It doesn’t matter whether Angela Harrison, the woman whose abusive estranged husband brutally murdered their five children and killed himself, was “leaving her husband for another man.”
It doesn’t matter because cheating, or leaving, or asking for a divorce, or saying “I think we need some time apart,” doesn’t cause someone to murder. It doesn’t “ignite” anything, any more than what a woman is wearing “causes” a rapist to rape.
Nonetheless, let’s examine the most basic thing about narrative that dominates all the stories I’ve seen about this tragedy (that of a selfish, uncaring mother who left her happy home to go have fun with another man): Is it true?
By her account: No.
From this morning’s Seattle Times:
On Friday morning, she left for work at the Indian Country Store in Puyallup, where a male co-worker urged her to get away from her husband. She said she had told him previously about years of physical and verbal abuse she and the children had endured at her husband’s hands.
“For the longest time,” she said, “I’ve tried and tried and tried to leave.”
But the children always begged her to stay, she said, because they wanted to remain a family.
Friday night, she didn’t go home from work, but instead went to the Muckleshoot Casino with the male co-worker and after that to a convenience store. She had decided her marriage was over.
She then left the store with her co-worker, whom she described as a friend. She said reports she’d told her husband she was leaving him for another man were incorrect.
However, the reporters did manage to find one account that contradicted Angela Harrison’s.
However, Pierce County sheriff’s spokesman Ed Troyer told The Associated Press on Monday that investigators believe Angela Harrison, indeed, was leaving her husband for another man, based on interviews with relatives who spoke with James Harrison before he killed himself.
The man was a murderer. An admitted abuser, of both his children and his wife. A stalker. A psychopath. Someone she had every reason to get away from. Yet a report from him, told to his relatives and repeated second-hand, posthumously, by police, is taken more seriously by the cops (and, it would seem, the reporter) than the story told by the woman herself.
Even dead, he still gets to set the narrative.
As I noted in the comments to your post from yesterday, this is also the way the news story on KOMO 4 ended–with the reporter saying that the police department stood by their story of an affair. As if that should be the police department’s main concern at this point.
Thanks for this Erica. The way the story is playing out is infuriating.
Thanks, ECB for noting that part of the article. I, too, thought it odd and irrelevant. You can almost see a writer just pounding out the story – there’s lots to write about — and maybe missing the opportunity to delete that section. But how does that get past an editor? It’s a truly grievous oversight.
You’ll take a lot of stick for this, but you are 100% correct. It doesn’t matter if she was having an affair — it doesn’t matter if she was whoring herself out on Pacific Highway South. The fucking murdering bastard is the cause. I’m sorry he’s dead, because I want to see him suffer in a fucking jail cell for ninety years.
you can’t spell mendacity without ‘men’. fuck.
ECB — I love pointing out your BS, but you’re making a very good point here. You’ll helping your point by not hyperventilating about it too.
I noticed this too; that the headlines were worded so that her trying to leave is what was the tipping point for him, not the fact he was abusive and controlling. I hope that people will take away from this that domestic abuse affects entire communities, not just the spouse being abused.
Rape triggers!
I think maybe people try to look for reasons in anything this horrific — i.e., there must be a reason why someone would kill their children or shoot up a school. That is more comforting, perhaps, then just thinking that the person is mentally ill (to Charles’s point yesterday) or just plain evil. Maybe it help people to process what happened — he did it because he thought she was cheating vs. he was an abusive, sick fuck.
Though, this doesn’t exactly work for something like Andrea Yates, where everyone just automatically assumed she was crazy. Interesting, that. A man must have a motivation (reason), but a woman can be consumed by mental illness (emotion).
While it’s alarming that in the he said/she said between an unknown quantity (Angela) and a proven antisocial abuser (her husband) the police would take the latter, it IS still possible that she had finally decided to get out but has her own reasons for not revealing that information. Like maybe she wasn’t able to take the kids with her, or maybe she was having an affair.
I’d press the police to at least shore up their assertion with some reasonable evidence as to why they don’t believe her side of the story…
bonus points: her late husband/shithead had dated her since she was initially impregnated by him at age 13! WTF, does Pierce County not charge statutory rape???
Doing the math, the Times names her as 30, him as 34……a 17 year old getting a 13 (or 12) year old pregnant would merit charging under WA’s RCW i believe
I was sort of shocked by the local news ending it’s story about this last night with “We’ll have more information as the investigation continues.” Seriously, this is a terrible tragedy, but the investigation is pretty fucking moot at this point. Murder/suicides tend to wrap up pretty neatly from an investigative point of view. Leave the poor woman alone.
I’m quite certain her leaving WAS the tipping point for him.
Having personally gone through the pain of a divorce w/ a cheating spouse, I can say that one tends to “loose it” during the shock of discovery.
However, not for one second does that justify harming another individual, let alone the depths of what this scumbag went to and killing his kids. As to killing himself? hey that’s his own choice.
As to her denying there was an affair?
Hate to say it, but a cheating spouse is always going to deny it… Does it matter in this case? Not really.
