“I don’t know what he could have told her to make her not say nothing, you know what I mean, but she didn’t,” Cobbins said.That’s not what he told Still. “Did you hear her screaming or anything?” Still asked.
“Weeping,” Cobbins answered. “She was saying, ‘No, no, don’t do that, no, don’t do that.’ “
Cobbins admits he was at the scene of the carjacking but insists it was Davidson and Boyd, who has not been charged in the carjacking or slayings, who carried out the crime.
http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2009/jan/31/lawyers-want-interviews-out/
Cobbins Interview with Knox Sheriff pt 4 AUDIO: Cobbins Interview with Lebanon (KY) Police
http://www.volunteertv.com/home/headlines/38721042.html Cobbins, Davidson motion hearing 
AUDIO: Cobbins Interview with Knox Sheriff pt 1AUDIO: Cobbins Interview with Knox Sheriff pt 2AUDIO: Cobbins Interview with Knox Sheriff pt 3AUDIO: Cobbins Interview with Knox Sheriff pt 4AUDIO: Cobbins Interview with Lebanon (KY) Police
These are rather long, about 30 min each. Hear this POS lie and cry, and actually believe his BS will fly. It’s like he is too dumb to even connect the dots to what the cops already have established as fact and work from that. The cops talk to him like he is slow. Cobbins breaks down crying. He gets animated, he flips out at certain points. Awww ,the poor rapist, murderer, immolator, torturer, sodomizer, poisoner, thief – you name it.He’s so scared, he’s so disenfranchised- everyone is out to get him.
My heart does not bleed for this guy, or any of them. Just because someone is pathetic doesn’t mean you are obliged towards pity or mercy. Cops are trying to get him to roll over on one or more of the other suspects,as if he is an innocent bystander.”I ain’t gonna lose my life for nobody!” A lot of it is unintelligible. What makes me worry about the above quote is that if the cops/lawyers might not think they can get the death penalty for all of them-why the cops are trying to get this one to rat out the other one. I’m not hearing remorse. I’m not hearing shame. I’m hearing someone afraid and angry with their back against the wall, who knows he is outsmarted and outgunned and all concerned know that he was involved with the rest of them. I’ve written about this case a few times here, most recently
I only regret that killing them is the worst they can do. That’s like putting neosporin on skin cancer.
More google news results :
http://news.google.com/news?q=channon%20christian&hl=en&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wn
They don’t deserve the trials to be moved. It doesn’t matter with crimes as heinous as these. When the prosecution presents the evidence-and the jury hears the details of what they did-and no doubt they will hear from the coroner- one would tend to think even the most ‘saintly anti-death penalty’ people would have to ask themselves if the sickest, most violent truly deserve to share this earth with the rest of us-and if so, what does that say about the value of life? Is it only Ok to be against torture when some groups do it, say in the name of war? Oh, it’s such a shameful thing. Torture is awful. Women getting raped and mutilated in (insert third world country), same thing- a cause worth a bumpersticker like Tibet? But rape and torture and murder of our own children? Well, that’s just Hateful. That was just an accident, like a three year old breaking a vase, we’re just making way too much of this. Do you see the incongruity here?
Many of us know about what this guy Pitts said, but it bears repeating, so that the unsympathetic vitriol can be seen under the red transparency film , like those spy books you could get from scholastic as a kid. You place the transparency over what you think you see, the obligatory disclaimer of “If they did it , I hope they rot” and you see underneath “You people have it coming, F U and the horse you rode in on.” It’s not cute or clever to be snide, mocking and self-righteous about ‘racists!’ when at least 4 of your own committed such atrocities. It’s inappropriate and disingenuous to use a crime of this proportion as a springboard to go after people who are not Reality Deniers, like himself.
