I don’t think the 13 year old was in any position to make an informed choice. Many people grow up to hold very different beliefs to those of their parents.
I’m not buying the family’s claim that there was no mental illness involved with the mother, either.
Tangential observation: if people weren’t fast enough to dodge an out of control bus or not strong enough to escape an attacker, that doesn’t somehow make it less tragic to most people. It’s strange to me that it’s somehow different when it comes to death stemming from low innate intelligence.
That’s fair. It was definitely child abuse in that instance.
But for the others, definitely neither sad nor tragic. They did something stupid and won a stupid prize for it. This wasn’t a case of people being too slow to dodge a train. It was people sitting on the tracks and just refusing to acknowledge it was coming.
The articles I read made it sound like the mother had always been a bit of a loner, so it reminded me more of the deaths of Timothy Treadwell (Grizzly Man) or Christopher McCandless (Into the Wild).
Things over there seem really polarized, even worse than here.
