Charles Rammelkamp

WOULD YOU LIKE FRIES WITH THAT?

Well, yeah, the guy was mental,
nobody’s going to dispute that,
but to say he wasn’t responsible
for killing those six people at Burger Blast
because he suffered from a paranoid delusion
involving businesses blocking his efforts
to rehabilitate his reputation
after all the publicity surrounding
his harassment charge against
a former high school classmate, a popular girl
when they were in school together,
now an assistant manager at a fast-food restaurant?
Seriously?

Could the psychiatrist the defense retained
really convince a jury –
or cast “reasonable doubt” –
that Kingsbury’s “delusional disorder,”
coupled with his autism
and the anxiety caused by his OCD,
meant he wasn’t responsible
for gunning down those people
as if they were targets
at a shooting gallery?

That’s just insane!


Charles's YouTube video reading of "Would You Like Fries with That?":



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Charles confesses: "In 2018 Jarrod Ramos gunned down five people at the Capital Gazette newspaper offices in Annapolis, MD. When the case came to trial in 2021, the defense attorneys’ jaw-dropping defense was that Ramos was insane at the time the crime was committed because of a combination of mental conditions that led him to become obsessed with the newspaper after it covered his 2011 harassment conviction. They claimed he’d developed delusions that the courts were persecuting him, too, since they’d rejected his defamation lawsuits. The jury didn’t buy it."

CHARLES RAMMELKAMP is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore, where he lives with his wife Abby. He contributes a monthly book review to North of Oxford and is a frequent reviewer for The Lake, London Grip, and The Compulsive Reader. A poetry chapbook, Mortal Coil, was published in 2021 by Clare Songbirds Publishing and another, Sparring Partners, by Moonstone Press. A full-length collection, The Field of Happiness, will be published in 2022 by Kelsay Books.