It always amazes me when white people put on the victim hat. And here I’m obligated, because I’m black, to say that if the defendants in this case did what they are accused of doing, I’d be happy to see them rot under the jailhouse. Sadly, that needs saying because there are people who will not take it as a given. But with that obligation fulfilled, let me add that I am likewise unkindly disposed toward the crackpots, incendiaries and flat-out racists who have chosen this tragedy upon which to take an obscene and ludicrous stand. I have four words for them and any other white Americans who feel themselves similarly victimized.http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2003731134_pitts03.html
I’m not the only one who was offended- here’s one comment, among many others out there:
” When a Pulitzer Prize winner adds the inclusive “AND” and then tags “any other white Americans that feel themselves similarly victimized” along with it, he is including exactly that, any other white Americans. “http://www.newsnet14.com/2007/06/leonard-pitts-you-need-to-apologize-just-like-don-imus/
How much do you want to bet he thinks the Duke Rape Lie was a real hoot ?
https://silentconsort.wordpress.com/2008/10/05/revisiting-the-duke-university-rape-farce/
There’s the school of Golden Rule-itis- the syndrome where people forget that ‘rule’ exists making the assumption that most people are not going to kidnap and rape, torture and kill, that most people will at some point do things they aren’t proud of, but it is important to make distinctions between petit mal evil and grand mal. They might think to themselves “two wrongs don’t make a right. ” Again, that kind of thinking is applicable towards the majority in the continuum of Bad Acts. They might say to themselves “I can’t save those kids now, it’s too late. Who am I to take another life to remedy their deaths with others? I don’t want that responsibility, I don’t want that on my conscience. ”
Again, that 2 wrongs/golden rule stuff is living in the ether of Everyone is Basically Good. There’s no such thing as Evil People, only disadvantaged. One can’t carry that PC mumbo-jumbo in one’s proverbial Privilege Backpack along with the Wow-Maybe-Some-People-Really-Are-More-Impulsive,Violent,Dangerous-and-Much-More-Likely-T0-Kill-Your-Children-Than-Others . Too heavy a burden for anyone.
These conflicting theories separate like oil and water, destroy critical thinking skills- one’s sense of logic and reason and create that ever-present and troublesome sense of cognitive dissonance- The one sense of This thing is Real, and feels Right. I know in my heart it’s True. This other thing- welll…. this Other Thing is only right in the rare exception to the rule, and wrong the other 99% of the time, but-dammit I-want-to-keep-my-job-and-not-piss-people-off-and-not-be-called-names. Man, this sucks. It really, really sucks. I know it’s crap, just like all the other bad stufff that goes with this is crap. If I start caring too much, with all this stuff in my head, I’m going to lose it.
How can one maintain the two conflicting beliefs without slipping into some catatonic-thorazine-like zombie state- a limbo where we just want to light candles and Think Good Thoughts. Positive affirmations. Vigils. Balloons. Teddy Bears tied to fences. Roadside memorials. The World of I’ll-Be-So-Good-and-Noble-in-the-face-of-Total-Evil-That-in-This-Goodness-I-can-Defeat-It! I can. I can defeat all forms of Mean, whatever Mean means. Can we fix it? Yes, we can, says Bob the Builder. Watch the Superbowl, drink beer, think about celebrities and materialistic pursuits. Be self-absorbed under the guise of Good-Guy Approval Sticker. Because you’re worth it.
Everyone’s a superhero.
Everyone’s a Captain Kirk.
With orders to identify.
To clarify and classify.
Nena, 99 Red Balloons
Someone else has done Evil, yet we can’t accept it. We need to make them Officially Sick. We need to come up with excuses, like …it’s all because their mom was a 12 year old crack addict. If they only had a Dad and a playstation, they wouldn’t have done this! They should have gotten more.. whatever. We’re busy scrapbooking, hugging, holding hands and crying. Oh, isn’t it terrible, as if it happened in a vacuum, all by its lonesome, the obligatory ‘isolated event’. Let’s just focus on Positive Memories and take Prozac. Awesome.
