Guess what? The press outside Brazil firmly refuses to notice that ten of the twelve killed were girls, with the exception of the British Guardian which snuck this comment into a longer story about the funerals of the victims:
Mateus Moraes, 13, told the O Dia newspaper that Oliveira had deliberately killed a number of girls but spared the boys. "He killed the girls with shots to the head," Moraes said. "The boys, he just shot to injure, in the arms or the legs.I spent some time going through various articles and found nothing more on something which fairly screams out: More than eighty percent of the victims were girls.
"I asked him not to kill me and he said: 'Relax, fatty, I'm not going to kill you,'" added Moraes. "As he reloaded the gun I just prayed. God saved me."
But on this particular topic the journalists keep their eyes firmly closed. This angers me greatly.
Oops! I almost forgot the other reference to girls I found:
Menezes de Oliveira's classmates and former teachers said he was routinely bullied at school, rejected and taunted by girls in class, and forced to endure "constant humiliation," including being thrown into a school garbage can, according to Brazilian media.Is this meant to explain why girls were the killer's choice for victims? Or as victim-blaming? After all, the girls who may have taunted the killer were no longer in school. Who knows? But none of this is placed into any kind of context at all, and the vast majority of the reports just talk about children in general.