Murder 3 blks from easy child's campus

[TerryJ2]

Things have settled down now, but a cpl wks ago, it was really scary. We thought we might have another VA Tech on our hands.
I expected teen drama, but not this.
easy child goes to Longwood in Farmville, VA. She called one day to tell me that there had been a murder in a warehouse or private home right next to campus, and one of the professors was killed.
There was a sort of a lockdown (not mandatory, just be aware and stay inside) but difficult child made plans to drive to another city with-two friends. (They are not allowed cars as frosh, but one of the girls has a medical release for a car.) Fine by me. The farther away, the better.

Turned out that a local girl who was into Horrorcore met a boy from Calif. The Calif kid flew in and the parents took them to a Horrorcore concert. (You wouldn't catch me dead doing that, excuse the expression. I wouldn't even allow my kids to go, much less transport them.)
The girl rec'd a text from another guy, the boyfriend got jealous and killed the girl, her friend, and the mother. Phonecalls started to fly, and the estranged father (separated) stopped by to see what was going on.
He was the next victim.
The kid sat in the house with-all the bodies until he stunk to high heaven, didn't sleep the entire time, and then went out in public that way. And especially eerie in how his songs nearly predicted the crime and outcome.
I read some of the posts by his friends and acquaintances online. Two of them basically congratulated him. Dozens of others slammed him, basically saying, "What were you thinking? This is music. It's not real!" One typed "I hate you I hate you I hate you" for an entire graph, then at the end typed, "I hope you fry."


http://www2.timesdispatch.com/rtd/news/local/crime/article/FARM27_20090926-221606/295789/

 

[Hound dog]

Quite obviously severly mentally ill, disturbed, whatever. A huge tragedy no one could see it coming.......neighbors didn't report the smell??

I'm out of the loop I guess, what's "hardcore"?? That's a new one to me.

 

[gcvmom]

Oh my gosh -- how horrible!!! It's like a bad horror movie... ugh.

 

[witzend]

What is Horrorcore? Not that I would ever go to anything called "horrorcore". I tend to think that the parents would be a little bit nuts to drive a kid from CA to VA just to see a concert of ANY type with a girl he met online. Or am I reading the post wrong?

 

[Hound dog]

Ok. Horrorcore........I read the word wrong. lol

I also don't understand a parent taking a kid to something like that. Ok, I can do punk, goth, and alot of other things as long as it's basically harmless rebellion stuff. But the impression I'm getting is that this is anything but harmless...........

 

[KTMom91]

I read about this in the San Francisco Chronicle...the kid was from the Bay Area.

Horrorcore is a genre of "music" that is horribly violent, and glorifies killing and torturing. This kid wrote and performed this stuff, flew across the country to see his girlfriend, and carved her and her family up.

How scary for easy child to be that close to that.

 

[Star*]

I'm glad 1st of all that my niece is safe. Next, I would have huge reservations about ANY parent who would be comfortable with a meeting between their daughter and a boy who flew all the way from California to meet for anything - let alone horrorcore. I wouldn't care if they were meeting to have a nice dinner and chaperoned dinner - NOPE, NADA....NOooooooo.

This boy obviously had a plan and acted it out. I can't imagine him getting anything less than life in prison. I'm not sure if VA has the death penalty; and in this case if I were on the jury I feel the level of his evil would almost certainly make my vote be to end his life. It's unclear if he's wanted on any sort of extradition warrants from CA. I mean they asked him - and they say he's never been in trouble but it makes you wonder huh? It's quite possible these aren't his first murders. Just a guess - but the nature of his crime is so haneous - and so calculated makes me think it's not the first time. I hope I'm wrong. He is a very twisted individual. Deviant - yes, mentally ill? I dunno - he thought this out pretty well.

Kudos to the police detectives for his capture....Prayers go out to the family left behind to pick up the pieces.

 

[TerryJ2]

I was all set to respond, but you beat me to it, KTMom.

In a nutshell, Horrorcore is WAY beyond rap or anything else we've heard.

Star, sorry to say, the police flubbed it. Big time.

