Nobody Knows What to Do with a Female Teen Killer, Other Than Watch Her Creepy Videos
As Alyssa Bustamante's cache of "Jackass stunt" videos resurface on YouTube, Missouri's penal system finds itself at its wits' end trying to accommodate a rare beast: the violent female juvenile offender.
Court proceedings for Bustamante—a 15-year-old who confessed to what authorities characterize as the premeditated slaughter of a 9-year-old neighbor, then led them to the hidden corpse—have so far focused on how she will be tried and where she will live. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that the options are limited:
Missouri's nationally respected juvenile justice system has no secure place to put a 15-year-old girl accused of a violent murder.
It's a system that was built for boys.
"This is real different for all of us," said Bill Heberle, deputy director of the Division of Youth Services. At Bustamante's certification hearing, Heberle testified that the state doesn't have a secure facility—meaning one with fences and locked gates—for girls.
... "We simply don't receive that many young girls that are committed to us for a heinous crime," Heberle said. "Our girls tend to be more violent toward themselves."
Bustamante certainly has exhibited violence toward herself, including a suicide attempt two years ago. While the Missouri juvenile justice system tries to puzzle out what to do with an alleged female thrill killer, the internet is busy rubbernecking at Alyssa's exuberant "Jackass stunt" videos, wherein she imitates the exuberantly male MTV series of yore. Bustamante's YouTube account has been the source of much commotion—it was there that she listed "killing people" as a "hobby," and the Associated Press described a video clip in which where Bustamante shocks herself on an electric fence, then coaxes her brothers into doing the same. At the time, the clip was thought to be lost to the black hole of disabled YouTube accounts. But, like everything unfortunate on the internet, it has miraculously found its way back to the limelight:
An internet archivist reposted several of Bustamante's videos—which range from Good Charlotte tributes to swimming pool splash-a-thons with her brothers—and Gawker commenter TheLemon posted it here, which means we just crowdsourced a murder investigation?