Autumn Pasquale, 12, was allegedly beaten and strangled by 15-year-old Justin Robinson and his 17-year-old brother Dante. Not long after the New Jersey girl went missing, however, one of the suspects "liked" the Facebook page set up for the purpose of searching for the then-missing preteen.
If there are other motives in the slaying of this young girl, they aren't yet known, but it's believed the two brothers killed the girl and took her bicycle after luring her from her home under the false promise of trading bike parts with her. The unsuspecting child walked into the predators' traps and ended up strangled, beaten, and thrown into a dumpster as if she weren't anything more to them than garbage. If these two boys did in fact murder 12-year-old Autumn Pasquale, then what they did is a textbook display of a fundamental disregard for human life. And this kind of lack of compassion displayed by any killer is telling of the possible threat of re-offense. So are Justin and Dante "rehabilitable," or is the murder of the Clayton, New Jersey, girl just the beginning of two ruined crime-drenched lives?
The Facebook page, "Find Autumn Pasquale," attracted the younger of the two accused brothers, but why? The answer could be the simplicity similar to "returning to the scene of the crime." Perhaps Justin Robinson wanted to keep tabs on the case, so-to-speak, to see if anyone suspected him and his brother or to otherwise observe from the sidelines what he and Dante had allegedly done. Autumn's big brother took to Facebook as well, but to share the threat of revenge on the two teens who are accused of murdering the girl.
Autumn's killers deserve to be tried as adults, and it's a possibility that this may happen. The prosecutor's office is "strongly considering" trying the two accused murderers as adults—and at 15 and 17, they're close enough to legal age of consent to know right from wrong.
Photo: Philly.Com
Crime analyst & profiler Chelsea Hoffman can be found on Huffington Post or Chelsea Hoffman: Case to Case. You can follow her on Twitter @TheRealChelseaH or contact her via her personal blog. Fan the Facebook page for updates on missing persons cases, issues in civil rights and details on Chelsea's fiction works.
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