First, they went to the house when the 2nd girl's mom called the police because her daughter had not returned phonecalls. The boy answered the door, and very calmly told the police she was at the movies.
Note, this is not his house. He is a guest.
The bodies were already there. The police stayed at the door and never looked inside.
Next, the kid called the police to come to the house because "he heard a noise." He led them to the back door, to the basement. There was animal feces everywhere but other than that, they didn't notice anything, nor did they search the house.
I suspect he was concocting an alibi, like, some intruder came in and killed everyone.

What he didn't bet on was that anyone else would be by.
The girl's mom called the dad, who was estranged from the already dead Longwood prof (it gets a bit complicated here, but anyway, I think he lived in the house at one point) and he was the next victim.

Then the kid didn't know how to concoct an intruder alibi. That plan was nixed because the timeline would have been wrong. (Note, in the newspaper, it says authorities have no idea why he called the police. Oh, come on. Use your heads!)

So he just sat and stared at the bodies. Or hacked them more. Or both.

He has the typical teen murder profile--loner, picked on, stays in his room all the time, obsessed with-horrorcore, Son of Sam is his hero. Mom has no clue. In fact, she was a teacher's aide when he was really little, and then homeschooled him later, and he rec'd his GED at home. Way overprotected, and strangely exposed to one-sided outside influences, like heavy metal. One extreme or the other. His dad plays guitar in a band called S&M (great influence, dad!) and his sister was in a heavy metal band at one point.

So sad.

 

[gcvmom]

Okay so what's the difference between mental illness and deviance? Are we splitting hairs? Is one just beyond repair while the other still has hope for redemption or rehabilitation?

Why did he get the GED at home? What was going on with him that mom decided he needed to be pulled out of school?

Helping out in your kid's school is not necessarily overprotectiveness -- it's just wanting to be involved. But maybe she knew something was different about her kid and that's why she wanted to be there: to keep an eye on HIM, not necessarily to protect him.

Just because SHE says he never got in trouble, doesn't mean that's the case. I'm sure they'll look at his school records with a magnifying glass.

It sounds like he did have some kind of idea because the crime seems to mirror his song lyrics that were described in the story: voices telling him to kill and then experiencing the stench of rotting bodies. He could check those off his fantasy list.

So again, I have to ask where do we draw the line between mental illness that may or may not be treatable and "evil deviance" that is only remedied by death? I'm all for the death penalty, but I'm having a hard time reconciling the difference between a criminal who is mentally ill and the concept of "evil". Things aren't so black and white for me anymore since coming to this site. I think about the woman in Texas who drowned all her kids. Clearly she is mentally ill -- we now know that from all the info that came out about her history and her treatment program in prison. But is she evil?

Just thinking out loud here...

 

[TerryJ2]

gcvmom, I'm not sure that it really matters. VA has the death penalty.
His lyrics show that it was premeditated.
He's toast. Unless he gets an incredible, high profile atty.
I agree, that maybe his mom knew something that others didn't. We won't know until the trial happens. His first trial date is in Jan.
by the way, the TX mom fit a profile, too. Did you know that more women use water to kill than men? Something Freudian to do with in-utero floating. Frankly, I think it's because fewer women are big enough or strong enough to use the brute force required to smash people's heads in. I'm not big on psychology, just pragmatism.

One of his acqaintances online posted that he was using crystal meth. That will come out at the trial, too.

 

[Hound dog]

gvc Mom in my personal opinion, there is no real difference in mental illness and evil deviance except for one very important thing.......evil devience there is no hope of getting better and you are a extreme threat to the public at large. Probably a bit more to it but it comes across more in feelings than in words.

There is very real evil in the world.

It appears the Mom did attempt to help her son. I don't think it's fair for the public to cast judgement on whether or not she did enough. All of us only can do what we know to do at the time.

When I was a little girl we had a neighbor lady, real nice lady. I was very little, but she stands out in my memory because of her severely mentally ill son. She struggled to handle a child that was a very real threat to the public, while he attempted to kill her, burn down their house......I could go on forever here........she even took him out of school because it was simply too dangerous for him to go. He was in and out of the state psychiatric hospital. My Mom spent alot of time over there helping her with her son.

