Mind Soup

A son stabbed his 100-year-old mother in the neck then told his brother "I've just gone mad," a court has heard. Hannah Fitzgibbon lived in Stepney with her son BBC : Michael Fitzgibbon, 62, admitted the manslaughter of Hannah Fitzgibbon at the Old Bailey. She died from a stab wound to her neck at the terraced home they shared in Stepney, east London in February. Fitzgibbon denied murder and the prosecution accepted his manslaughter plea on the grounds of diminished responsibility. The unemployed former black cab driver was initially charged with murder. But prosecutors accepted a plea to the lesser charge after psychiatrists agreed he was suffering depression of "moderate severity" as well as the early stages of Parkinson's disease. Crispin Aylett QC, prosecuting, said: "This is a case in which the defendant stabbed his mother when she was 100 years old. Deteriorating health "This occurred at a time when it seems that in fact th...

When Lynn Middlebrooks Geter found that her 12-year-old son's report card wasn't to her liking, she didn't offer to help him with homework or ask teachers for extra instruction. No, she decided something more drastic was in order. The 38-year-old mom from Warm Springs, Georgia decided the best way for her boy to learn was to kill his pet hamster. With a hammer. The kid, naturally, was quit upset. What would happen with his next report card? Would he have to beat his sister to death to improve his commitment to math? So he told his teacher about it the next day. The teacher called social workers, who in turn called the Meriwether County sheriff's department. For her visionary parenting strategies, Geter is now in jail for animal cruelty, child cruelty and battery. UPDATE: Lynn Geter was either the greatest mom in Georgia, or a Mommy Dearest who put up a good show in public, but was a wicked witch inside the privacy of her own home. Those seem to be the radically dif...

A 78-year-old Hallandale Beach grandmother ticketed for driving on a suspended driver's license spent 15 days in jail before authorities announced her license wasn't suspended and an outraged judge set her free. County Court Judge Lee J. Seidman ordered Gabrielle Shaink Trudeau's release in December at her arraignment. "She's handcuffed like Houdini, for the record. She's got chains around her waist, and she's got handcuffs in front around her hands as if she was some kind of a violent criminal," said Seidman, according to a transcript. "I want her released. I think she's suffered enough at our system's mistakes." Safeguards built into Broward's judicial system are designed to prevent what happened to Shaink Trudeau. But the prolonged jailing of an elderly woman with no previous criminal record over a traffic ticket has left red-faced authorities admitting they botched her case. "We fell down and we fell down badly,...