It's a fascinating and tragic case. However, I think it's an illustration of the fact that the police's role is to determine if a crime has been committed, not to figure out exactly what happened in the case of any mysterious death. Given that this person definitely jumped off the balcony of their own volition, it would be very hard to prove that they were in such danger at that very moment from the other people in the apartment that those people could be held legally responsible for the death.
If a person is being chased by someone with a gun, then jumps off a balcony, is it their fault for jumping? A person holding a gun can make another person do a lot of crazy things without firing it. Replace gun by any other threat.
I'm aware that someone jumping off a balcony under their own steam could theoretically be a murder or manslaughter case. My point is that we don't know if anything like that actually happened here. If there is no prospect of proving beyond reasonable doubt that it did, then there is not much for the police to do. It's a sad and frustrating situation for the family. But the police are not Miss Marple; their job is to catch criminals, not solve mysteries.
He might not be the sharpest mind in St. Mary Mead, but Inspector Slack certainly does his fair share of mystery-solving as a police officer.
On a serious point though, I think there is some value in purely investigative work by the police even when there's no prospect of a successful prosecution. Unusual cases might lead to better insights into things that affect many more people: revealing well-hidden criminal gangs for instance. Even if the police can't pin the guilt on a specific suspect or accidental cause, the result of an investigation might simply be better public awareness of a risk, which is a good thing.
> there is some value in purely investigative work by the police
Simply knowing that every 'mysterious' death will be thoroughly and exhaustively investigated is a massive deterrent to just wiping out your enemies as happens so commonly in many places that have no form of homicide / cold case department.
The job of the police is to preserve order and accord. That includes investigating, thorougly, mysteries, especially mysteries that involve people jumping off balconies. To avoid a scenario where 'clever people' wander around the country leaving a trail of bodies in their wake because they keep covering their tracks effectively.
Seems odd to suggest so firmly and decisively 'oh well too bad so sad, not a police matter, let's move on!' especially given the way the other relevant parties are described to have behaved.
From a practical point of view, the police in the UK are far too starved of resources to investigate mysteries where there is no realistic prospect of prosecuting anyone for a crime. To do this would require dropping higher priority investigations.
I also think that it would be overreach for the police to do this kind of thing. The UK is not a police state (in theory at least). The police have no business investigating anyone who they don’t suspect of having committed a crime. In this case, of course, there were reasonable grounds for suspicion and so there was an initial investigation. However, once it became clear that there was no realistic prospect of proving that anyone in the apartment was legally responsible for the young man’s death, there was nothing for the police to do.
It's easy to get sucked in by the fascinating story told in the article and forget that legally speaking almost everything turns on the last few minutes before the man jumped – about which we know almost nothing. If he didn't jump in response to an imminent threat to his life, then good luck making any kind of criminal case.
>To avoid a scenario where 'clever people' wander around the country leaving a trail of bodies in their wake because they keep covering their tracks effectively.
In this case the only person who could realistically be guilty of murder or manslaughter (Sharma) is now dead. So we need not fear that he will kill again.
It always strikes me as odd why they're too starved to investigate unexplained deaths but at the same time they're not too starved to investigate misgendering tweets[1]. There are two explanations I can offer:
- misgendering tweets are more important than unexplained deaths
- police would be less starved if they allocated their priorities better
Don't entirely disagree but the investigation of misgendering tweets most likely doesn't need anyone to actually leave a desk so a "thorough investigation" sounds like the police are doing a lot but really it's a bit of clicking and scrolling. To claim the same level of effort for an unexplained death would take a LOT more effort and expertise - but if (I don't know) they are weighted the same in crime statistics the police are going to go for these easy wins all day long.
Not only that, but it strikes me as "secondary" law making. I.e. Bureaucrats, politicians, police chiefs, etc get the power to "repeal" laws by simply not enforcing them, under the cover of "lack of resources".
Using a software dev analogy. It's like each case is a feature ticket, and then constantly grooming the backlog so any feature related to say "GDPR" is marked as too-large and pushed to the bottom.
Rather, case-files should be completed FIFO with very clear rules and thresholds for when it can't be meaningfully resolved. Same goes for prosecutorial discretion.
In summation, commentary from my side: "WTF is wrong with these people, I'm surprised society hasn't fallen apart."
The UK is going to fall apart because the level of corruption has reached the scale that nobody who's competent and prepared to do a good job (i.e. moral people who see doing a good and thorough job as a core value) wants to put up with it any more. It's too visible.
I studied Computer Science in the UK and the very first job I got (in central London providing service to names you'd certainly recognise) was with this absolute cowboy outfit managed service provider that was providing about 1/4 of the services it claimed to provide. Backups? Yes, you're getting billed for them, no, they aren't happening. Hot spares? See above. Redundancy? See above. On call? See above. The lying was endemic and it was gross. I developed a chronic drinking problem while working there and I really do think working/being in an atmosphere of bullshit affects you in some sort of karmic way.
The UK is going to fail if they don't drastically change trajectory because everyone who isn't gross is going to leave, and the tap of infinite numbers of exploitable Poles has been turned off.
The police in the UK don’t always allocate their resources wisely (and have innumerable other faults). However, this seems to me to be a case where the police correctly stopped allocating resources to an investigation that wasn’t going to get any closer to building a criminal case against anyone.
I think it’s fair to call your second bullet point a ‘hot take’. Police funding was hit hard by austerity and the effects of that are still with us. It’s not credible or evidence-based to attribute the overall shortage of resources to overpolicing of tweets (however annoying and stupid that may be considered in itself).
Right, I'm sure they had the entire force of hundreds of officers looking into this...
And while you're correct that the article you linked is a bullshit waste of time, it probably represents around .005% of the forces allotted time in a year.
There is no big gotcha here, other than the reality that politics is a part of policing.
E.g., this bit: "The Coroner is expected to open an inquest where there is reasonable suspicion that the deceased has died a violent or unnatural death, where the cause of death is unknown or if the deceased died while in custody or state detention as defined by section 1(2) of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009."
"As a result of the crash, which all parties agreed was unintentional, two men stood accused of murdering his father and a friend who was cycling with him. One of those charged, twenty-five-year-old Sadik Baxter, had never laid eyes on the victims. At the moment of impact, he had been miles away, in handcuffs.
"When Donna heard the charges, she asked, How is this even possible? Ian had learned the answer in law school: a sweeping and uniquely American legal doctrine, often couched in terms of justice for victims’ families, called felony murder. To engage in certain unlawful activities, the theory goes, is to assume full responsibility if a death occurs—regardless of intent.
