A Thai teenager has confessed to robbing and murdering a taxi driver after trying to imitate scenes from the controversial "Grand Theft Auto" video game, police said on Monday. The 18-year-old high school student, now in custody pending further investigations and a trial, faces death by lethal injection if found guilty of robbing and killing a 54-year-old taxi driver with a knife at the weekend.Police said the youth, an obsessive player of the video game, showed no sign of mental problems during questioning and had confessed to committing the crime explicitly because of the game.
"He said he wanted to find out if it was as easy in real life to rob a taxi as it was in the game," chief investigator Veeravit Pipattanasak told Reuters. The youth, described by his parents as polite and diligent, was arrested late on Saturday after he was found trying to steer a cab backwards out of a Bangkok street with the severely wounded driver in the back seat, newspapers reported.
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I'd agree with you if this happened in America or the UK, but this is Thailand we're talking about. They're a lot better when it comes to sentencing people. Give the b*****d the lethal injection! I think if you kill someone and say a video game made you did it, you deserve to be sentenced to death! Natural Selection!
To do something like this, you've got to be totally screwed up in the first place.
"Don't shift the blame"
Couldn't agree more.
Seems be a trend among people these days for blaming video games for them going out and killing. Hopefully he'll get the lethal injection, less people like him in the gene pool the better.
+ freakin' 1
I've been playing violent video games since I was around seven years old - I remember my Dad teaching me how to play Wolfenstein 3D, which got me into those kinds of games. Even now, I'm a big lover of first person shooters and games like that.
Does this mean that I beat up everyone I see and randomly kill people? Of course not. My parents chose to do a little thing called "parenting" when I was young, which involves monitoring what I play and ensuring that I knew that this was just a simulation and not something I should do in real life.
So give us a break....violent video games aren't always to blame for violence. If your kid isn't smart enough to know the difference between real life and a simulation, they shouldn't be playing those games.
"Grand Theft Auto" came out in 1997.
****ing dumb ...
as im sure most Thai detectives are mental health professionals. regardless, killing another human and showing no signs of remorse is in itself a sign of mental illness.
They should give this F@#$#$ the chair!
Why is everyone here so closed minded?. What if the game does have a role in violence?.
Oh. That's right. This is a technology site. How silly of me.
Like I said influence comes from anywhere and everywhere, it's knowing in yourself the difference from right and wrong and unfortunatly there is a lot of people out there that don't know the meaning of the word.
Why is everyone here so closed minded?. What if the game does have a role in violence?.
Oh. That's right. This is a technology site. How silly of me.
Yes this is a technology site...and I am sure most of the people here are gamers. So how many neowinians do you suspect are killers? I mean just go to the GTA IV threads in the PS3 and 360 forums! Those guys must all be killers!
It is because of people like you, that personal accountability is non-existant in this world.
This is yet another stupid article written about someone stupid blaming a video game and stupid people believing it.
Of course if you have a knife you can rob a taxi after killing someone. But in GTA you don't actually kill them, you throw them out of the car. So he wasn't imitating the game really, was he?
"He said he wanted to find out if it was as easy in real life to rob a taxi as it was in the game," chief investigator Veeravit Pipattanasak told Reuters.
yea right... maybe he showed signs of mental problems by commiting this crime and actually saying such ****?
And the parents... oh how objective! Really! If they say he's been good and therefore try to support that statement that it's exclusively GTA's fault, I call BULLSH*T on that.
Where's all the other GTA players robbing and murdering? Because seemingly it now doesn't matter whether you are sick in first place or not. Guess I only need to open my eyes and see the blood streaming on the streets... Sorry still can't see it.
Well yes, but why do you need to try it? I mean you CAN open a car door of a waiting cab. You can grab the driver, and if you're not totally weak, you can pull him out of the car. knifes work, too. they are made for that reason and it's common knowledge that you can kill someone with a proper knife. Well, I don't need to try, common sense helps, too.
What a sick kid, he must have mental problems.
I'm against capital punishment, he sure needs rehabilitation and re-socialisation.
And if it was true, that he's not sick, which I'm not buying, he needs a plain PUNISHMENT even more.
Because a mental sickness is more "okay" than doing it "just because"
IMO, crappy argumentation, if we count logic in.
Glassed Silver:mac
That's Singapore, I believe. Not sure about Thailand
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