Grumbling about your electricity bill? This will take your mind off it.
Australian Throws Daughter Off Bridge to Death, Police Say
The Times, London, Thursday, January 29
-Associated Press-
A father allegedly threw his four-year-old daughter off a bridge in front of the girl’s two young brothers and scores of motorists during rush hour in Melbourne today.
Witnesses said Arthur Phillip Freeman, 35, suddenly stopped his family car – which also had his two young sons inside – and, with young Darcey Iris in his arms, walked to the side of the West Gate Bridge, just after 9 a.m. He then allegedly dropped his young daughter over the railing and into the water, 190 feet below.
Shocked drivers who witnessed the incident – which police say occurred in a matter of seconds – immediately called emergency hotlines as Freeman reportedly got back in the large white family Land Cruiser, and drove away.Darcey miraculously survived the fall and was pulled from the water by police within 10 minutes and ambulance officers spent the next 50 minutes resuscitating her on the bank on the side of the Yarra River. She was then airlifted by helicopter to the nearby Royal Children’s Hospital in a critical condition and treated for the next four hours.
The tragedy gripped Australia as it unfolded on television, with footage of paramedics frantically trying to resuscitate Darcey on the riverbank streamed during regular news bulletins with updates on the little girl’s condition.
Freeman was arrested by police an hour after the tragic incident when he was spotted, accompanied by his two sons, Benjamin, 7, and Jack, 23 months, in a “visibly distressed” state outside the Commonwealth Law Courts across town in central Melbourne. The family had been in the midst of a custody battle.
Security staff at the court said that Freeman was shaking like a leaf, and staring with wild eyes when they spotted him and alerted police. Police, initially unaware he was involved in the bridge incident, said they took him into custody peacefully. As he was being led away, Freeman reportedly begged court staff to “take care of my kids.”
“He was pretty down and he had the two other children with him and he tried to enter the court. He couldn’t talk to anyone, he wouldn’t talk to anyone, he was just a mess,” witness Vince Mascia told the Nine Network. As Freeman was being questioned by detectives, Darcey died in hospital from massive internal injuries.
Her father was then charged with murder and set to appear before a criminal court. However he was deemed “suicidal” by psychiatrists and remanded in custody. He will next appear in court on May 21 for a committal hearing.
10 Comments Comment
Leave a Comment
I fail to understand the correlation between this act of madness and the water and electricity bill. Maybe you should have mentioned the case where a man shot his wife and children before turning the gun on himself (because he lost his job) instead.
[Daphne – Actually, it was his wife who killed all five of their children and then shot herself, and he shot himself when he came home and found them dead. I read the story yesterday, but couldn’t find the link again today. Maybe you’d like to post it here. There’s no correlation between this act of madness and water and electricity bills, but it does help all but the most self-absorbed and up-themselves people to get a sense of perspective on their ‘problems’.]
There’s always someone less off than yourself, whatever situation you are in. Unfortunately that usually doesn’t make you feel better. I try to think of this line, forgot who originally said it.
“I had the blues cos I had no shoes, till I saw a man in the street who had no feet”
It appears that the man DID shoot the whole family. Contrary to what Gerald is implying, however, it appears that both the man and his wife lost their jobs following a “misconduct probe” (ie not because of the recession):
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-me-children-killed28-2009jan28,0,4523206.story
Whatever the case, it’s a sad story.
[Daphne – In the reports I read yesterday, he was supposed to have shot himself after returning home to find them all dead. I suppose they didn’t know what had happened yet.]
Well, I stand to be corrected but it is true that we tend to exaggerate things.
This is very tragic. However one has to try and understand what was going through this poor man’s head.
He probably felt cornered, and must have been terribly desperate. Having seen that he was likely to lose custody of his children he may have lost the plot. He may have been thinking “If I cannot have my children, nobody can”. At least he spared the boys’ lives. I am not trying to defend what this man did. I am just asking that we try and understand what drove him to this point of no return. We should look at our own custody laws which are unfairly weighted in favour of the mother’s rights to custody. We should also look at how social workers and lawyers fight these battles, and whether due consideration is made to the traumatic experience of the father suddenly losing complete custody of his own children, sometimes without warning and most often without the necessary psychological support. The loss of this girl’s life is a terrible thing to have happened, but please also spare a thought for the parents who are both now destined to a lifetime of regret, guilt and sorrow.
Regardless of what you think about your electricity bills, it seems bizarre in the extreme to suggest taking solace in the fact that somewhere else in the world someone is flinging their children off a bridge. By that token, nothing is worthy of complaint.
The size of electricity bills is either a fair reflection of the value of the commodity in question, or it isn’t. Reaching a conclusion, preferably aided by facts and unimpeded by half-witted partisan views, is not exactly an effort that should test the mind to excess.
Mind you, should subsidies be scaled back incrementally and how will the pensioners and the less well-off cope…?
Oh dear, is anything miserable happening in Darfur today? That should take my mind off things…
@Lino Cert
‘If I cannot have my children, nobody can’
The father acted ‘godlike’. He does not have the right to decide over his children’s life. Children are supposed to be protected BY their parents and sometimes they have to be protected FROM their parents. The father in this case or others does not have to feel guilty necessarily, he is probably NOT able to feel regret, guilt and sorrow.
You are implying that, or have you been in such a situation?
Your concern sounds melodramatic to me.
[Daphne – The man is apparently suicidal and has been committed to a psychiatric hospital.]
@ Andrea
There have been several such sad cases recently, the unusual aspect here is that this man murdered his daughter children, and not his sons, and strangely enough not himeself, as most filicidal parents would. Perhaps he had a last minute change of mind. I don’t think that he acted “God-like”, more likely he was cornered and had nowhere to go, and the thought of losing his daughter became unbearable, in his mind he probably felt he was “protecting” his daughter, perhaps he felt the boys would eventually be able to protect themselves.
My point was that there should be more support towards parents who may face sudden deprivation of their offspring, taking away a parent’s child suddenly and without warning can have disastrous consequences.
@Lino Cert
The father was protecting his daughter by killing her? Can I ask for some additional explanations, please?
Have you ever heard of the Caucasian Chalk Circle?
http://www.amazon.com/Caucasian-Chalk-Circle-Bertolt-Brecht/dp/1559702532
One could call that father’s act, with all the respect due to his assumed pressing and tragic life situation, self-centred with a misconceived approach to the idea of care and concern. It is not HIS decision whether his daughter has to live or do die.
Without a question, there has to be psychological support towards parents in any kind of need, AND their children of course and I hope in our case, the Australian father and the rest of his family will benefit from it.
@ Steve – your sentence is attributed to a lot of authors including Dale Carnegie and Gandhi.