives the lesson in accountability he needs while behind bars. More than likely, though, two murders were committed on November 26th, 2010: Rashida Anderson's and Kendall's future.
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