Hat tip to commentor Alison for Colorlines’ “Minuteman Vigilante Shawna Forde Convicted for Brisenia Flores’ Murder“:
This afternoon a Pima County, Arizona, jury found Minuteman border vigilante Shawna Forde guilty on two counts of first-degree murder for killing nine-year-old Brisenia Flores and her father Raul Flores Jr. in May 2009, the Arizona Daily Star reported.
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Forde was also convicted of attempted first-degree murder for shooting Brisenia’s mother Gina Gonzalez, along with other aggravated assault and robbery charges.
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On May 30, 2009, Forde and two suspected accomplices woke up the Flores family and told them they were law enforcement officers. When Raul Flores Jr. questioned the intruders they stormed into the house and shot Flores and his wife. Gonzalez testified during the trial that after she was shot, she could hear her daughter ask the gunmen why they had shot her parents before Brisenia was shot twice, at point blank range. Gonzalez survived only by pretending she was dead, and then by crawling to the kitchen to find her husband’s gun and shoot at intruders when they returned.
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Forde has ties to multiple right-wing groups, including the tea party, the Minutemen American Defense, a border vigilante group that polices the border with their own guns and surveillance equipment, and FAIR, the anti-immigration group that helped design Arizona’s SB 1070.
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Her defense downplayed these associations, and instead tried to cast Forde as a boastful eccentric with big plans and little follow-through. The prosecution pointed to a recording of a phone call between Forde and an FBI informant, during which Forde made it clear that she planned the invasion.
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“People underestimate me all the time,” Forde said on the phone call recording, the Green Valley News and Sun reported.
Tom Scocca has his own opinion on the media coverage:
The Associated Press and other news outlets are referring to Forde as a “border activist.” While it is true that Forde was involved in various political efforts to restrict immigration, many of those efforts consisted of running around with guns, as part of a self-styled “Minuteman” group.
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When people do that kind of thing in other countries, taking up weapons in support of their particular causes, we tend to refer to them not as “activists,” but as “militants.” And then when they use the weapons to murder somebody, sometimes we call them “terrorists.”
You’d think Mr. Scocca would have read the unwritten Media Village Idiot style-sheet: By definition, “terrorist” is used only for other-than-white belligerents. That’s why Rep. Peter King doesn’t have to include the IRA he supported during their more violent days in his new “terrorist” investigations — thanks to our Irish-American ancestors’ service during the Civil War, we’ve been upgraded to Officially White People on this side of the water, no matter what Andrew Sullivan’s Tories may say.
beltane
If Ms. Forde can be considered an “activist” I guess the same could be said for any member of the Gestapo. The only way a white American gets to be called a terrorist is if he or she converts to Islam, otherwise your cold-blooded killing is just plain old activism the same as what Code Pink does.
mclaren
Yes indeedy, the far-right’s “border activist” is your home invader.
This opens up lots of wonderful euphemisms we can use to cover torture and murder and mayhem. For example, those guys in the Mexican cartels who are cutting peoples’ heads off and tossing them on dance floors down in Sinaloa aren’t gangsters — they’re “pharmaceutical activists.” And Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t an assassin — he was a “political activist.”
Ash Can
@beltane: Not the same as what Code Pink does. Code Pink are dangerous lunatics, but a right-wing activist who kills people is a lone wolf who was driven to do what s/he did by the evil liberals who are destroying our great nation.
Pooh
Not specific to this post, but hot damn this blog is on fire today.
gbear
I spent a moment at the AP link trying to figure out if the comments were snark or for real. In the next moment, I realized that I didn’t want to go there. I should know better than to do that with any straight news source.
freelancer
@Ash Can:
FTFY
Ash Can
@freelancer: Oh, to be sure, but they still make wingnuts shit themselves. Then again, it doesn’t take very much to make wingnuts shit themselves.
Mr Furious
Wait. Isn’t Pima County where that candy-ass liberal Sheriff Dupnik who got his panties in a bunch over shooting rampages and assassination attempts is?
No wonder Forde had to take matters into her hands, Second Anendment remedy-style.
Sheriff Joe up the road wouldn’t charge her, he’d deputize her!
(/snark)
There better be a special place in Hell for murdering that kid in cold blood.
suzanne
@Mr Furious:
Yes.
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
Have the blithering buffoons of the blargosphere issued a statement informing us that they’re the REAL victims?
Before the cock crows thrice they shall deny her.
James E Powell
And please, whatever you do, do not call them American Taliban. That would be over the top.
Roger Moore
@Ash Can:
Considering the age of the typical Teabagger, I assume that they could easily be shitting themselves out of incontinence as easily as fear.
Comrade Javamanphil
@gbear: The comment section on news stories at yahoo (AP or otherwise) makes the youtube comment section appear thoughtful and measured.
freelancer
@Ash Can:
True story. On the day after Election Night 2004 my mom gets a call from her wingnut sister who was amazed that it wasn’t reported in the “liberal media” that violent activists from moveon.org slashed the tires on Bush’s limo. That’s right, lefty guerrilla fighters from a fundraising website stabbed the tires on the POTUS’s missile-proof limo. They can’t even get a WIN without finding a way to make themselves victims.
mcd410x
I’m glad Sullivan isn’t horribly ill, but one day in I’m already tired of his born-with-a-silver-spoon bullshit.
