Killer Mom Kristi Anne Abrahams: Examining How Social Media Reacts

Most of us are not totally fine, The world has damaged us somewhere along the way, to the point where we can't trust everyone we meet. We've heard some dark things which are beyond our understanding. We might even worry about murderers, whether or not we live in high crime neighborhoods. A rather common, media-assisted fear is the cruel and utterly pointless abuse and murder of a vulnerable and defenseless child, especially by his or her parents or guardians. This is exactly what happened to Kiesha Weippeart, the 6-year-old who was killed by her mother, Kristi Anne Abrahams, on July 18, 2010, after years of abuse.

Before she was known to have slain her child, Abrahams publicly said, ''If anyone has seen her can they please contact the police?'' Kiesha's stepfather, Robert Smith, also didn't admit to covering up the crime at first. In fact, they had kept the little girl hidden in a suitcase for about a week, then disposed of her in a shallow grave (but not before setting it on fire in a flimsy attempt to conceal her identity, incriminating evidence, or both). If they were indeed attempting to hide their acts, they failed. According to The Sydney Morning Herald, the girl's body still "exhibited wounds consistent with long-term abuse and serious blunt force trauma suggesting that she had been slammed into the ground or another hard object."

In fact, investigators forensically determined the injuries were "consistent with being punched in an upward direction." Given the stated signs of ongoing physical harm, many would doubt that this death was 100% accidental. After all, even if the death had been accidental, how many genuinely grief-stricken moms would stuff their kid in a suitcase and burn them?

Then you have the added dishonesty of pretending her daughter was kidnapped, or maybe had just wandered off to some unknown fate. No one on earth would defend Kristi Anne Abrahams or Robert Smith as parents of the year. However, let's ask another question in examining such a case: Do two wrongs make a right?

Examining Social Media Reaction to Kristi Anne Abrahams

On June 16, 2013, the Australian Facebook page, "Shit Sydney," talked about the Kristi Anne Abrahams case, prompting a lot of strong reactions. These included comments like the following: " DIE VERY SLOWLY filthy f***ing oxygen thief!" "You are putrid f***ing mutts, you scum dogs deserve nothing but a beating and mental torture." "They need to bring back medi eval torture methods for people like this..." "I hope she gets raped by satan himself and hope he shoves his flaming c*** down her throat and lights the insides of this mutated scum of a human." "I want to shove petrol down her throat and burn her insides and then chop her up and feed her to the sharks..." "we need to bring back the death penalty,bible says eye for an eye," "Sadly her mother was a fu**ed up slag who probably kept her for some lousy centrelink benefits."

I could have included many more comments, but you get the idea. Their basic point is that something more should be done with her. She obviously deserves the very worst kind of treatments imaginable, right? Well, that ultimately depends on how much you could live with as a human being. At a certain point, it seems one can look at these comments and wonder, "Hmm, are these sentiments really so good?" Granted, it's unlikely that any of these people have done anything quite like what Kristi Anne Abrahams did, but isn't the underlying sentiment of rage similar to, say, a mother (or father) abusing a child? Is hoping for someone to be "raped by satan" really a defensible moral principle?

It gets complicated when we're really being honest, too. It seems most people have these irrational moments of rage, and there isn't always a logical counterbalance to them, either. Someone locked into an abusive mindset can quickly form an abusive pattern, especially when they lack the ability to form clear moral judgments and boundaries. I'd like to think that I could never be such an abusive person as Abrahams, but that's not always how the human brain works.

Most (if not all) people who engage in violent behavior were themselves damaged along the way, and it can be very much cyclical. We already know ⁠— even as folk knowledge ⁠— that brain chemistry, or even something like the weather, can negatively impact a person's ability to think clearly. We can become hateful, irritable, possibly even murderously angry by relatively minor things. Maybe life is frustrating to us in general, so we lash out at someone we don't like. Maybe we feel powerless in our own lives so we lash out at weaker victims. If we already have a callous disregard for others, any number of things may result.

If you really take an honest look at such characters, they're not necessarily as mystifying as social convention would have us believe. Of course, many people wouldn't dare consider the mental state of someone like Kristi Anne Abrahams, for fear of being too sympathetic to her. If nothing else, it leads to others questioning our own moral decency. One can easily imagine others saying, "You mean you have sympathy for this Kristi Anne Abrahams bitch?," or something along those lines. Never mind that, to some degree, we should feel obligated to understand such people, so as to not become them. Instead, we're not even supposed to stand outside the parking lot of that arena. Just making hateful, vengeful comments about such people and the job is supposed to be done...right?

Am I Better than the Facebook Comments?

After reading this little text of mine, some people might simply accuse me of boarding that moral high horse to flex my own superiority. Well, that's not really my intent. In fact, I can understand the rage of these reactions, and suspect that some of these people genuinely feel these things (though some may simply be trying to fit in ⁠— something I also suspect about so-called "cancel culture").

As time progresses, I see less need to differentiate myself from the stupid herd that I so often criticize. Am I not among them? My point is ultimately convoluted here, which is fine by me. Perhaps there ultimately isn't a point but to look at such things and say, "Hey, this happened, then this, and then this." With the brutal absurdity of the universe, honesty is almost a crime from any perspective.