"The precipitating offenses in this case: Sadik Baxter had searched five cars for stray cash before surrendering when cops appeared, and O’Brian Oakley, his twenty-six-year-old friend, had fled the scene, lost control of his car in a police chase, and killed the bicyclists. The prosecution charged both men with two counts of felony murder in the first degree.
"Recently, Ian spoke with me about the case while caring for his newborn daughter in Brooklyn; as we talked, he sometimes ran his hand down a thick beard he’d grown in homage to his dad. 'It’s truly one of the cruellest ideas in the American legal system,' he said of felony murder. 'And most people don’t even know it exists.'"
Is it really murder if you break into a car and surrender when the cops arrive?
What about this real-world example from the same article:
"In 2015, when he was fifteen, LaKeith and four friends broke into two unoccupied homes in Millbrook, Alabama, to steal Xbox games and other electronics. A neighbor called the police, who appeared, guns drawn. LaKeith ran into the woods, and one of the officers shot and killed his friend, sixteen-year-old A’Donte Washington, who they said had a gun. The prosecution alleged that one of the older teen-agers had fired a shot, and a grand jury found that the officer’s use of force was “justified.” LaKeith was charged as an adult with murder, for the killing at the officer’s hand."
Is a 15-year-old really a murderer when a police shoots his friend for stealing Xbox games?
Elsewhere in the world, murder usually means a premeditated killing. This is something completely else.
Two people were dead (partly) because Oakley fled. Sadik’s actions did not have any causal factor in the deaths. Clearly injustice to charge Sadik with murder.
>They were up to no good and as a result two innocent people are dead.
What? The one was just stealing stuff from cars. Do you think anybody who did some minor crime deserves to be heavily punished for something unrelated a friend of them did?
Why would cops even engage in a dangerous car chase for a petty theft?
They should be held accountable, not the friend of a guy who killed a cyclist while fleeing from police.
> heavily punished for something unrelated a friend of them did?
It is not unrelated at all.
> They [the cops] should be held accountable
I agree with that. They too should be held accountable, yes.
> not the friend of a guy who killed a cyclist while fleeing from police.
The friend could have said "yo dude, let's not do crimes, it is stupid". If he would have done that the two cyclist would be still with us.
He did a crime. Intentionally. That crime directly lead to two deaths. He is punished for that. He thought he will be punished less severely. He was wrong. Sometimes when you roll a roulette wheel the ball stops at "two cyclist dead, you go to prison for life". The best strategy is to not roll the wheel.
> killed a cyclist
Killed two cyclist. Dean Amelkin and Christopher McConnell. Now that is a tragedy. Those two did not do anything wrong. They could be you, they could be me, they could be our parents, they could be our friends.
There's nothing direct about it. He was already in handcuffs when his friend decided to flee and the police decided to pursue. These other people made the decisions that killed the cyclists. The definition of murder is stretched beyond recognition here.
You probably think that these unexpected felony murder charges have a deterring effect that gets would-be criminals thinking twice about "rolling the wheel". But that's not the case either because statistics show nobody even knows about this legal doctrine (as mentioned in the New Yorker article).
> You probably think that these unexpected felony murder charges have a deterring effect
Not really. I know it doesn't.
It's more like I have a limited amount of care. I imagine all the injustices and bad things in the world. There is so many of them. And I imagine them all in a rough order from the worst and most terrible injustices to the most minor ones. Idk the top might be a toddler dying of an easily treatable illness for reasons of neglect or capitalism. And the last one might be some well of person having to wait an extra minute to be served. And along the line somewhere I just stop caring with a passion. And this particular thing is over that line for me. This is what I mean when I say I can't work myself up about this.
Even if we concentrate just on this case, there are greater injustices I care about more.
The two cyclist moved down. That is tragic. My heart beats hard for them.
The fact that the cops violated policy by their speed during the chase. That's bad. The fact that seemingly there is no negative repercussion for this is even worse. That's an injustice I care about.
Then there is the fact that even if the cops were let go because of this. (Which doesn't really happen.) They would just get a job as a cop somewhere else. That is also fairly bad. I care about that.
Then there is a thing which some of the articles about this case allude to, but don't spell out exactly. It sounds like the dude got a longer sentence because he went for a trial. Practicing lawyers call this the "trial tax" unofficially. You absolutely have a right to a trial, but if you use that right you very often get more severe punishment. (for all kind of reasons) Now, that is bad. That is an injustice.
By the time I get to the dude's situation I run out of steam and care. Should he be punished? Yes. Does he deserve life in prison? Eh.... I don't think so. Was he sentenced according to the rules of the land? Appears to be. Are the laws of the land just? No, not really. Is it fair that circumstances outside of his direct control dramatically altered the course of his life? No, but I guess the cyclist would feel the same too.
Just basically the whole situation is too brainy for me to care about on an emotional level.
I'm not disagreeing that it's fucked up to be convicted for murder that you didn't do. But let's also not downplay crimes here. Stealing stuff from cars is actually pretty bad, and that person is not just an innocent victim who was minding his own business.
I worked as a detective in the Netherlands and we had a single task; 'waarheidsvinding', which means 'finding the truth'. We didn't have the task of convicting someone or finding a crime, we had the task of finding the truth. So in a case like this, that meant finding out exactly why someone jumped or fell from a balcony.
First of all, you obviously only did this in cases where there was some prospect that a crime might have been committed, not in any instance of something mysterious happening.
Second, the police did attempt to figure out why the man jumped from the balcony. However, without the cooperation of the other people who were in the apartment, there is really no way to know for sure. And without knowing for sure, there's little prospect of anyone being convicted of a crime. The police don't have infinite resources. At some point you have to accept that the circumstances around a death may never be fully known. This happens all the time in the real world.
> First of all, you obviously only did this in cases where there was some prospect that a crime might have been committed, not in any instance of something mysterious happening.
How would you know if a crime has been committed or not unless you actually find out the truth about the event/situation?
It's not hard to imagine circumstances in which the police get involved because there is initially some suspicion of a crime, the police do some investigations and then stop investigating because, although many aspects of the case remain mysterious, it really doesn't look like a crime any more. (Alternatively, if it was a crime then the main suspects seem to be dead anyway so we have better things to do with our limited resources.) In fact I'm fairly certain I've read about many cases like that. Journalists might continue investigating in order to sell books and articles and satisfy the punters' curiosity but the police are no longer interested.
