Link works for me. I think the parens in the link target are borking it for some people.

As for what it’s like…. It’s weird. I knew him when we were both like 10 or so. My mom and his mom were pretty good friends, so I’d go over to his house any time they wanted to hang out.

He was a normal kid. He liked Nintendo and was trying to learn to play guitar.

His dad though… his dad was a raving psychopath. He used to beat the shit out of both him and his mom. I damn near caught a beating from him once until mom declared that if he was there, we wouldn’t be.

Eventually, I moved to another state, and his family moved to Florida.

A few years later, I was in freshman English class in high school (year 9 for the Brits), and an office runner came and told me I had a phone call.

It was my mom. “Josh killed a girl.” I’m not sure why she thought it was necessary to tell me at school since there was nothing to be done about it, but I guess she wanted to break the news to me before I saw it online or something.

The story on Wiki is pretty accurate from there. His mom was cleaning his room while he was at school because it was starting to smell when she noticed a wet spot under his bed, investigated, and found the body of a missing neighbor girl.

She had been missing for a week or so, I think; it’s been a while. While she was missing, he had even participated in the neighborhood searches for her.

I remember following the story as it developed. It was weird af to be reading about the kid I used to play Mario with on cnn. There was a whole media circus about him. We weren’t involved in any way since we had been moved apart for years.

In hindsight, knowing what I know now, there’s still ZERO indication that he would do something like that. He wasn’t a problem kid, he never let on about any weird sexual things (even hints of budding weirdness), if anything, I was a bad influence on him - he was a well behaved kid and I was the friend that was always like “hey, let’s go throw rocks at cars” or something because I was a little shithead.

I 100% believe the “scared dumbass kid” story the defense put out. I don’t for a second believe any of the “sexually motivated” shit. Every 14 year old had porn hidden in their room in those days. That doesn’t make him a crazed sex killer.

He was a scared kid with a terrifying abusive father that panicked and did something horrifying that can never be taken back.

Did he murder a child? Yes. Is he to blame? 100%.

I do not condone, approve of, or support what he did in any way whatsoever. But knowing his dad, I understand WHY it happened.