I'm sure a lot of you have heard the news by now. The mother and godmother of Alex Spourdalakis pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter. They were sentenced to four years, and with credit for time served they'll be out in a week ( Read more... )

( CW: Murder of the disabled by family members. Genocide. )

I think we're having a summer homicide spike. Homicides of autistics have been coming in very fast lately.

June 19: Kevin Wilkes is killed by a fellow group home resident who was known to beat him up and bully him; staff kept them housed in the same location despite Kevin's previous injuries.

June 20: The body of Aaron Pajich is found buried ( Read more... )

The other day I looked back over the diaries I kept when I first went to college, and I looked at the entries I made just after 9/11. Much of it was just my writing down what I learned from the news, as I learned it, and talking about how it affected our daily lives; but some of it was oddly prescient. Some excerpts:

September 16, 2001:
" ( Read more... )

Today I added the 200th memorial page to the autism memorial site. The most recent death was on Monday. We lost a little boy named London McCabe, a six-year-old iPad afficionado with a cute smile. His mother threw him off a bridge after blogging about how hard it was to raise an autistic child and asking her readers for money ( Read more... )

I spend some time each day monitoring the news and maintaining the Autism Memorial site, and lately, things have been unusually quiet. This year so far, 2014, I've added only seven new people, mostly children. That there should be any is bad, but that the new cases are a trickle instead of a flood is somewhat hopeful ( Read more... )

You know that study, the one that's been in the news lately, about how lots of serial killers are autistic?

This one?That study... Yeah, it's bad science, or bad journalism, depending on whether it's the researcher or the reporter who made the leap from "people say you have autism" to "you actually have autism ( Read more... )

Isabelle "Issy" Stapleton is fourteen years old. She is in the hospital because her mother tried to kill her. On Wednesday, Issy's mother locked herself and Issy into their van and filled it with carbon monoxide. Issy's mother regained consciousness soon after the attempt. Issy is still in a coma ( Read more... )

Autism MemorialIn the wake of the "Innocent" verdict in the Trayvon Martin case, I have been thinking about just how easy it is to get off scot-free when you kill someone who is part of a minority group. Whether the minority group in this case is "people who are black" or "people who look like punks to a paranoid Neighborhood Watch captain" doesn't ( Read more... )

I guess I'm expected to post some kind of response to the Newtown shootings. About how some people say the shooter had autism. About how autistic people aren't any more likely to be violent. About how autism doesn't skew your sense of morality, or cause you not to care about others. I've had a lot of trouble putting my thoughts together, though ( Read more... )