The Daily Mail is reporting that 31 year-old twins Christopher and William Cormier of Winder, Georgia have been charged with beating to death 30 year-old Sean Dugas, then encasing his body in concrete and burying him in their father's backyard.
According to reports, the Cormier brothers knew Dugas, a reporter for the Pensacola Journal News, when they lived in Florida and had been part of the "Magic gaming community" of that area. Dugas was known to have the best collection of gaming cards - which police estimate was worth up to $100,000 - the Cormiers broke his home and beat him to death in order to steal the cards.
For those of you who are not familiar with this game it was created in 1993 by a mathematician and Dungeons and Dragons enthusiast named Richard Garfield. Sold by Wizards of the Coast, it is a trading card game using cards that are linked to five different kinds of magic (as in sorcery, not tricks). Players, who role-play as sorcerers, use the cards to destroy their opponent before their opponent destroys them, mostly through the use of spells, enchantments and fantasy creatures such as Chaos, Orb, Bad Moon and Animate Dead.
The game is enormously popular among children and youth with gaming communities springing up among players. Dugas was said to have been one of the most active members of the Pensacola Magic community, which was where he met the Cormiers.
In a bizarre twist to the tail, after the twins killed Dugas, they allegedly took his body with them when they moved from Pensacola a few weeks later and returned to Winder, Georgia to live with their father, telling him they needed to bury a friend's dog in the back yard.
Police found the body when their investigation of Dugas' disappearance led them to the Cormiers. They found the body while searching the premises on October 8. It had been hidden inside a blue storage container that was encased in concrete.
"We were were able to cut the bottom away from [the container] and it was in fact a body [inside]," an officer said.
A coroner ruled that Dugas died from blunt force trauma to the back of the head.
Unfortunately, this game has more than 12 million players in more than 70 countries, according to Tolena Thorburn, spokeswoman for Wizards of the Coast. To date, more than11,000 cards have been created.
This story proves the dangers of sorcery, a dark art that can never be reduced to "just a game."
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