God Bless Texas, GOP Style
A funny thing has happened in the rightwing blogosphere. A story of a heroic father, who stopped a man from raping his five year old daughter, went unnoticed for almost two months.
That story is from June 20th of this year and appeared on ABC. But it wasn’t until a story appeared in the U.K’s DailyMail yesterday that the right took notice:
A Texas father who discovered a man raping his five-year-old daughter and beat him to death with his bare hands will not be charged with homicide under state law.
A Lavaca County grand jury decided not to press charges against the 23-year-old father in the June 9th death of Jesus Mora Flores, 47, who was killed inside a remote shack after he was caught molesting the young girl.
Under Texas state law, deadly force is authorized and indeed, justified in order to stop an aggravated sexual assault and coupled with the fact that the harrowing 911 calls made by the father back claims he even tried to save the pedophile’s life led to the grand jury’s decision.
Lavaca County sheriff’s deputies said that the father, whose name has not been released to protect the little girl’s identity, sent her and her brother to feed the family’s chickens.
The boy rushed back to tell his dad that someone had grabbed his sister and taken her to a small secluded shack and the father rushed towards his daughter’s screams and arrived to find them both with their underwear off.
Rightwing blogs are flocking to this story as a sort of “stand your ground” scenario, as though it just happened. Perhaps if the right considered other news sources, besides Fox, they may have noticed this story. But that didn’t happen. Perhaps that is because this is a story of defense that everyone can get behind. A man walks in and sees another man brutally raping his daughter. The father then goes onto beat the man, in what can only be described as a god awful fit of rage, and ends up killing him. When you read the comments on the wingnut blogosphere, you’ll quickly see a George Zimmerman narrative trying to be construed, but that is far from the truth. First off, despite the horrific details of this case, officers decided to not be the sole juror of rather the father should be charged or not. Instead, they decided to let an actual jury decide that. This was something that Sanford Police weren’t willing to do, until extreme public pressure decided it was needed.
Then there’s another issue here. The father walked in on an actual crime being committed. That’s when he went into action. For Zimmerman, he pursued a boy simply walking home.
And then we have the big thing. This father, once he realized how far he had gone, he decided to try and get help for the man:
Flying into a rage, the father beat Flores unconscious, but attempted to call 911 for the rapist after he had made sure his daughter was safe.
Sheriff Micah Harmon had said in June that he was not willing to press charges against the father, rather the case would be presented to a grand jury.
At the time, Harmon said that the man was ‘very remorseful’ and didn’t know at the time he had killed Flores.
‘You have a right to defend your daughter,’ Harmon told CNN at the time. ‘The girl’s father acted in defense of his third person. Once the investigation is completed we will submit it to the district attorney who then submits it to the grand jury, who will decide if they will indict him.’
Again, not the case in Zimmerman.
This horrific story is the very reason we have laws to protect victims. The right is trying to spin this into some sort of Zimmerman case, when it is far from it. If this case was similar, then we would have heard about it back in June, when the mainstream media was reporting on it and during the heights of the Zimmerman trial. But Fox and Drudge decided not to push this story then, realizing that it is not the same, so the right didn’t notice it. Again, we see how they get their news and construe the narratives they want to push.