Everything in this story indicated foul play. It’s like all these people who fell through windows. I remember the guy who ended up impaled on the railing. Everyone knew it was a murder at the time. Certainly, the public and the journalists did. Same with the spate of oligarch deaths with, what, 2 helicopter crashes in the same region within a few months?
The parents suspected something. Once the Met started digging all the red flags should have made them take the whole affair seriously.
I mean, the daughter gives a thoroughly debunked testimony at the coroner inquest and somehow that’s normal and nothing to worry about?
"Finding out the truth" sounds almost like the goal is to uncover sets of relations that produce crime, and therefore to surveil the social world, rather than to simply look and see if its necessary to charge someone for purposes of social maintenance. The US policing and prison system is very maligned, but even for all that 95%+ of times when the police are called, nobody gets arrested and nothing happens, in fact the police just try to diffuse the situation; they are not there to get anyone arrested, but if they need to arrest someone, they will. The US is just a particularly violent place with extraordinarily well-funded police departments.
What makes policing in the United States different is the weakness of central (i.e. federal) authority and lack of nationwide standards of training and conduct. Typical US police training is about six months, while European programs are not rarely three years (including essentially an associates degree in law enforcement). A parallel issue is civil asset forfeiture, which can amount to legitimized robbery.
Those are issues (though nobody will allow federally funded police departments in the US). Still, ideologically, if the US police were more uniformly well trained, they would still be dealing with a predominately confrontational and violent population, and they would be not only ideologically but legally obliged to stay out of things that aren't police business, like the so-called "truth" of any story. In any case, the veracity of any given narrative is for the courts, and potentially juries to decide, not a unitary, federally funded police force.
Its clear that many of the legal and police systems in European countries were built directly out of the legacy of the monarchies and/or fascism, where absolute and centralized power directly administrates the affairs of the law and the state. So even if they are more well funded, well trained, and more effective than their american counterparts, the threat of total control, and terror through domination, still looms large.
As Scythe pointed out, because in the US the vast majority of policing is not federally funded, its not at all uniform, so the effects of the FBI and CIA and other federal agencies in toto is negligible. And state-police, while having a larger effect than the federal agencies, also have significantly less power over local jurisdictions than local police departments. The US--and honestly this is to its credit--has remarkably strong local police departments that are funded predominantly by the residents they police. This is even parodied, or criticized, in media when they show "small town america" cops who are either totally incompetent because there is almost never crime in the town, or are in league with nefarious forces and have to be investigated by outside agencies (see Killers of the Flower Moon, which is specifically about the formation of the FBI for that purpose, even if it has expanded its purview since the early 20th century.)
Even if state police are federally funded, why does that matter? The use of that funding is still under the power of the state (or else it would be unconstitutional, for the federal government to direct how state institutions are operated).
> Even if state police are federally funded, why does that matter?
It matters quite a bit to the question of whether federally funded police would ever be allowed. You stated outright that they weren't.
> The use of that funding is still under the power of the state (or else it would be unconstitutional, for the federal government to direct how state institutions are operated).
The normal way in which federal funding operates is that they direct its usage. You're not compelled to do what they want, but if you don't, they don't give you the money.
When I said "allowed," I meant at a mass scale, at every level, uniformly in a centralized system, not some funds for specific purposes here and there. Now, certainly, there have been times when that sort of federal funding has been specifically intended to more centralize policing in the US, but in general the structure of the state is such to prevent that, unless there is a serious change to US law.
> First of all, you obviously only did this in cases where there was some prospect that a crime might have been committed, not in any instance of something mysterious happening.
It's probably fair to say that nearly all mysterious deaths imply the possibility of some sort of malfeasance.
In reality it seems like a combination of police failings and the family expecting too much. The texts that were exchanged and the findings in the apartment certainly give rise to at least a reasonable suspicion of foul play which arguably should have prompted the police to investigate more thoroughly. If not murder, it is entirely possible that other crimes were committed, such as extortion, false imprisonment, obstruction of justice, etc. There may be various reasons why they didn't investigate more thoroughly: incompetence, lack of resources, or some more sinister/political reason.
But it is far from guaranteed that a more rigorous investigation would have yielded meaningful answers, let alone a conviction. The parents' theory (that he died accidentally while trying to escape danger) sounds plausible to me, but of course it would when carefully presented by a sympathetic journalist who also decides what other facts of the case to disclose to us. I am doubtful that evidence could be produced to achieve anything close to the "beyond reasonable doubt" threshold required to sustain a conviction. That alone could be a reason for the police to decide not to devote significant additional resources to the investigation. We will probably never know.
I agree with you on all points. It’s worth noting that the prime suspect for the lesser crimes you list (Sharma) is now dead. I suspect that’s another factor at play in the police’s decision not to investigate further.
> However, I think it's an illustration of the fact that the police's role is to determine if a crime has been committed, not to figure out exactly what happened in the case of any mysterious death.
That’s a very limited point of view and is more representative of the role of the police in a given context. This might be how it works in London and in the US, but it is not the case everywhere. There are systems, for example, with different police forces, one for actual policing and one working with the judiciary and whose role is explicitly to investigate and find the truth in such cases.
In this case, yes. London and the whole British establishment are thoroughly corrupt and the police is subservient.
Yes, that is what I am talking about, as this happened in London. As far as I'm aware, most police forces (of the kind that anyone would want to emulate) are focused on investigating crimes, not on attempting to resolve arbitrary mysterious circumstances.
>London and the whole British establishment are thoroughly corrupt and the police is subservient.
The simplest explanation for why the police stopped investigating is that there isn't any very strong evidence that anyone still alive (Sharma is now dead) is legally responsible for the death of the man who jumped from the balcony. Even if you are right that everything is the worst and everyone is corrupt, it doesn't follow that corruption is explanation for what happened in this instance. The police attempted to find out the truth, but none of the key witnesses were cooperative.
Audm was an article narration service which was eventually acquired by the New York Times. The service is now part of the NYT but still narrates articles across many publications — including the New Yorker.
Long but worth at least skimming. Full of little tidbits adding up to a damning indiction of London's welcoming embrace of wealthy criminals.
> Riverwalk was built by the London property impresario Sir Gerald Ronson, who was convicted in 1990 on charges of conspiracy, false accounting, and theft in connection with a stock-fraud case; he did a stint in prison, and then in 2012 was made a Commander of the British Empire for his philanthropic work.
