The Lululemon Whydunnit
An employee at an upscale Maryland yoga clothing shop is accused of killing a co-worker who found suspected stolen merchandise in her bag, then trying to conceal the crime by tying herself up and blaming the attack on two masked men.
[Prosecutor] McCarthy said Brittany Norwood, 28, spun an elaborate ruse to convince authorities that she and the dead woman, Jayna Murray, had been attacked inside the Lululemon Athletica shop in Bethesda where they worked.
Terrible and tragic and etc, but at least intelligible, a linear internal logic. Norwood is stealing, gets caught by coworker and now has to make a decision: fold and lose everything, or go all in on one last hand and maybe get out of this.
That's the gamble: is it worth a life, is it worth going to jail forever, to get out of a retail theft charge? It is if it works, I guess.
II.
When you read enough news reports, you get to understand the code words. [Murder AND "upscale neighborhood"] always means domestic homicide (usually murder-suicide) or "non-white." Google it if you don't believe me.
The codes aren't conscious attempts to communicate unspeakable info to the reader, they are unconscious manifestations of the retinas of the writers. It's how they see the world, and after a while, you can tell how they see it by how they describe it.
"Make a left at the traffic light." "Make a left at the strip bar." Two different people.
So unless the two women were dating, this upscale neighborhood killing means one of them is going to be black or Asian. I leave the rest as an exercise for the reader.
III.
When Norwood was found the morning of March 12 inside the shop, she told police that she and Murray, 30, had been sexually assaulted by two masked men who came in the previous night after closing time. Norwood was found with minor scratches and other wounds, her hands and feet bound.Trouble is, when they examine the women, there are no signs of rape. A week later they figure out it was Norwood.
[Prosecutor] McCarthy offered new details about what happened before Murray died, saying she had been asked by a store manager to check Norwood's bag for stolen merchandise. Murray called the manager that night to say she believed Norwood had been stealing.That same night, after the store had closed, Norwood told Murray she needed to get back into the store because she left her wallet. When the two returned, they argued over the suspected theft, McCarthy said.
Norwood then picked up some sort of weapon inside the store and used it to beat Murray for as long as 20 minutes throughout the shop, McCarthy said. He said Murray sustained a severed spinal cord and blows "too numerous to count."
Oh, ok, it's this movie plot. Norwood didn't kill Murray to prevent her identity from being exposed, because Murray had already turned her in to the manager. Norwood killed her later that night. Now it becomes a revenge story. Still terrible, but at least it makes sense. Revenge taken as murder, and then Norwood stages the scene and concocts a story about masked men to trick everyone. So she's no longer going for four aces, she's trying to bluff. It's a longshot, but no one would wonder why you tried it.
IV.
Except-----------
When Norwood was found the morning of March 12 inside the shop...
-------except rather than leaving the store, rather than staging it as a robbery/murder and then getting the hell out of there so that no one would even think about her, Norwood stayed behind and pretended to have been a victim, too. She stayed there all night until the manager came to open the store the next morning.
That's not the behavior of someone trying to get away with something, that's the behavior of someone who wants to pretend to be someone else: I'm a victim. She thinks she can win, as long as she can trick you into going easy on her.
That's called a hustle, trying to convince seasoned players that you're someone that you're not. And when it fails, you get in a lot more trouble than if you just folded early and come back to play another day. Trouble is, hustlers don't hustle to win, they hustle because they don't know any other way to live.
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March 28, 2011 5:45 PM | Posted by : | Reply
Turns out you're right about the black part. You can see photos of her here,
http://askmissa.com/2011/03/19/brittany-norwoods-facebook-photo-reveals-seemingly-normal-woman/
Score: 11 (11 votes cast)
March 28, 2011 5:47 PM | Posted by : | Reply
Crap, should have waited a second longer. You can see the victim is white.
http://news.lalate.com/2011/03/21/brittany-norwood-arrested-for-lululemon-murder-of-jayna-murray/
If the roles were reversed they wouldn't have hesitated to mention the race and there would have been speculation about racism being a motive. But now that I've brought that up I'll be suspected of being a racist myself. And now that I've brought it up that I've brought it up... well you know.
