Here in the US, people kill for a lot less.
And incidentally, in case you didn't know, to classify as a robber you need to either use, or threaten, with violence.
The average burglar is not a robber.
In Australia, organised crime has taken to hiring teenagers as hitmen; e.g. the perpetrators of a failed assassination attempt against a retired footballer (they shot him but he survived) included a 15 year old and 16 year old – https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/sixteen-heart-pumping-ab...
Reasons for using teenagers include that they cost less, they are impressionable, easier to manipulate, eager to "prove themselves", and receive more lenient sentencing (especially those under 18). Adult hitmen demand thousands, they'll find a teenager willing to do it for $500 (AUD 500 = USD 350). https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/at-the-crossroads-offend...
Apparently, this strategy wasn't invented in Australia, Australian criminals have copied it from Europe where it was already established (particularly in Sweden and the Netherlands)
It's an old strategy. It's commonly been part of plots of various stories/movies in the US going back decades.
I think significant aspects of it are quite novel – e.g. teenagers being recruited via Signal or Telegram, often by overseas fugitive gang leaders; some cases have even (allegedly) involved Iranian government agents
Also, there's a difference between something repeatedly happening in fiction over decades, and law enforcement seeing multiple real life cases of it over a few months in a single metro area
Also, given he opened the safe and called the police a few minutes later, what happened to the money from the safe.
Truth is in these situations we don't know so no one outside of the case should speculate.
I feel the tendency to turn criminal cases into public spectacles does more harm and disservice to justice than anything else. The public has no business passing judgement or deciding for themselves. Leave them out of it.
Though the gruesome spectacle of public obsession with criminal cases like this has a long and (ig)noble history. There were late Victorian and early Edwardian “police reports” that filled exactly this sort of lurid fascination with the macabre.
However, I found the wider premise of the article more interesting than the speculation about the crime - which is whether someone convicted of an unpleasant violent crime can be simultaneously a warm and friendly person, and whether the justice system is as cut and dried as people like to think.
I found it very thought provoking beyond (or possibly in spite of) the “unsolved mystery” aspect.
What a laughably insulated statement. An example from NZ - Janek Patel was murdered in 2022 while attempting to prevent the cash register at his corner store from being stolen.
The figure has been described as "a few dollars".