Portland man charged with choking girlfriend with his own dreadlocks

Portland, OR police say 32-year-old Caleb Grotberg used his "dreadlocked" hair to choke his girlfriend during a domestic assault. She was taken to a hospital "with several non-life threatening injuries."

Cacao.

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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The Snowden Principle

http://twitter.com/cbmills CB Mills

Are you sure this wasn’t a skit from Portlandia?!
- Sagodjur
  
  No, as cool as Portland is, there are some crazies here too, and not just the conservative kind that apparently forget where they live…
doomcake

off with his dread
- Mark Lee McDonald
  
  I’m calling it early. You win the thread.
Navin_Johnson

“No mon”
Frank Diekman

Now they’re DEAD locks!
Navin_Johnson

Guess who’s coming to jail…….Natty Dreadlocks…
http://www.facebook.com/people/Mobi-Mktg/100002118545853 Mobi Mktg

Hey – They don’t call them ‘dread’ locks for nothing! Put in a headlock with a dreadlock!
niktemadur

She was taken to a hospital “with several non-life threatening injuries.”

Lice bites?
- cdh1971
  
  Wookies don’t have lice. They have fleas.
  - cdh1971
    
    WWJD?
    - ocker3
      
      Don’t you mean WWCD??
http://www.geekforce.com Hugh Johnson

Where’s “shocked kitty” when you need him?
- http://www.geekforce.com Hugh Johnson
  
  There, that’s better.
http://profile.yahoo.com/UA73ZKCKA3WHGO54FMGAS3K4XQ DanielE

Straight from an Insane Clown Posse song. “I’d choke you with all my dread locks.”
http://twitter.com/sirkowski Sirkowski

Cultural appropriation kills.
mb81

Dreadful.
- niktemadur
  
  Which is the opposite of natty, I suppose.
Lexicat

“Caleb Grotberg?!”

That is quite a name. . .
cj howeareya

No Woman, No Press Charges. Please.
Scott Meyer

This sort of thing wouldn’t happen if everyone were armed with dreadlocks.
videobored

A well manicured Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear hair, shall not be infringed, trimmed, or conditioned!
beer_radley

Assault with a dready weapon.
orangedesperado

Hahaha, let’s all have a good laugh about domestic violence ! hahaha Mr. Natural Counterculture turns out to be the kind of guy who physically assaults his girlfriend ! I can’t stop laughing !

( * sarcasm* )

Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you commenters ? The ugly truth is that intimate partner violence is affecting someone that you know, someone that you are friends with, someone who is your relative, or neighbour, or coworker, or employer or teacher, etc. and/or — gasp — someone who is part of your underground/subculture/collective/maker’s faire/burningman/LARP/rational skeptics/whatever group.

I know that we want to believe that domestic violence only happens to the “other”. Sadly it is across the board, dumb republicans do it, and so do radical leftists with Phds. The people who it happens to don’t talk about, because sometimes other people think its FUNNY or deserved or (insert excuse here why it is not as bad as the victims says it was).

Very ashamed of you today, BB’ers.
- http://burntheflag.ca Jardine
  
  Some people prefer to laugh to prevent themselves from crying.
  - orangedesperado
    
    Do you think the woman who was strangled was laughing ? Before, during or after ?
    - Donald Petersen
      
      Y’know, we get that this is a horrible crime. It’s also a horribly commonplace crime, and boy it sure would be great if it were rare, or better yet nonexistent. But it’s not. It happens all the goddamned time. And for that, we’re all very, very sorry. And many of us, it will no doubt surprise you to learn, work hard to eradicate this kind of horrible behavior.
      
      In the meantime, we notice that this fella performed this commonplace atrocity in an uncommonly interesting way: with his own hair. To which, mixed in with our shame and horror that such behavior exists, we react with our well-honed sense of the absurd. Dunno about you, but I’ve never seen anyone before who is accused of strangling someone with his own long, matted hair. I think I’d react in a similar way to someone who smothered someone by pinching shut their mouth and nostrils with his toes.
      
      It’s just not something you see every day. Unlike your more everyday, garden-variety crimes of passion. I’m glad your sensibilities are not yet so jaded as to dull the pain you feel at other people’s suffering; really, the world needs many, many more like you.
      
      But some of us are a bit beaten down by the awful things in life, and you’re gonna find black comedy and gallows humor everywhere you turn when you spend time in Western society. Rail against it if you feel you must, but there it is. Not all of us have the fortitude to continue in life taking everything so very seriously, especially the things that are actually beyond our individual capacity to change. Like humanity’s propensity for violence against itself.
      
      And I’m relieved to know that you probably won’t be counted in the number of people giggling at my own funeral. Somebody’s gotta show some decent solemnity, by gum.
      - cdh1971
        
        Donald..I like the cut of your jib.
        
        edit: Given orange’s subsequent nasty comments, scratch my parenthetical comments…
        
        (And I agree with the spirit of, and the facts of, orangdesperado’s comment. Based on your other, previous, comments in other threads at this fine establishment, DP, I wager you do too.
        
        I don’t know about you but I take comfort in that.)
      - orangedesperado
        
        Innovation in life-threatening assault = hilarity ?
        
        Thanks for the mansplain. Obviously my feminist spine is preventing me from laughing along the way you guys are able to.
      - Donald Petersen
        
        Wouldn’t have thought feminism entered into it. Had the guy choked another man with his hair, the comedy value, such as it is, would be precisely the same.
        
        Otherwise, you’ve summed it up well. The hilarity (again, such as it is) stems from the innovation.
      - ocker3
        
        I work in a high school, the amount of black humour that flows in staff rooms is sometimes amazing, but it obviously helps the teachers get rid of their frustrations with the problems inherent in being surrounded by 28 teenagers for hours and hours.
    - welcomeabored
      
      Possibly ‘before’ and definitely ‘after’. I wouldn’t even rule out ‘during’.
- http://www.geekforce.com Hugh Johnson
  
  I’ll just leave this here.
http://www.facebook.com/dredlock.savoy Hotel Savoy

People don’t kill people. Dreadlocks do.
jackbird

He also used a bottle of patchouli to choke everyone else.
Kerouac

I was only laughing at the “cacao”. Is that bad?
John Smith

They can take my dreadlocks when they pry them from my cold dead hands.
bolamig

He’s not getting a jury of his peers. That would be a…
http://twitter.com/intensitystudio Antonio Carrasco

Most of the time it’s the patchouli that makes you choke, not the dreadlocks…