Sunday, Jan 15, 2012 at 10:45 AM
Itzcoatl Ocampo, the 23-year-old Yorba Linda man arrested for allegedly being the serial killer who targeted homeless men in Orange County over the past month, is scheduled to appear Tuesday in Orange County Superior Court to face charges, but he’s already the poster boy for three groups of people that have populated the comments section of local newspapers and media websites. Each attribute his pathology to a specific Ocampo personal trait without knowing jack shit about his mental makeup.
One group blames Ocampo’s psychosis on him having served in Iraq with the Marines, a point bolstered by Ocampo’s own relatives.
In this good Los Angeles Times profile, an uncle claims Ocampo claimed to see and hear things after returning from his Iraq tour. The statement has been immediately seized by many commenters, whom without knowing anything about Ocampo’s life insist that his service turned Ocampo into a disturbed serial killer, and that more such cases will inevitably emerge–never mind that hundreds of thousands of armed forces members have returned from both Iraq and Afghanistan without having been transformed into serial killers.
The story also notes that Ocampo was born in Mexico, a point that Know Nothings have already seized and will only grow once it’s determined if he entered this country legally or illegally. Since he was born in Mexico and Mexican immigrants–whether legal or illegal–are inherently crime-ridden, goes the logic, it follows that Ocampo killed because he wasn’t born in this country.
Given our nation’s current xenophobia toward anything brown and general fatigue with the Iraq War, that the above two camps have emerged isn’t surprising. But the most bizarre conspiracy regarding Ocampo’s motivations springs from his first name: Itzcoatl, a Nahuatl name meaning “obsidian serpent” that was the name of an Aztec emperor. White supremacists have already hopped on the following ludicrous conspiracy–that the name is what motivated Ocampo to commit his crimes, that the power of the bloodthirsty Aztecs reverberated across centuries to motivate the sick individual to target White men.
That’s the opinion held by our own precious racialist, Costa Mesa pendejo Martin H. Millard. “We wonder if ‘Itzcoatl’ is this guy’s real given name or if he’s a Brown racist who took that name as some Brown racists do,” he wrote over at the collection of digital dung known as the CM Press. You know, because anyone with a Nahuatl name is automatically capable of savagery–you know, because of the whole Aztec thing.
The details will ultimately emerge about Ocampo’s reasoning for committing the murders (if he is in fact the serial killer, of which Anaheim police who arrested Ocampo on Friday are confident). Until then, one can only sit back and laugh at the above rationales–and cringe at how these people actually live among us.