Japanese mother kills kid over his Nintendo DS

Over in Tokyo, a Japanese mother has gone on trial for killing her five-year-old son over his Nintendo DS.

Under pressure from work and frustration with her kid’s lack of discipline and tidiness, 42 year old Shizu Shigeta first kept his handheld console. When kindergartener Koshi asked for it, she shot back with the question: “would you rather breathe or play DS?”

Koshi chose his DS and his mother chose a more violent and final method of parenting. She tied his hands and feet with plastic twine and taped his eyes and mouth shut. Then she pulled a garbage bag over his head and another over his feet and sealed them at his waist.

“I intended to untie him once he’d apologised,” Shigeta said. But still drugged up on sleeping pills and alcohol she had consumed the night before, she fell asleep.

The two were discovered an hour later by the boy’s father but Koshi was already unconscious by then, and was pronounced dead three days later with hypoxic encephalopathy: brain damage caused by lack of oxygen.

Shigeta admitted to killing her son despite claiming she only remembered “fragments” of the incident. The prosecution in Tokyo is currently asking her to serve just four years in prison.

(Source: Japan Today, Photo: Wall Street Journal)