Blue Collar Scientist

Nelly Vasquez-Salazar apparently had a traumatic experience early Monday morning. According to her story, a person wielding a knife came at her in the dead of night and attacked her. She fought back with her own knife, killing her assailant.

Legitimate case of self-defense? Proper use of deadly force in response to an imminent threat to life? Not quite. That was just the first story she told the authorities. The second story was a little bit different.

According to authorities, Nelly killed her six year old daughter by stabbing her eleven times. She did this because the six-year old was sleepwalking.

No, wait - that’s not quite right. It was because the six-year old was sleepwalking, and the mother thought she was possessed by the devil. Satan, Lucifer, or whatever name you give it. As reported by ABC:

“The first statement we received from the defendant was that it was an act of self-defense,” [Assistant State's Attorney Stephen] Scheller said. “After she made the statement to detectives, she later recanted it, made a second statement, which she admitted in fact she had stabbed her daughter multiple times about the body.”

Fortunately, the authorities aren’t granting her a free pass, as they do in so many religiously-motivated killings - they’re holding her in lieu of $5 million bond.

Sleepwalking is a sleep disorder, characterized by a lack of REM atonia, the component of sleep that normally prevents extensive and coordinated movement of the voluntary muscles during sleep. The treatments for the condition are pretty straightforward. For some people, antidepressants or benzodiazepines will do the trick, but the more typical response is to make the sleep environment safer - by using stair gates, practicing good sleep hygiene, and so forth.

Sleepwalking treated in this manner is not normally very dangerous - until you combine it with the toxic influence of religion, apparently. Anyone looking at this case objectively could not possibly conclude anything except that a mother has brutally killed her daughter because of her belief in a spirit - that has never been demonstrated to exist - that she also believes has powers - which have never been demonstrated to be possible - and that this not-known-to-exist spirit was inhabiting her daughter, and that this justified¹ the killing.

1. At least at the moment of the act, she must have believed this. [↩]