As a Londoner this was the aspect of the piece I found most hideous. The whole city runs on a quiet attitude of 'money above all' that makes living here as someone on the outside of this world frustrating
Perhaps not "old money" looking at those dates, but I'm still reminded of:
> They were indeed what was known as 'old money', which meant that it had been made so long ago that the black deeds which had originally filled the coffers were now historically irrelevant. Funny, that: a brigand for a father was something you kept quiet about, but a slave-taking pirate for a great-great-great-grandfather was something to boast of over the port. Time turned the evil bastards into rogues, and rogue was a word with a twinkle in its eye and nothing to be ashamed of.
> Matthew and Rachelle felt mounting unease about Zac’s trajectory. He was growing up too quickly, and he sometimes behaved belligerently—stomping around their flat, slamming doors, at times becoming physically intimidating. Fearing that he was taking drugs, they asked his childhood physician to draw blood at his next checkup and surreptitiously screen it.
Yeah the parents seem ridiculously negligent here - when your 19 year old son is palling around with 45 year old Oligarchs who live on Park Lane you sit them down and have a long chat with them, because they've probably already got one foot in the grave.
EDIT: got mixed up with whose daughter Dominique was, but I think the general hypothesis still holds.
---
- Zac was working with Shamji, under pretense of being estranged from mother
- Zac met Shamji's daughter Dominique, and they were friends or dating
- Zac was staying with Shamji's associate Sharma
- Zac's story was starting to show inconsistencies for Dominique and maybe Shamji
- when Zac's mom texted him "sending much much much love", he had a "look on his face" after reading it that caught Sharma's attention, and he asks who the msg was from. Given his estrangement from his mom and family, Zac had no quick answer that wouldn't imply another love interest. In his confusion, Zac appeared to be cheating on Dominique. Maybe he bragged about another woman, misreading how Sharma would react. Maybe Zac looks like some sort of undercover snitch, for which Sharma is hypersensitive.
- In the course of next few minutes, Sharma grabs/breaks the phone, punches Zac in the jaw and locked him on the terrace, and called Shamji, who turned around due to unresolved confusion of who Zac was
- Zac panics. He knows he knows he cannot explain without everything unraveling. He tries to jump to buy time to invent a story. He fails to make the jump.
- Sharma sees him missing from balcony, but doesn't know if he made it to water or climbed down or what.
- Shamji and Sharma don't know what is going on, and can't make sense of what happened.
- Shamji is trying to keep his daughter out of the situation, so is trapped in his lies.
I like your breakdown of events, but Dominique was Sharma's daughter, not Shamji's. It does seem very likely that he was caught one way or another and took a dive to try and make it out alive
> He explained that he’d spent Thursday evening with Zac at Riverwalk, along with Dave Sharma, a fifty-five-year-old friend who lived in the apartment. Sharma’s daughter, Dominique Sharma Clarke, who was in her early twenties, was also there.
For Dave Sharma's daughter to be named Dominique Sharma Clarke, it sounds like she was married...?
> I spoke to Ismailova recently, and she told me that she’d known Zac by yet another fictitious name, Thaimas, and that she’d believed him to be a young Kazakh who lived by himself.
A white Londoner is not capable of passing for a Kazakh.
> A white Londoner is not capable of passing for a Kazakh.
Ever heard of Borat? /s
I think they implied ethnic Russian from Kazakhstan, like Arkady Volozh (the founder of Yandex) or Vladimir Zhirinovsky (the proto-Putin of the 90s).
They should be called Kazakhstani (the nationality), not Kazakh (as in the ethnic group), but this is the New Yorker, so pathos tends to matter more than logos.
The part that doesn't add together for me is when they mention how Shamji almost certainly knew of Zac's real surname and accent. Shamji brushes it off saying that Zac's dad told him to use a different surname, but that doesn't explain the accent part.
Shamji also doesn't have interest in Zac's 'family money'. Or, at least, there's no documented action he takes which would indicate any interest.
Shamji seems interested in leveraging Zac's actual family contacts to fleece them in typical, above board, business-type scams. Or at least he has Zac set up meetings so that they can potentially identify a mark together.
Sharma seems to genuinely believe the tale about Zac's background, even after Zac jumps, as evidenced by the call with the chauffeur. Sharma seems to think Zac is (or could be) alive the next day, as evidenced by sending the chauffeur at all. Sharma also knows the address to Zac's parents' house while still believing that his mom is in Dubai.
>At 10:35 p.m., Shamji texted a friend of his named Mervin Sealy, sounding agitated. “I have just been heating up knives and clearing up blood,” he wrote. A few minutes later, he followed up with a voice message to Mervin: “I’m not fucking around, ni---r, come to fucking Pimlico and pick up this fucking car and drop me home, bro.” He added, “Shit’s about to go wrong. Wrong!”
This message is weird for a few reasons. 1, it potentially shows that the situation was heated well before Shamji and Dominique left the apartment. 2, I have no earthly idea what 'heating up knives' means in this context. 3, he sends this text just an hour and a half after they arrive at the apartment. So an hour and a half after arrival Shamji feels the need to frantically text and leave a voice message for someone to come get him out of the apartment and drive him home using his own car. Shamji doesn't, at this point, feel like he can drive himself home and Dominique is either unable or unwilling to do this either. If he's drunk and 'heatin up knives and clearing up' is some kind of slang for trying to sober up, then why can't Zac drive him home? Why can't Dominique? Why can't he just call an Uber? For whatever reason he wants to get out of there and make sure his car isn't left at the scene.
>“Mr. Shamji is then seen to look over the river wall in directly the spot that Zac has fallen into.” The wall is about four feet high, and Shamji cranes his torso over it, peering down into the water. Then he straightens, returns to his Mercedes, and drives away.
Shamji presumably sees the body and makes no calls or texts to Sharma. Sharma wakes up the next morning thinking that Zac is/might be alive and sends a goon to go find him. _Somehow_ he knows to send the goon to look for Zac at his parents' house without knowing that it's his parents who live there.
>“I’m thinking fuck this little kid,” Sharma messaged Shamji on the morning of November 28, 2019—Zac’s final day.
Whatever happened that night, it does not seem like a 'spur of the moment, Zac said something that seemed suspicious/off' scenario.
Given that he’d been saying “fuck this kid” to Sharma, and then Zac subsequently died potentially attempting to survive a leap with a broken jaw at Sharma’s apartment… maybe Sharma was the knife and Shamji was agitating him
Everybody in such games seems to participate in a bit of self delusion. Even the cons. Even if they come across some details that don’t add up, they would rather shut up and stay in the game rather than question it and walk away.
If you were the sort who would question every little detail then you are unlikely to be a participant in this sort of deal making/fixing enterprise.
Those who would obsess over minute details would either be rank outsiders and non players, or those who have already made it and have too much to lose.