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
And then they used their ACORN shields to deflect all the rounds the SS fired at them!
Or wait. Did your mom’s friend think the SS parks the PotUS’s limo OUTSIDE the WH’s fence and leaves it? ‘Cos that would be even funnier.
freelancer
@mcd410x:
No fucking kidding.
El Cid
you libtards want to whine about one case where a border activist got too zealous about keeping us safe but you won’t talk about how you’re trying to rob free speech from sarah palin by criticizing her
hypocrites
ruemara
I just don’t understand why this horrible murder isn’t getting any air time at all. You have to be kidding me that this isn’t important. But something done by kim kardashian is highly important. fuct priorities man.
Yutsano
@ruemara: Cuz white folks slaughtering brown folks don’t make ratings. And if it don’t get ratings the media don’t care. Welcome to 21st Century journalism.
Villago Delenda Est
@El Cid:
OK, Poe’s Law is going into overdrive here…
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: Yes. This. Exactly what I was going to say. Same as it ever was, same as it ever will be (so my pessimistic side says).
Phil Perspective
@Villago Delenda Est: I am 99.9% sure his comment was snark.
freelancer
@Phil Perspective:
It’s fucking Cid, I’m 100% sure.
Villago Delenda Est
Oh, it’s our Cid, alright.
He’s just got the patter down so well, it’s frightening.
rb
@El Cid: Oh, right, poor Sarah P. Poor I-quit-my-public-service-job-to-make-$7-million-a-year-in-the-public-sector-but-I’m-still-One-Great-American Palin.
Triassic Sands
The verdict was good news. Now, I hope the appropriate sentence — life without the possibility of parole — will follow.
I’ll feel a lot better knowing Forde is locked up in a maximum security prison forever (surely AZ has one of those for women?).
I imagine that she’ll ask the next Republican president for a full pardon. It’s a sign of just how low Republicans, and my opinion of Republicans, have sunk that I worry she might receive clemency. Few people have been less deserving than Forde.
Gregory
@ruemara:
Easy! “Liberal media”!
Oh, wait…
Jebediah
@Triassic Sands:
Does AZ do the death penalty? If so, she must be eligible.
If not, I would hope any attempt at clemency would be met with a raging shitstorm of angry publicity. There are simply no facts in this case that mitigate for clemency.
El Cid
@rb:
we need a hero to battle the libtard elites at starbucks and at government teat-sucking libraries and sarah stepped up to the job and now you librul alinsky types who thought you had it all planned out to sell the usa to the united nations have to face someone who knows all the issues better than you do.
and sarah doesn’t have to read all those newspapers or ‘know stuff’ to do it.
Paul in KY
@Triassic Sands: The appropriate sentence is death. She murdered a child.
Chris
I saw the same thing on CNN, where the woman was identified as “Arizona Vigilante.” My responding rant in the CNN comments section is reproduced here.
For the love of Christ, she murdered two people for political motives: that’s the very definition of TERRORISM. It’d be freaking nice of you people in the press if you called a spade a spade and stopped dressing it up with fancy words like “vigilante,” “lone gunman” or God knows what every time the criminal doesn’t fit your ethnic or political cliche of what a terrorist is supposed to look like.
russell
If i’m not mistaken, they got the death penalty in AZ. And I don’t care what color folks are or what their legal status is, nobody likes people who shoot little girls in cold blood.
Forde made her own bed, now she can lie in it. Hope the rest of the bloodthirsty nativist fuckers get the point.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
Wow. That’s such a good impersonation of a winger…it’s creepy.
RSA
Timothy McVeigh: heartland activist.
Marc McKenzie
I am against the death penalty. But in this case, I have to say this–she should die–and not some quick and painless lethal injection. Make it painful.
This…pardon my language, bitch…murdered two people, one of them a nine year-old child. And yet she acts as if there was nothing wrong with that because they were not like her–clean, white and all right.
I’m shedding no tears if she’s executed.
rickstersherpa
@Mr Furious: According to Dante, there is:
the 7th Circle, Outer ring: This ring houses the violent against people and property, who are immersed in Phlegethon, a river of boiling blood and fire, to a level commensurate with their sins: Alexander the Great is immersed up to his eyebrows. Dionysius I of Syracuse, Azzolino da Romano, Guy de Montfort, Obizzo d’Este, Rinier da Corneto, and Rinier Pazzo are also seen in the Phlegethon as well as references to Atilla the Hun. The Centaurs, commanded by Chiron and Pholus, patrol the ring, firing arrows into those trying to escape.
Hope she enjoys the swim (not) and gets enough arrows to look like a porcupine.
zuzu (not that one, the other one)
She will no doubt be imprisoned in Arizona, where she will enjoy the loving attention of her fellow inmates. No doubt some of those inmates are Hispanic mothers of girls about Brisenia’s age.
smedley
@zuzu (not that one, the other one): One can only hope…