16 year old dies in "Underground Fight Club"

Carol

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Homicide is nuts, and again my response would be "Had this occured in any other contact sport would it even be a issue? Had it not been a punch but a baseball would homicide be getting considered by anyone?"

Accidents happen, it sucks, but it happens in every activity.

It's not nuts, at least, not they described it in the article...which says they are investigating the death as a homicide. It also says that there was no evidence so far that it was a homicide.

Think about it from the family's point of view. A 16 year old, bright student, doesn't have a history of trouble, is killed because he's been because he's been hit in the head a bunch of times.

The cops can either shrug their shoulders and say yep, dead kid with a smashed up head, oh well, and tell the parents to get his body.

Or, they can investigate to see if anything went wrong, to make sure his death was only an accident.

A homicide investigation that shows the death was an accident also clears the names of all of the teenagers invovled.

I think the cops did the right thing.
 

Don Roley

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A homicide means a person was killed by another person. A homicide can be a murder case or it could be a manslaughter case.

And then there is the case of justifiable homicide such as when you use leathal force to defend someone's life.

And in this case, the difference between a sport accident and this is that someone was actually trying to hurt someone else. Even in a purely sport accident they would investigatge this.

Think of it from the police side of things. They probably have no real idea if this was a case of the kid agreeing to be part of this, or if the other guys took him out and beat him to death and made up the story of the fight club to cover it up. Until they are sure that this kid went into this of his own free will, they have to investigate this from all other angles as well.
 

matt.m

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It really sucks. Now the kids parents are going to go through life asking "How come."
 

bydand

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It really sucks. Now the kids parents are going to go through life asking "How come."

Another side to this is that all the other kids are going to be going through life asking the same thing. Except the ones who actually fought him that day are going to be asking "was it me, who killed my friend?" as well. Kids horsing around, it is a fact of life unfortunally, this is a tragic event for everyone involved. We all did stupid things with our friends I think (I know so in my case.) I agree that this points out the simple fact that boxing/MA/wrestling, none of them are playing around. I know for a fact this could have happened to me and my friends at this age, we got lucky, these kids didn't. My heart goes out to everybody involved.
 

searcher

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Are we going to further digress into the "ways of old?" Secret fight clubs seem to me like we are taking several steps back as a society. The real question is what are WE going to do about it?
 

rutherford

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Are we going to further digress into the "ways of old?" Secret fight clubs seem to me like we are taking several steps back as a society. The real question is what are WE going to do about it?

Ignore the headline. It's garbage.
 

Andrew Green

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the headline says "Underground fight club" but the rest of the article sounds like they where just doing some boxing sparring. Big difference between the two IMO.
 

MJS

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the headline says "Underground fight club" but the rest of the article sounds like they where just doing some boxing sparring. Big difference between the two IMO.

Well, we can call it whatever title, but the fact remains that there is a very good chance that these injuries happened due to people being careless, not knowing what they were doing, no proper supervision, and the list can go on and on.

If someone is interested in cage fights, I think they'd be better off getting some legit, proper training under someone who can direct them to legal events.
 

modarnis

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It's not nuts, at least, not they described it in the article...which says they are investigating the death as a homicide. It also says that there was no evidence so far that it was a homicide.

Think about it from the family's point of view. A 16 year old, bright student, doesn't have a history of trouble, is killed because he's been because he's been hit in the head a bunch of times.

The cops can either shrug their shoulders and say yep, dead kid with a smashed up head, oh well, and tell the parents to get his body.

Or, they can investigate to see if anything went wrong, to make sure his death was only an accident.

A homicide investigation that shows the death was an accident also clears the names of all of the teenagers invovled.

I think the cops did the right thing.

And that's what the police are paid to do... investigate stuff. Cops investigate the untimely deaths of elderly people in their homes, kids hit with baseballs, car accident victims etc. They try to analyze the circumstances and put the death into some category and close their case
 

Jimi

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It is very sad about the death, I agree. Another sad aspect is that possibly some other kid invovled (And under investigation) is thinking, I am such a bad ***, rather than, Oh my god, I took a life. Most teens that play fightclub and find things on the internet like felony fights to copy, are careless about anyone elses health or life until they are about to get locked up. I am not sure if the kids invovled have this (What I call MTV2) attitude, but if they were off in the desert invovled in an UNDERGROUND FIGHT CLUB, they were trying to be little billy badasses. Pardon my blunt attitude, but children playing fightclub is on par with kids doing what they see on JACKASS, and it upsets me. It is not far removed from when teens sneak off to smoke a joint on Jefferson Rock (Wherever) and one falls to his death, while this situation of kids sneaking into the night to play fightclub and one takes a lethal beating, in both instances, they snuck off to do something wrong unsupervised. I bet some of them invovled joked about "The 1st rule of fightclub is don't talk about fight club." I am not trying to take away from the weight of this tragedy, I am just expressing my opinion about some of the dumb things our teenagers do, I used to be one of them. I am very sorry for the families and their loss and I hope they heal. The sad thing is many kids will not learn from this, either from a distance or those close to the tragedy. Too many kids will here of this and not think of how terrible it is, but they will speak of it as though it were some divine right of teen passage and some will feel they must sneak off and survive it to be cool. We may very well see more of this kind of tragedy in the future. Again, just my sour opinion, so please do not be too offended if my opinion is not as empathic as yours is. I have tried to staighten out some teen friends of the family and former martial arts students, and sometimes we can not stop them from hurting themselves. I am a little sour about such teen foolheartyness. End rant.
May that child rest in peace and may his family grieve and heal in peace.
 

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