Zac had not passed his driving test yet. Remember he emailed his mother to tell her that he had used her credit card to book part if his driving test? That's when she texted him with the much much much love reply.
Also Dominique had brought her own car which he had parked in the Riverside apt car park. So she could not drive Shamjis car for him
> In a recent press release, Shamji was identified as the chief executive of yet another company, DarkByte, which bills itself—in language so laden with jargon that it cannot be explicated—as having something to do with A.I. (Marc Sinden, whom the Shamjis hired at the Mermaid Theatre back in 1993, summarized Akbar’s modus operandi for me as “Big announcement, and then fuck all.”)
> "We are delighted to collaborate with HPE to elevate this AI Cloud Service offering, further capitalizing on the growth of AI applications and building our next-generation digital infrastructure," says Akbar Shamji, CEO of DarkByte
Companies like HPE have partner programs that companies can self register to join.
This is because most MSPs are small mom-and-pop shops and a company like HPE or ServiceNow can't justify the headcount to have a personalized partner program for each MSP or small business.
PRNewswire is also basically an RSS feed. Every company publishes random PR listicles on there. I have no idea why (the newer generation of larger tech companies don't, but legacy ones do), but they do it.
The thing I’m most curious about is the teen’s attraction to extravagance & wealth. What upbringing would cause a child to desire riding in a limousine / pretend to come from old money?
At least from my perspective, he already comes from a pretty well off family. What more is there to desire?
(My perspective is pretty limited as someone who barely spends £10 a day and considers that a bit much)
I don’t think there is a functional difference beyond a certain point. No matter how expensive a car is, it ultimately is still just a car. Porches still can’t fly.
I definitely do get the power they feel though. My most memorable moment of middle school was when a classmate threatened to kick my family out of our house as the apartment was owned by his parents. I would think rich people more often socialize with other rich people in which they don’t wield that power.
> the teen’s attraction to extravagance & wealth. What upbringing would cause a child to desire riding in a limousine / pretend to come from old money?
Some people just get like that. A friend of mine went that way - everything became about appearance to them. Clothes, cars, fancy central London office - appearance was everything. They had no interest in anything 'organic' or 'authentic' it was purely about brands, places, status symbols. Really depressing to see where it led them (astray, which I imagine isn't uncommon.)
There's a kid in my son's school who can't stop mocking other children for their appearance of a lack of wealth. He keeps finishing off his mocking with how much wealth his parents have and the pool at their home and other luxuries they have access to.
They aren't even 10.
We are family friends with a person who happens to be a teacher at school. She said it gets worse as they get older. The school is a private one so I assumed it might be due to a higher percentage of children being from more affluent backgrounds so I dug into behaviour at several large public schools who have kids from all backgrounds.
It's even worse there. Even the teachers participate in an exercise of thinly veiled mockery of children who cannot afford the entry fee to a school activity or "donation" to the school.
Every school I dug into has it in some form or another. And the end result of that is that even children who are from well off background whose parents don't flash it around feel left out when their peers talk about expensive holidays and their parents' luxury vehicles. The children start to ask their parents and put pressure to present themselves as more wealthy.
The obsession with displays of wealth has always been there and anecdotally it feels it's getting worse. Maybe I'm too pessimistic but I definitely don't feel it getting any better. The worst part of it is how much the layers keep building themselves up. I know enough families now to know this isn't coincidence; there is even a large amount of debt being built up just to maintain facades of obscene wealth. Once they are in that trap, you can't just exit one day saying "know what? That was a lie".
We'll never know about this particular teenager's motivations, but I'd wager that given the school he was in, there were similar pressures that eventually got the better of him :(
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadOn a serious point though, I think there is some value in purely investigative work by the police even when there's no prospect of a successful prosecution. Unusual cases might lead to better insights into things that affect many more people: revealing well-hidden criminal gangs for instance. Even if the police can't pin the guilt on a specific suspect or accidental cause, the result of an investigation might simply be better public awareness of a risk, which is a good thing.
Simply knowing that every 'mysterious' death will be thoroughly and exhaustively investigated is a massive deterrent to just wiping out your enemies as happens so commonly in many places that have no form of homicide / cold case department.
The job of the police is to preserve order and accord. That includes investigating, thorougly, mysteries, especially mysteries that involve people jumping off balconies. To avoid a scenario where 'clever people' wander around the country leaving a trail of bodies in their wake because they keep covering their tracks effectively.
Seems odd to suggest so firmly and decisively 'oh well too bad so sad, not a police matter, let's move on!' especially given the way the other relevant parties are described to have behaved.
I also think that it would be overreach for the police to do this kind of thing. The UK is not a police state (in theory at least). The police have no business investigating anyone who they don’t suspect of having committed a crime. In this case, of course, there were reasonable grounds for suspicion and so there was an initial investigation. However, once it became clear that there was no realistic prospect of proving that anyone in the apartment was legally responsible for the young man’s death, there was nothing for the police to do.
It's easy to get sucked in by the fascinating story told in the article and forget that legally speaking almost everything turns on the last few minutes before the man jumped – about which we know almost nothing. If he didn't jump in response to an imminent threat to his life, then good luck making any kind of criminal case.
>To avoid a scenario where 'clever people' wander around the country leaving a trail of bodies in their wake because they keep covering their tracks effectively.
In this case the only person who could realistically be guilty of murder or manslaughter (Sharma) is now dead. So we need not fear that he will kill again.
- misgendering tweets are more important than unexplained deaths
- police would be less starved if they allocated their priorities better
1 - https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-surrey-47638527
Using a software dev analogy. It's like each case is a feature ticket, and then constantly grooming the backlog so any feature related to say "GDPR" is marked as too-large and pushed to the bottom.
Rather, case-files should be completed FIFO with very clear rules and thresholds for when it can't be meaningfully resolved. Same goes for prosecutorial discretion.
In summation, commentary from my side: "WTF is wrong with these people, I'm surprised society hasn't fallen apart."
The UK is going to fall apart because the level of corruption has reached the scale that nobody who's competent and prepared to do a good job (i.e. moral people who see doing a good and thorough job as a core value) wants to put up with it any more. It's too visible.
I studied Computer Science in the UK and the very first job I got (in central London providing service to names you'd certainly recognise) was with this absolute cowboy outfit managed service provider that was providing about 1/4 of the services it claimed to provide. Backups? Yes, you're getting billed for them, no, they aren't happening. Hot spares? See above. Redundancy? See above. On call? See above. The lying was endemic and it was gross. I developed a chronic drinking problem while working there and I really do think working/being in an atmosphere of bullshit affects you in some sort of karmic way.
