A Girl, 7, Was Killed Over a Video Game Boast — and the Shooter, 9, Left Witnesses Haunted by His Words

It was a snow day from school for kids in Eastern Pennsylvania on March 6, 1989.

Jessica Carr, 7, was spending the morning at the Kresgeville home of Richard and Trudy Ratti, along with their six children and other neighborhood kids, including the Rattis’ next-door neighbor Cameron Kocher.

Some of the kids were playing the video game “Spy Hunter.”

One of the Rattis’ children, Brian, who was 12 at the time, recalled Jessica boasting to 9-year-old Cameron that she had her own version of the Nintendo game. 

“Now I can get further than you,” she allegedly said, the Associated Press reported. “I beat the dragon.”

The video game playing stopped after Richard noticed the kids had made a mess in the kitchen. Richard later recalled that Cameron was upset.

“He said he didn’t leave any of the bowls and cups in there,” Richard said, per AP.

At one point, the children went outside to ride snowmobiles, but Cameron declined, returning to his home next door, still upset.

At around 1 p.m., the fourth grader grabbed his father’s key to the gun cabinet that was hidden in the base of a lamp and retrieved a hunting rifle equipped with a scope.

Cameron, who was familiar with weapons because he’d hunted with his father, loaded the rifle, walked to a second-story bedroom window and unlocked and removed the screen. He then looked through the scope of his father’s rifle and fired a shot at Jessica, who was riding as a passenger on a snowmobile in a nearby field. The bullet struck her back, piercing her spine and right lung, the Associated Press reported.

The boy then cleaned the rifle before returning it to the cabinet, according to later testimony, per the AP.

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Fearing that a sniper was loose in the neighborhood, the Rattis called Cameron and asked him to return to their home. The boy obliged.

There, he proceeded to play Nintendo and told those who were crying over the body of Jessica: “If you don’t think about it, you won’t feel bad,” Brian Ratti later said, per the AP.

But when he fired the rifle, Cameron sustained a cut in the shape of a half-moon above his eyebrows. When police asked him about it, he told an officer that he had checked out the rifle because he wanted to look at the scope, but that it accidentally went off, per The Morning Call. Officers also found blood on the rifle’s stock and scope, per the newspaper.

On March 8, 1989, Cameron was arrested and charged with criminal homicide and released on bail into the custody of his parents.

The death of Jessica and the boy who killed her shocked the community and the nation.

Judge Ronald E. Vican called her killing “deliberate and willful,” per the AP.

“We customarily associate the crime of murder with adults, or at least older juveniles,” Vican said, according to the AP. “Young children do kill. … Homicides involving child killers are increasing at an alarming rate. Neither society nor our system of criminal justice is sufficiently prepared to … satisfactorily handle situations involving young killers.”  

Cameron pleaded no contest in 1992 to a count of criminal homicide but was later convicted as part of a plea deal to misdemeanor involuntary manslaughter, the AP reported.

In a statement, Jessica’s mother Donna Teetz said she agreed to the plea deal grudgingly. “Involuntary manslaughter means it’s an accident,” she said, according to the AP. “It wasn’t an accident.”

Cameron was sentenced to a juvenile detention center until the age of 21, according to the Pocono Record.