Interesting case. I don't remember this one. Charged as an adult at age nine?
25 years ago, Pennsylvania boy Cameron Kocher shot and killed neighbor girl after losing to her in Nintendo gameKocher gunned down little Jessica Carr with rifle as she rode snowmobile in rural Poconos town of Kresgeville, Pa. He was spared jail because of his age and made no further headlines since brutal 1989 slaying.
BY DAVID J. KRAJICEK / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
SUNDAY, MARCH 16, 2014
The case of Cameron Kocher (center) sparked fierce debate on whether he should be tried as adult for killing of little Jessica Carr.
A Nintendo butt-whuppin’ ruined Cameron Kocher’s day off.
The 9-year-old fourth-grader got a snow day on a March Monday 25 years ago in his rural Poconos hometown of Kresgeville, Pa.
When his parents left for work that morning, Kocher went next door on Hideaway Hill Road to the home of Richard and Trudy Ratti, where kids from the neighborhood had gathered.
A first-grader, Jessica Carr, 7, challenged Kocher to a bout of “Spy Hunter,” a video game in which players spray enemies with machine guns mounted on a speeding car.
Kocher must have thought he had an advantage. He was older, and he knew his way around guns.
His father, Keith, was a hunter and, like many country kids, the boy had been introduced to firearms. He favored camouflage clothing, and some called him Little Rambo.
But the younger girl was good at the game, and Kocher got mad when she beat him.
He was still steamed early that afternoon when Trudy Ratti ran the kids outside to play in the snow. Some of them jumped on the family’s snowmobile, but Kocher stomped home.
Alone there, he went to the second-floor master bedroom, retrieved a hidden key and unlocked his father’s gun cabinet, lined with 10 firearms. He removed a .35-caliber Marlin rifle, found the proper ammo in a separate locked drawer, and loaded a cartridge into the chamber.
Kocher opened a window, removed the screen and leveled the rifle on the noisy snowmobile moving slowly across the Ratti yard, 100 yards away. He found his target in the scope and squeezed off a shot.
The boy replaced the window screen, returned the rifle to the cabinet, and put the shell casing back in the ammo box.
A few minutes later, Richard Ratti phoned and ordered young Kocher to return to his house. Little Jessica Carr had been shot while riding on the back of the snowmobile, Ratti said, and they feared a sniper was loose in the area.
He was worried about Kocher’s safety.
The Ratti home was a scene of emotional bedlam, with kids wailing and praying over their friend, who lay dying in the living room. As Kocher walked past, he calmly said, “If you don’t think about it, you won’t be sad.” He sat down and played a video game by himself.
Later that afternoon, a state police trooper noticed a halfmoon-shaped cut on Kocher’s forehead — a wound from the recoil of the rifle scope, it turned out.
Investigators found the boy’s blood on the rifle and near the bedroom window redoubt. Two days after the shooting, the Allentown Morning Call announced to the world the latest American crime outrage: “9-Year-Old Arrested in Killing.”
No one so young had ever been charged as an adult with murder, and the case prompted national skull sessions about judicious punishment for kids who commit vile acts — and about justice for their victims.
As legal adversaries debated whether Kocher should be treated as a boy or a man, the sympathy scale seemed to tip toward the shooter and his parents.
Richard Ratti, whose 13-year-old daughter was on the snowmobile with Jessica Carr, said the pity was misplaced.
“You can’t feel as bad for the Kochers as you should for the Carrs,” he told a reporter.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/justice-story/boy-kills-neighbor-girl-nintendo-game-article-1.1723189#ixzz2wHELYQgC