The UK is going to fail if they don't drastically change trajectory because everyone who isn't gross is going to leave, and the tap of infinite numbers of exploitable Poles has been turned off.
I think it’s fair to call your second bullet point a ‘hot take’. Police funding was hit hard by austerity and the effects of that are still with us. It’s not credible or evidence-based to attribute the overall shortage of resources to overpolicing of tweets (however annoying and stupid that may be considered in itself).
And while you're correct that the article you linked is a bullshit waste of time, it probably represents around .005% of the forces allotted time in a year.
There is no big gotcha here, other than the reality that politics is a part of policing.
>[...] in such danger at that very moment from the other people in the apartment that those people could be held legally responsible for the death.
E.g., this bit: "The Coroner is expected to open an inquest where there is reasonable suspicion that the deceased has died a violent or unnatural death, where the cause of death is unknown or if the deceased died while in custody or state detention as defined by section 1(2) of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009."
You can get convicted for murder when you never even met the victim or knew about them:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/12/18/felony-murder-...
"As a result of the crash, which all parties agreed was unintentional, two men stood accused of murdering his father and a friend who was cycling with him. One of those charged, twenty-five-year-old Sadik Baxter, had never laid eyes on the victims. At the moment of impact, he had been miles away, in handcuffs.
"When Donna heard the charges, she asked, How is this even possible? Ian had learned the answer in law school: a sweeping and uniquely American legal doctrine, often couched in terms of justice for victims’ families, called felony murder. To engage in certain unlawful activities, the theory goes, is to assume full responsibility if a death occurs—regardless of intent.
"The precipitating offenses in this case: Sadik Baxter had searched five cars for stray cash before surrendering when cops appeared, and O’Brian Oakley, his twenty-six-year-old friend, had fled the scene, lost control of his car in a police chase, and killed the bicyclists. The prosecution charged both men with two counts of felony murder in the first degree.
"Recently, Ian spoke with me about the case while caring for his newborn daughter in Brooklyn; as we talked, he sometimes ran his hand down a thick beard he’d grown in homage to his dad. 'It’s truly one of the cruellest ideas in the American legal system,' he said of felony murder. 'And most people don’t even know it exists.'"
Don't do that. Though luck, select your friends and activities better if you worry about this.
What about this real-world example from the same article:
"In 2015, when he was fifteen, LaKeith and four friends broke into two unoccupied homes in Millbrook, Alabama, to steal Xbox games and other electronics. A neighbor called the police, who appeared, guns drawn. LaKeith ran into the woods, and one of the officers shot and killed his friend, sixteen-year-old A’Donte Washington, who they said had a gun. The prosecution alleged that one of the older teen-agers had fired a shot, and a grand jury found that the officer’s use of force was “justified.” LaKeith was charged as an adult with murder, for the killing at the officer’s hand."
Is a 15-year-old really a murderer when a police shoots his friend for stealing Xbox games?
Elsewhere in the world, murder usually means a premeditated killing. This is something completely else.
Second degree "murder" also exists, as does third degree "murder" aka voluntary/involuntary manslaughter.
What? The one was just stealing stuff from cars. Do you think anybody who did some minor crime deserves to be heavily punished for something unrelated a friend of them did?
Why would cops even engage in a dangerous car chase for a petty theft? They should be held accountable, not the friend of a guy who killed a cyclist while fleeing from police.
There is nothing "just" about that.
> heavily punished for something unrelated a friend of them did?
It is not unrelated at all.
> They [the cops] should be held accountable
I agree with that. They too should be held accountable, yes.
> not the friend of a guy who killed a cyclist while fleeing from police.
The friend could have said "yo dude, let's not do crimes, it is stupid". If he would have done that the two cyclist would be still with us.
He did a crime. Intentionally. That crime directly lead to two deaths. He is punished for that. He thought he will be punished less severely. He was wrong. Sometimes when you roll a roulette wheel the ball stops at "two cyclist dead, you go to prison for life". The best strategy is to not roll the wheel.
> killed a cyclist
Killed two cyclist. Dean Amelkin and Christopher McConnell. Now that is a tragedy. Those two did not do anything wrong. They could be you, they could be me, they could be our parents, they could be our friends.
There's nothing direct about it. He was already in handcuffs when his friend decided to flee and the police decided to pursue. These other people made the decisions that killed the cyclists. The definition of murder is stretched beyond recognition here.
You probably think that these unexpected felony murder charges have a deterring effect that gets would-be criminals thinking twice about "rolling the wheel". But that's not the case either because statistics show nobody even knows about this legal doctrine (as mentioned in the New Yorker article).
Not really. I know it doesn't.
It's more like I have a limited amount of care. I imagine all the injustices and bad things in the world. There is so many of them. And I imagine them all in a rough order from the worst and most terrible injustices to the most minor ones. Idk the top might be a toddler dying of an easily treatable illness for reasons of neglect or capitalism. And the last one might be some well of person having to wait an extra minute to be served. And along the line somewhere I just stop caring with a passion. And this particular thing is over that line for me. This is what I mean when I say I can't work myself up about this.
Even if we concentrate just on this case, there are greater injustices I care about more.
The two cyclist moved down. That is tragic. My heart beats hard for them.
The fact that the cops violated policy by their speed during the chase. That's bad. The fact that seemingly there is no negative repercussion for this is even worse. That's an injustice I care about.
Then there is the fact that even if the cops were let go because of this. (Which doesn't really happen.) They would just get a job as a cop somewhere else. That is also fairly bad. I care about that.
Then there is a thing which some of the articles about this case allude to, but don't spell out exactly. It sounds like the dude got a longer sentence because he went for a trial. Practicing lawyers call this the "trial tax" unofficially. You absolutely have a right to a trial, but if you use that right you very often get more severe punishment. (for all kind of reasons) Now, that is bad. That is an injustice.
By the time I get to the dude's situation I run out of steam and care. Should he be punished? Yes. Does he deserve life in prison? Eh.... I don't think so. Was he sentenced according to the rules of the land? Appears to be. Are the laws of the land just? No, not really. Is it fair that circumstances outside of his direct control dramatically altered the course of his life? No, but I guess the cyclist would feel the same too.
Just basically the whole situation is too brainy for me to care about on an emotional level.
Second, the police did attempt to figure out why the man jumped from the balcony. However, without the cooperation of the other people who were in the apartment, there is really no way to know for sure. And without knowing for sure, there's little prospect of anyone being convicted of a crime. The police don't have infinite resources. At some point you have to accept that the circumstances around a death may never be fully known. This happens all the time in the real world.
