The other day, Penny Arcade took a swipe at a “video games did it!” story about a group of US teenagers who murdered a homeless man and blamed it on video game violence. It turns out that the stepmother of one of the boys is a PA reader, and she emailed PA. [scroll down to “a rare opportunity”]

As Gabe says:

The sad truth is that the reality we’re talking about here would probably never actually see the light of day. The media will tell the story they want to tell regardless and that story will be about violent games. The parents of these kids will be lucky to get two lines in an article about the crime. If they tell a reporter that their son hardly played games or that he was fucked up long before they bought a Playstation do you really think that will make it into the final article? You’d never see that side of the story, not in a million years.

But you’re about to.

[Via Pootergeek, who writes: “If it’s for real then it tells a tale almost as disturbing as that of the murder.”]