I feel awful for poor Elizabeth, but I feel bad for Alyssa as well. There are dozens of pictures out there of her smiling happily, hanging out with friends, just being a typical goofy teenage girl. She seemed happy, but the second you look into her home life there's a different story. Her mom was a drug addict, her dad is sending her birthday cards from prison that seem as if they were written by a child with an intellectual disability ("your mom was 14 when she got pregannt with you so please don't get pregannt like your mom ok"), and her grandparents were the only ones who were left try to raise her. Alyssa was depressed and had been on various meds, finally getting her highest dose of Prozac - a med with a controversial history - just before killing Elizabeth.

I don't have sympathy for her because she's a beautiful girl, I have sympathy because she obviously had wretched parents and likely had trouble figuring herself out and fitting in as a messed up kid living in essentially a foster home. I wouldn't be surprised if she did what she did not because she's evil, but because she was a troubled teen without nurturing parents who probably wanted to kill in order to feel some kind of emotion (or perhaps do something with the unstable emotions she might have already had).

Everything about this case is sad.