We hear litany after litany: “it was a car-jacking gone wrong”, “It could have been anyone they picked. It wasn’t racial, of course not, how dare ou suggest such!” or “they were on drugs, otherwise it never would have happened” and try to convince ourselves it’s true. Chalk it up to Random Badness, which of course since we are all =, we are all capable of such, right? We all know someone who sets kids on fire, sodomizes them, tortures and kills them, don’t we? Hmm, let me check.. Nooo, there’s a lot of other random and sometimes dumb things people do, but ya know, those things-can’t say as I do know ayone like that. Must be because they got away with it, because we’re all the same, but the ones who do it all the time in secret get away with it becauuuseee…” I know, I know , Mr. Kotter! Because they’re Privileged! It’s that Magical Backpack Thing! Right? I bet the guy next door did this last weekend and the cops probably even saw him doing it and helped him escape! ”
We try to justify the fact that past history often predicts future events any way we can. If someone fake-challenges us with “well, it is obvious from their past criminal record they had troubled lives” , “it’s Black Rage, like that Colin Ferguson kook on the subway. They didn’t really know what they were doing. Oh, I didn’t mean they are slow, of course they are geniuses, we’re all the same- don’t get me wrong, they could have been rocket scientists and cured cancer If Only They Had a Dad (meme) but they were compromised, they were ‘at-risk’ …. um.. in the throes of blinding rage against The Man. It’s really The Man’s Fault. It’s always The Man’s Fault. ”
Enter Evil White Serial Killers- they are the .01 % of their own population, serial because they are able to get away with it and/or exercise enough self-control to appear relatively normal and/or orchestrate and plan their dirty deeds. For them , there is no way anyone would believe they were just out having fun with no Truly Evil Agenda, and then POOF, something overtook them! No one is going to try and explain away Inherent Tendencies to violence. No one is going to try and soften up what the serial killers do because their mom was an alkie, or their dad beat them or their uncle molested them. No one is ever going to make up programs to mentor or otherwise sanity-ize disturbed white youth from the Outer-City. One reason is because the serial killer is the exception, not the rule. People don’t clutch their purses or lock their car doors for no reason at all, they do it because they innately sense Danger. They know the odds of The Profile of the 35-40 something serial killer guy scenario is pretty damn unlikely, but everyone avoids Oakland, at least parts of it like the plague it is.
When the killing phenomenon is not-so-rare -Oakland- we just look the other way “oh, that is just too bad”. We don’t do that with comparably and ever-more-rare Official Serial Killer. Nor does the “I can’t believe it myself. Mr. Smith was always a good neighbor- quiet, unassuming, kept to himself. It’s just so sad. He lost his job, his wife left him, he gambled away everything, but no one would have ever known. He always was pleasant, he always waved to us. It’s such a tragedy.” No, this particular media-induced repsonse will never work with Cobbins,Davidson et al.- their crying or no crying on those sound files above-except perhaps one of their mothers. “He was always a good boy. I don’t understand. ” It will never work because everyone knows they weren’t normal, decent people who snapped. An example that makes my point is the fact that hardly anyone reports witnessing crimes in Those Places , because they know there will be retaliation, and it will be swift and fatal if possible. They are even terrified of each other. Turning in the bad guy merits no reward but certain death.
Like so many other ills not caused by the body, we medicalize mayhem as well. If we do that, it implies there IS a fix, treatment, or at the very least- a kind of reverse mental hospice. If we can’t legally put someone out of OUR misery, we can at least make OURSELVES more ‘comfortable’. When we hear the double-think illogical We Are The World, We Can Save the World, We Can All Be Astronauts crap, we might look at them as if they are doing a scene from a new version of Theatre of the Absurd. We see the long criminal record as having disregard for playing by basic rules, but need to toss in some More-PC-Than-Thou crime/PC/racial softener sheets in order to deal with the actual end result. We want to shake our heads, but not really look , though when we drive by an accident or there is a crash on CNN, we do look. People don’t want to look at Channon and Chris because they don’t want to believe some awful truths. We cannot look their happy, smiling, bright faced photos in the eye and continue to lie to ourselves.