How would you know if a crime has been committed or not unless you actually find out the truth about the event/situation?
How would the police get involved unless a crime has been reported?
The parents suspected something. Once the Met started digging all the red flags should have made them take the whole affair seriously.
I mean, the daughter gives a thoroughly debunked testimony at the coroner inquest and somehow that’s normal and nothing to worry about?
Compared to peer nations, the US spends a decidedly ordinary amount of money on the police:
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/how-police-compare-differen...
What makes policing in the United States different is the weakness of central (i.e. federal) authority and lack of nationwide standards of training and conduct. Typical US police training is about six months, while European programs are not rarely three years (including essentially an associates degree in law enforcement). A parallel issue is civil asset forfeiture, which can amount to legitimized robbery.
Its clear that many of the legal and police systems in European countries were built directly out of the legacy of the monarchies and/or fascism, where absolute and centralized power directly administrates the affairs of the law and the state. So even if they are more well funded, well trained, and more effective than their american counterparts, the threat of total control, and terror through domination, still looms large.
What? Not only are those allowed, we already have them. That's what the FBI is.
Also, if funding is your concern, it's routine for state police to be federally funded.
Even if state police are federally funded, why does that matter? The use of that funding is still under the power of the state (or else it would be unconstitutional, for the federal government to direct how state institutions are operated).
It matters quite a bit to the question of whether federally funded police would ever be allowed. You stated outright that they weren't.
> The use of that funding is still under the power of the state (or else it would be unconstitutional, for the federal government to direct how state institutions are operated).
The normal way in which federal funding operates is that they direct its usage. You're not compelled to do what they want, but if you don't, they don't give you the money.
It's probably fair to say that nearly all mysterious deaths imply the possibility of some sort of malfeasance.
But it is far from guaranteed that a more rigorous investigation would have yielded meaningful answers, let alone a conviction. The parents' theory (that he died accidentally while trying to escape danger) sounds plausible to me, but of course it would when carefully presented by a sympathetic journalist who also decides what other facts of the case to disclose to us. I am doubtful that evidence could be produced to achieve anything close to the "beyond reasonable doubt" threshold required to sustain a conviction. That alone could be a reason for the police to decide not to devote significant additional resources to the investigation. We will probably never know.
That’s a very limited point of view and is more representative of the role of the police in a given context. This might be how it works in London and in the US, but it is not the case everywhere. There are systems, for example, with different police forces, one for actual policing and one working with the judiciary and whose role is explicitly to investigate and find the truth in such cases.
In this case, yes. London and the whole British establishment are thoroughly corrupt and the police is subservient.
Yes, that is what I am talking about, as this happened in London. As far as I'm aware, most police forces (of the kind that anyone would want to emulate) are focused on investigating crimes, not on attempting to resolve arbitrary mysterious circumstances.
>London and the whole British establishment are thoroughly corrupt and the police is subservient.
The simplest explanation for why the police stopped investigating is that there isn't any very strong evidence that anyone still alive (Sharma is now dead) is legally responsible for the death of the man who jumped from the balcony. Even if you are right that everything is the worst and everyone is corrupt, it doesn't follow that corruption is explanation for what happened in this instance. The police attempted to find out the truth, but none of the key witnesses were cooperative.
I sometimes employ AI summarizers that are on the internet. I haven't settled on which works best.
> Riverwalk was built by the London property impresario Sir Gerald Ronson, who was convicted in 1990 on charges of conspiracy, false accounting, and theft in connection with a stock-fraud case; he did a stint in prison, and then in 2012 was made a Commander of the British Empire for his philanthropic work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ronson
He's more "swashbuckling businessman who was a bit too swashbuckling" than "career criminal". Rather different to the post-Soviet oligarchs, at least.
> They were indeed what was known as 'old money', which meant that it had been made so long ago that the black deeds which had originally filled the coffers were now historically irrelevant. Funny, that: a brigand for a father was something you kept quiet about, but a slave-taking pirate for a great-great-great-grandfather was something to boast of over the port. Time turned the evil bastards into rogues, and rogue was a word with a twinkle in its eye and nothing to be ashamed of.
-- Making Money by Terry Pratchett
No wonder the kid had issues
edit: they also hid cameras
My speculation:
---
EDIT: got mixed up with whose daughter Dominique was, but I think the general hypothesis still holds.
---
- Zac was working with Shamji, under pretense of being estranged from mother
- Zac met Shamji's daughter Dominique, and they were friends or dating
- Zac was staying with Shamji's associate Sharma
- Zac's story was starting to show inconsistencies for Dominique and maybe Shamji
- when Zac's mom texted him "sending much much much love", he had a "look on his face" after reading it that caught Sharma's attention, and he asks who the msg was from. Given his estrangement from his mom and family, Zac had no quick answer that wouldn't imply another love interest. In his confusion, Zac appeared to be cheating on Dominique. Maybe he bragged about another woman, misreading how Sharma would react. Maybe Zac looks like some sort of undercover snitch, for which Sharma is hypersensitive.
- In the course of next few minutes, Sharma grabs/breaks the phone, punches Zac in the jaw and locked him on the terrace, and called Shamji, who turned around due to unresolved confusion of who Zac was
- Zac panics. He knows he knows he cannot explain without everything unraveling. He tries to jump to buy time to invent a story. He fails to make the jump.
- Sharma sees him missing from balcony, but doesn't know if he made it to water or climbed down or what.
- Shamji and Sharma don't know what is going on, and can't make sense of what happened.
- Shamji is trying to keep his daughter out of the situation, so is trapped in his lies.
For Dave Sharma's daughter to be named Dominique Sharma Clarke, it sounds like she was married...?
> I spoke to Ismailova recently, and she told me that she’d known Zac by yet another fictitious name, Thaimas, and that she’d believed him to be a young Kazakh who lived by himself.
A white Londoner is not capable of passing for a Kazakh.
Ever heard of Borat? /s
I think they implied ethnic Russian from Kazakhstan, like Arkady Volozh (the founder of Yandex) or Vladimir Zhirinovsky (the proto-Putin of the 90s).
They should be called Kazakhstani (the nationality), not Kazakh (as in the ethnic group), but this is the New Yorker, so pathos tends to matter more than logos.
A fairly large fraction of Kazakhstan's population is ethnic Russian.
Common for children of unmarried parents as well
- Sharma wanted the money that Zac represented he had.
