Infant killed for “interrupting” Farmville
A 22-year-old mother from Jacksonville, Florida pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for shaking her 3-month-old son to death for interrupting her Facebook game.
The mother, Alexandra V. Tobias, was arrested in January and declared her plea on Wednesday Oct. 27 before Circuit Judge Adrian G. Soud.
She told investigators that, when the baby started crying, interrupting her as she played a facebook game called ‘Farmville’, she shook the baby, smoked a cigarette “to compose herself,” and proceeded to shake him again. The baby may have hit his head during one of the two shakings, she said.
Farmville is a real-time farm simulation game developed by Zynga, available as an application on the social-networking website Facebook and as an App on both the Apple iPhone and Android.
It is the title of one of the “worst inventions” in recent decades by Time magazine. With more than 60 million members, most of whom access the game through Facebook, the game has proved itself an instant hit.
So much so, that some players have found it so addictive that they’ve lost their jobs and racked up debts in excess of thousands of dollar. One child alone, with unrestricted access to a parent’s VISA card manage to amass a debt of £905.