Score: 23 (33 votes cast)
March 28, 2011 6:25 PM | Posted by : | Reply
Seattle papers covered the murder because the murderess was a former area soccer star.
Score: 2 (12 votes cast)
March 28, 2011 11:02 PM | Posted, in reply to , by : | Reply
You don't read this blog much, do you ErisGuy?
Because her being a former area soccer star is only the surface reason they covered this murder.
Score: 1 (15 votes cast)
March 29, 2011 6:15 AM | Posted by : | Reply
I think it is highly probable that TLP knew what the women looked like before "predicting" they would be non-white.
Score: 11 (33 votes cast)
March 30, 2011 6:46 AM | Posted by : | Reply
Ok. Consider me especially dense.
Is the real reason because the hyper-liberal elities who run the paper have subconsciously aware of the real violent threats to their authority (hint: it's a ****, not the tax enough crowd) and because this subconsciously reminds them of the several racist murders of whites in Seattle (for example, the Mardi Gras murder few years back)?
Score: 0 (10 votes cast)
March 30, 2011 1:00 PM | Posted by : | Reply
I am so tired of all the violence perpetrated by blacks against whites, but if I complain about it then I must be a racist, right? Because statistics do lie, if the statistics suggest that blacks are a barbarous and bloodthirsty group.
Score: -7 (41 votes cast)
March 30, 2011 3:45 PM | Posted by : | Reply
Another tragedy is the lapse in judgement by the manager and the victim.
Score: 0 (6 votes cast)
March 30, 2011 5:10 PM | Posted, in reply to , by : | Reply
It is only racist to complain if you are white. If you are black, compaining makes you a sellout.
Score: -1 (21 votes cast)
March 31, 2011 6:15 PM | Posted, in reply to , by : | Reply
Yeah. Remember how all of those blacks dragged us whites out of Europe on slave ships and made us work for them for a couple of centuries? Barbarians!
Score: -4 (42 votes cast)
April 3, 2011 6:15 PM | Posted by : | Reply
Rather than a racial thing, I interpreted this event more as "I'm a girl, and thus can steal anything, lie about anything, and randomly attack people without suffering any consequences." Seems like women i live their entire lies with the maturity of 8-year-old bratty children and rarely get more than a slap on the wrist for any horrid action of false accusation.
* I'm late for school... two bums raped me in the park.
* I got jitters about my marriage... a latino man in a white van kidnapped me.
* He has pleats in his pants, i hate pleats. I'm going to toss a drink in his face and tell my boyfriend he groped my breasts.
Score: -10 (36 votes cast)
April 3, 2011 9:59 PM | Posted by : | Reply
"Remember how all of those blacks dragged us whites out of Europe on slave ships and made us work for them for a couple of centuries? Barbarians!"
It was Moslems, both Arabs and Turks which took and continue to take European slaves. Conceal your racism and get your history straight.
Score: -3 (33 votes cast)
April 3, 2011 10:31 PM | Posted, in reply to , by : | Reply
ErisGuy, that comment I made was what we, in the humorously endowed community, refer to as "sarcastic."
Score: 5 (11 votes cast)
April 4, 2011 9:54 PM | Posted by : | Reply
Black murderers, slavers, pirates, cheats.
White murderers, slavers, pirates, cheats.
Nothing about it is just or fair. Only the demonstration that they are all alike only insofar as they and us are together all alike. Within each of us is everything horrible humanity is capable of.
Don't want to be accountable for all those who look like you have done? Don't expect others to be. We are not wired to think about it the reasonable way, but the right thing only truly counts when it is hard.
Score: 11 (13 votes cast)
May 3, 2011 12:23 AM | Posted by : | Reply
The picture is awesome............It was indeed one of the best blogs I have come across in a long time. Hoping to see more...........
Score: 0 (2 votes cast)
June 7, 2015 9:04 AM | Posted by : | Reply
What I can't believe is the murderess' savagery: She murdered a coworker to hide a RETAIL THEFT?? And thought she would get away with it? Killer is an entitled moron.
Score: 1 (1 votes cast)
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