- Sharma remarked to Shamji (before the events) that Zac, having involved himself with them, was not allowed to run away.
- Zac was thinking (before the events) of entering witness protection.
All indications are that nothing special happened that night; the situation had already gone bad. Why postulate a comedy of errors?
- The "hint of a Russian accent" that Zac supposedly put on (but nobody except Shamji ever noticed)
- How quickly Shamji and his associates were to claim that Zac "seemed suicidal"
- The "heating up knives and clearing up blood" text from Shamji hours before Zac's death
- The traces of blood spotted by the police when they searched the apartment Zac jumped from
But hey, the cops asked a few questions and none of these shady characters instantly signed a confession so what more could they possibly do?
It's already known that they knew he jumped into the river; this is pretty easy to explain.
Shamji also doesn't have interest in Zac's 'family money'. Or, at least, there's no documented action he takes which would indicate any interest.
Shamji seems interested in leveraging Zac's actual family contacts to fleece them in typical, above board, business-type scams. Or at least he has Zac set up meetings so that they can potentially identify a mark together.
Sharma seems to genuinely believe the tale about Zac's background, even after Zac jumps, as evidenced by the call with the chauffeur. Sharma seems to think Zac is (or could be) alive the next day, as evidenced by sending the chauffeur at all. Sharma also knows the address to Zac's parents' house while still believing that his mom is in Dubai.
>At 10:35 p.m., Shamji texted a friend of his named Mervin Sealy, sounding agitated. “I have just been heating up knives and clearing up blood,” he wrote. A few minutes later, he followed up with a voice message to Mervin: “I’m not fucking around, ni---r, come to fucking Pimlico and pick up this fucking car and drop me home, bro.” He added, “Shit’s about to go wrong. Wrong!”
This message is weird for a few reasons. 1, it potentially shows that the situation was heated well before Shamji and Dominique left the apartment. 2, I have no earthly idea what 'heating up knives' means in this context. 3, he sends this text just an hour and a half after they arrive at the apartment. So an hour and a half after arrival Shamji feels the need to frantically text and leave a voice message for someone to come get him out of the apartment and drive him home using his own car. Shamji doesn't, at this point, feel like he can drive himself home and Dominique is either unable or unwilling to do this either. If he's drunk and 'heatin up knives and clearing up' is some kind of slang for trying to sober up, then why can't Zac drive him home? Why can't Dominique? Why can't he just call an Uber? For whatever reason he wants to get out of there and make sure his car isn't left at the scene.
>“Mr. Shamji is then seen to look over the river wall in directly the spot that Zac has fallen into.” The wall is about four feet high, and Shamji cranes his torso over it, peering down into the water. Then he straightens, returns to his Mercedes, and drives away.
Shamji presumably sees the body and makes no calls or texts to Sharma. Sharma wakes up the next morning thinking that Zac is/might be alive and sends a goon to go find him. _Somehow_ he knows to send the goon to look for Zac at his parents' house without knowing that it's his parents who live there.
>“I’m thinking fuck this little kid,” Sharma messaged Shamji on the morning of November 28, 2019—Zac’s final day.
Whatever happened that night, it does not seem like a 'spur of the moment, Zac said something that seemed suspicious/off' scenario.
Anyone heating up knives is either sterilizing them for emergency surgery or preparing them for torture (branding).
If you were the sort who would question every little detail then you are unlikely to be a participant in this sort of deal making/fixing enterprise.
Those who would obsess over minute details would either be rank outsiders and non players, or those who have already made it and have too much to lose.
Incredibly, a quick search suggests that that very same company DarkByte has entered into a collaboration with Hewlett Packard Enterprise - https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ai-meets-renewable-...
Give that a read.
> "We are delighted to collaborate with HPE to elevate this AI Cloud Service offering, further capitalizing on the growth of AI applications and building our next-generation digital infrastructure," says Akbar Shamji, CEO of DarkByte
This is because most MSPs are small mom-and-pop shops and a company like HPE or ServiceNow can't justify the headcount to have a personalized partner program for each MSP or small business.
PRNewswire is also basically an RSS feed. Every company publishes random PR listicles on there. I have no idea why (the newer generation of larger tech companies don't, but legacy ones do), but they do it.
There's a lot of "if the olds do it, we're doing something different" mentality.
!
But of course.
The thing I’m most curious about is the teen’s attraction to extravagance & wealth. What upbringing would cause a child to desire riding in a limousine / pretend to come from old money?
At least from my perspective, he already comes from a pretty well off family. What more is there to desire?
(My perspective is pretty limited as someone who barely spends £10 a day and considers that a bit much)
When your parents are millionaires but your friends' parents are billionaires, you still get jealous.
I definitely do get the power they feel though. My most memorable moment of middle school was when a classmate threatened to kick my family out of our house as the apartment was owned by his parents. I would think rich people more often socialize with other rich people in which they don’t wield that power.
Millionaire = nicer cars, maybe a chartered flight.
Billionaire = private jets in their name.
Also, just cause you see something for what it is to you shouldn’t prevent you from seeing through other’s eyes!
Some people just get like that. A friend of mine went that way - everything became about appearance to them. Clothes, cars, fancy central London office - appearance was everything. They had no interest in anything 'organic' or 'authentic' it was purely about brands, places, status symbols. Really depressing to see where it led them (astray, which I imagine isn't uncommon.)
They aren't even 10.
We are family friends with a person who happens to be a teacher at school. She said it gets worse as they get older. The school is a private one so I assumed it might be due to a higher percentage of children being from more affluent backgrounds so I dug into behaviour at several large public schools who have kids from all backgrounds.
It's even worse there. Even the teachers participate in an exercise of thinly veiled mockery of children who cannot afford the entry fee to a school activity or "donation" to the school.
Every school I dug into has it in some form or another. And the end result of that is that even children who are from well off background whose parents don't flash it around feel left out when their peers talk about expensive holidays and their parents' luxury vehicles. The children start to ask their parents and put pressure to present themselves as more wealthy.
The obsession with displays of wealth has always been there and anecdotally it feels it's getting worse. Maybe I'm too pessimistic but I definitely don't feel it getting any better. The worst part of it is how much the layers keep building themselves up. I know enough families now to know this isn't coincidence; there is even a large amount of debt being built up just to maintain facades of obscene wealth. Once they are in that trap, you can't just exit one day saying "know what? That was a lie".
We'll never know about this particular teenager's motivations, but I'd wager that given the school he was in, there were similar pressures that eventually got the better of him :(
This is his company - A crypto climate start up. A16z are you guys in need for an other money laundering criminal?