My most vivid memory was of the Mom (and I can still recall her name although I might have been 4 at the time) sitting at our kitchen table and sobbing because nothing anyone was doing was making the slightest bit of difference. The psychiatric hospital kept sending him home when she'd beg them not to because she was always in fear he'd kill someone.......Just horrid.

And he did. He was about 14 at the time. It was ugly and it was brutal....and although Mom kept the details from us...........I know that the neighbor lady was so beside herself Mom kept in constant contact with her for fear she'd commit suicide until she eventually moved away.

But I do remember one conversation she had with my Mom. She was talking about her son's Dad.......how she believed him to be pure evil. And that despite her best efforts........her son was a carbon copy of the Dad, even though Dad had left them when he was a baby.

She believed there was evil in the world. Most likely Dad and son had a severe form of mental illness. But sometimes.........you just have to look pure evil in the face and take it for what it is.

Just my 2 cents.

 

[TerryJ2]

That poor woman! She tried and tried.
Having this board would have helped her a bit. But having nowhere to turn ... that's the worst.
I agree, there was some genetic component there (and possibly also influence from the dad, although it's implied that they were not living together). That's fighting a losing battle.
Supposedly it is possible to be born with-o a conscience, but it's a very low %. Like, a sub-percentage of percentages. It's hard to tell because so many illnesses mask so many others.
Still, with-o a conscience doesn't necessarily parallel murder. You can still learn to live within the laws of society through cause and effect.
I lean more toward thinking that evil is a learned behavior.
For example, someone who is either A] 1) mentally ill + 2) undx'ed and unguided + 3) pulled into evil practices, or B] 1) brainwashed by society + 2) unguided + 3) pulled into evil practices (such as the Taliban, where most kids are born healthy but dirt-poor and society condones violent, one-sided behavior.)

Lots of overlap, either way.

 

[DammitJanet]

Is this the murder where the people were decapitated? I didnt actually read the link...lol.

My daughter in law's father lives up by VA TECH and works at TECH and was on campus for the shootings. He isnt a teacher but is some sort of maintenance tech guy. He was one building over from the whole fray.

One month or so ago another two students that attended VTech were murdered when they went off to watch the sunset in the Jefferson National Forest just minutes from the campus. They were in the boys truck. Both honor students. Freshmen.

I was talking to daughter in law's dad about the above murders and he told me about a new, recent murder where people were decapitated from another college also near his area. This could be it. VA isnt all that large and they dont get THAT many murders on college campuses.

 

[TerryJ2]

Well, officially, the police refuse to say.
However, unofficial reports say that they were stabbed and cut up and chopped into little pieces.
That implies decapitation to me.
Just incredible to think about.

 

[DammitJanet]

Ugh. So scary. Hope easy child is doing ok.

 

[Marguerite]

What always bothers me abouth these cases - they are about a very damaged and disturbed person who committs atrocious acts, but is also someone who is interested in something outside the norm in musical tastes.

But why blame the music? Chances are, the music may have helped him vent and de-fuse, for a lot longer. Someone like that is already disturbed. They will choose whatever seems to help them cope. Lots of people like music outside the mainstream, but the vast majority don't go on a murderous rampage.

My middle two kids like Rammstein (German Goth band). That band suffered by association after the Columbine massacre because the murderers in that case were Rammstein fans. But the band made it clear that there was nothing in their music which incited anyone to take guns and murder people. When difficult child 1 showed interest in their music (and he didn't know about the Columbine connection) I made a point of not only listening to it, but Googling the translations. Much of their lyrics is written in German and is very skilfully crafted. The sound is very dark, the words not necessarily so.

Someone who is disturbed will hve a lot of facets in their life NOT connected with their mental illness. They may like eating at McDonalds. Does that mean we should be nervous of the Hamburglar?

Correlation does not necessariiy equal causality. Although it certainly does warrant a bit of careful attention. The problem with ANYTHING that becomes an obsession, especially with the mentally ill - when the boundaries between fantasy and reality get blurred to the point of confusion. And for such people, they will use whatever tools are to hand.

So don't blame the music. Blame the illness.

Marg