Las Vegas Woman Tortured in Ransom Bid for Playstation

Two people in Las Vegas, Christopher Hunter and Rosa Garcia are charged with torturing a woman in a ransom bid to get someone to bring them a Playstation. According to the Las Vegas Sun, 

Not awesome enough for years in jail

Garcia and Hunter were indicted Friday for binding the woman to a chair for six hours, shaving parts of her head, threatening to kill her, threatening to behead her and show her head to her children, forcing her to take pills and drink alcohol, and emailing pictures to her acquaintances, all in a bid to get someone to bring them a Playstation gaming station as a ransom.  The emailed videos and ransom demand apparently involved someone bringing the Playstation to the location where they were holding the woman.

That is a lot of torture for a gaming system. There is no good reason to tie up and torture someone.   Tying up and torturing someone to get a Playstation is one of the stupidest I can think of.  It’s not particularly expensive.  It’s not clear if they were trying to get a new Playstation or trying to get back their old Playstation that they thought someone else had.  Either way, it’s a lot of work and risk to go through to get something that costs a couple of hundred dollars.  If this was an attempt at self-help over their own system that someone else took, calling the police would have been more effective and would not have gotten them in jail.  But that wouldn’t have been very gangster.  If it’s a new system they were trying to get, simply robbing a store would have probably been easier and carried less penalty if it had gone wrong.  But I’m willing to bet good money that these guys were either drunk, high, or extremely stupid.  Because they used they emailed evidence of their crime and exact location.

One of the people who got the emailed ransom requests (which included video of the woman being bound, shaved, and tortured, was sent to the police, who promptly showed up at the house and arrested the two and rescued the woman who had been untied when the police showed up.

These two apparently also don’t have any friends who have a Playstation who would let them use it. By their crazy behavior, this isn’t surprising.  Now they are likely to spend a lot of time in jail, where there are no Playstations and are likely to miss the next four or five generations of videogame systems.