Who killed Captain Stacy?

[cyberghostface]

So there was a certain scene in A+X #11 that caught my attention...



Was it really Otto's fault? Let's see.

From Amazing Spider-Man #90...












So basically Spider-Man deliberately causes Dr. Octopus to lose control of his tentacles... the tentacles attack him and knock over debris, killing Captain Stacy... and Otto is the one to blame?

Comments

[kuronotenshi]

Spider-man isn't innocent in it, But Otto -is- to blame.

At what point is Otto's choices to be a criminal forgiven? A court of law would likely find that Otto -was- responsible for the death, it would be manslaughter because...as stated earlier. It happened in commission of a crime. Even if Otto wasn't actively committing a crime at the time, he was a wanted FUGITIVE regularly enough at the time, that in itself is a crime.

For a real world Metaphor - Guy decides to rob a bank. Criminal action. Random Civilian at bank has a gun, gets the drop on the robber. Shootout occurs as it's likely to happen. Civilian shoots the gunman in the arm, gunman loses control of the weapon, kills a bank teller. Guess what, Both are technically to blame, and the civilian will have to live with it, even if they are cleared of wrong doing. Dude robbing the bank gets hit with Murder or Manslaughter because..hey...he chose to be a criminal and try to rob the bank. Still the criminal's fault the teller is dead because if he hadn't tried to rob the bank, the teller would still be breathing.

And as a point of order, Peter never said 'it wasn't my fault'. In fact, one of his flaws was that he took responsibility for FAR too many things. As compared to Otto who apparently couldn't take responsibility if it were a living enemy of his he could murder and walk around in their skin because he made enough mistakes in his own life, time to steal someone else's and mess theirs up also.

Edit:

Wanted to add.... Peter taking his responsibility for the death of Captain Stacy had been used by writers for years as a driving force in hero-ing SMARTER not HARDER. Like Uncle Ben pushed him to be a her in the first place, so to did taking responsibility for both Stacy deaths. It became an important part to the character to not make that mistake again.