If there is one thing White people are good at, it’s what is termed in recovery movement babble ‘Denial’ . However, before the rehab facility co-opted that term, it had another meaning- it had a function, and that was what is now called a “coping mechanism’. It didn’t equate to a form of PC self-lying, it was a form of mental protection that our heads do on their own, it is a form of self-protection. Without it, how would people take any risks at all without completely freaking out? Could people drive, or fly or even trust any food we eat ? It is also a function of the mind which helps us deal with the shock and awe of grief , loss, and enables us to continue and carry on our lives, creates a kind of religio-quasi-stasis where we simply don’t allow what is buried to bubble forth, enabling us not to take matters into our own hands, or in despair -harming ourselves. The media creates tainted tomatoes, lettuce or peanut butter hysteria, but its agenda is not PC-compatible with Real Danger.
When you think of this case, think of those kids who deserved to live, who did not deserve in any way the horrors that happened to them in their last moments , hours or days. Think of the grief and loss of the families before you retreat into your own litanies of PC denial/excuses. Think of the Christian and Newsom families’ Reality. We ARE responsible to protect ourselves, but not in the form of retreat and denial. The Correctness Polizei wages war on us by making us feel guilty, when we are in fact the victim. It makes us feel responsible, when our children are slaughtered by others. It gaslights our minds and robs us of justifiable and righteous anger, calling us ‘Haters’. It creates a ‘call and response’ and we slobber like Pavlov’s dogs when we hear the gentle regretful, yet compassionate tones of the reporter telling of the latest horrors.
You don’t have to accept it. You don’t have to accept the name-calling. There are some things you don’t have to forgive, because it’s not your job. You don’t have to Unconditionally Love your child’s killers. We worry so, so much about things like styrofoam and whether or not we should spank our kids, but we revert to system presets about anything truly horrible and surreptiously check each other’s eyes when these atrocities are rarely even mentioned between people in real-life, so worried are we that we may offend, that we may catch some small sign of disapproval, that we may be rejected from The Game.
Remember yet another one of those ‘don’t use your brain’ chick-TV cliches “Do you want to be happy, or do you want to be right?” suggesting that if you just let go of your own sense of justice or point of view , you’ll be less stressed out, hence happy. Well, that is another form of sweeping stuff under the rug. Go along to get along, it sucks but it sucks less than fighting , so don’t sweat the small stuff- in fact don’t sweat anything at all, we have it all scripted for you. Don’t worry, be happy, don’t be a shit-disturber and above all, don’t get mad or talk about it. Whee. So, do YOU want to be Nice, or Alive?
So .. what do we do in the meantime -besides moving away and/or arming ourselves, telling our children not to open the car window, that it is better to be thought ‘racist’ than dead, which is not-so-dissimilar to the self-protection classes for women in which they say it is better to be thought a bitch and yell “NO! I DON’T WANT YOUR HELP!” then be attacked?
Back to what can we DO. We can align ourselves with forces that refuse to Celebrate Adversity- that make us carry the burden, whether of omission or commision. Whatever way we can. Even if you must help behind-the-scenes, help those who have risked it all, help those you deem sincere , worthy and dedicated, who are able to do what you cannot-that counts and is appreciated. You can help in a service-oriented way, offering up a skill- you can help in a practical way if you can, contributing towards operations.
You can help by not participating in the low-end gossip-banter and realize how late in the day it is- meaning- not making things worse than they are. You can help by approaching our tasks in a serious, calm, grown-up way. You can educate yourself and others on the truth and even anonymously take that to the local level, actually talking to people you run into, especially youth and when you see these little white kids dressed like rap thugs, talk to them. You’ll be surrpised at the results when they actually think an adult gives a shit about them. When you see someone doing something right, tell them. Tell them even if you don’t know them, perhaps especially then. Make an effort to mend fences, when that fence holds something worth protecting. Be the better man.
Cry me a river.~ Leonard Pitts, on the Christian/Newsom murders…..
The Spoils of War 
I’m glad you’ve returned. I missed your writing. I figured you’d quit the fight based on your “Words of Warning” post. Welcome back!
Matt- Thanks for the encouraging words. I don’t have as much time as I used to for the blog, but want to keep it going.