@11, right now the police are shoring up the plantiff’s case in a lawsuit for causing the victim undo suffering.
What? The cops and the media are biased? Surly, you can’t be serious?!?
Also, the bodies weren’t found until the next day, how exactly does a man shoot five kids multiple times without waking up the neighbors in mobile homes? Those things aren’t exactly insulated for sound, how does a man abuse his family for years in a trailer park and no one does anything? It’s all part of the same self-serving attitude — the family is somehow internally to blame for their problems, so no one else has to do anything.
@9 why can’t both be true? The fact that this guy’s batshit abusiveness was a leading factor in this doesn’t mean it was the only factor.
If I went through a bad breakup, maybe I’d do some yelling to emphasize my pain. That would be an appropriate response, and the reason for my yelling is clear. This guy’s reason is the same; his response was completely inappropriate, though, due to his fucked-up-edness.
I keep thinking that the wife must have had a plan to get her kids away from Psycho Dad — it must be killing her that she wasn’t able to carry it out.
Ascribing reason and thought to someone who clearly was beyond either reason or thought is … well, a waste of time.
But the easy access to guns and the inability of police to temporarily confiscate said items when someone is unfit to have them has more to do with this than we might otherwise think.
People split up and have abusive relationships in other first world nations – but they don’t normally have the means to slaughter all their kids and wife/girlfriend in those other countries.
We’re all imperfect in our own ways. But five kids are dead because we worship guns in America.
Another aspect of the quoted paragraph that bugs me: the “however.” I mean, like everyone else said, regardless of whether she was leaving him because he was abusive, or leaving him for just for kicks, what he did was still completely wrong and completely insane.
But the way that’s written, it implies that the whole case hinges on whether she and the guy were just gambling or were actually fucking.
Either way, she left her abusive husband and was hanging out with another guy. Her story doesn’t even actually contradict what the husband supposedly told his family members — so why the “however”?
It’s not surprising that a controlling, jealous, violent, abusive husband would *believe* that his wife who has left him is seeing another man. That’s what jealous, controlling men usually think, whether it has any basis in reality or not. Considering that cops deal with these types of men all the time and should have at least a basic grasp of this psychology, it’s ridiculous for them to ascribe any value to what the husband believed on the matter. And of course, that’s just the stupidity icing on top of the moot-point cake.
“Insane” doesn’t cut it. He was not a random psycho; he was part of an established culture of men beating murdering their wives and children. It’s a part of OUR lives too, if you live in this country. These scenes are being played out EVERYWHERE, in trailer parks and in Mercer Island mansions. Most of them don’t end in five dead but they are epidemic assaults all the same.
If you are an abuser, GET HELP NOW. If you are an abuse victim, CALL NOW. The National Domestic Violence Hotline operates 24/7 at 1-800-799-SAFE (1-800-562-6025) and can hook you up with shelter near where you live. If you are in imminent danger, let the pride and shame go for a minute and CALL 911 NOW. You have to get out. Make it today.
People split up and have abusive relationships in other first world nations – but they don’t normally have the means to slaughter all their kids and wife/girlfriend in those other countries.
Family murder-suicide is traditional in Japan despite rigid gun control and no tradition of individual gun ownership:
… The Japanese language has diverse words for shinju. Shinju has been classified into two major categories, johshi (mutually consented lovers’ suicide) and oyako-shinju (parent-child suicide), the latter of which is subclassified further such as boshi-shinju (mother-child suicide), fushi-shinju (father-child suicide), and ikka-shinju (family suicide). The number of johshi have been declining in the past three decades. Although the number of oyako-shinju has been declining since the 1950s as well, it is still a serious problem.
Most cases of shinju are boshi-shinju in which the children, who are too young to decide on suicide themselves, are killed by their mothers. Ohara and Inamura have both pointed out that boshi-shinju and fushi-shinju have important differences (Ohara, 1963, 1965; Inamura, 1977, 1993). In boshi-shinju mothers in their 20s and 30s kill their children and then commit suicide. The children most often victimized in boshi-shinju are of preschool age. In fushi-shinju the fathers (who are usually older than the boshi-shinju mothers) kill their children (who are older than the victims of boshi-shinju), and then commit suicide. The most common reasons for boshi-shinju are psychiatric disorders and family conflicts, while those of fushi-shinju are financial problems and physical illness. Japanese often show considerable sympathy toward parents who are not able to find any other recourse but to commit suicide with her/his children.
… although the incidence of murder-suicide is similar, the type of murder-suicide may differ from country to country. For example, in the United States one-half to three-quarters of murder-suicides are those in which a husband murders his wife and then kills himself. In Britain and Japan, most murder-suicides are those in which a mother kills her children and then commits suicide.
[Japanese immigrant mother] who tried to drown herself, her infant daughter and her four-year-old son by entering the ocean on Santa Monica Beach. Although they were quickly pulled out from the water, only the mother survived. She was tried in a California court for child abuse and first-degree murder. When this was reported in Japan, it shocked Japanese society. There was also the added feature for the Japanese of being subjected to foreign censure in this case, something not easily accepted.
This mother had attempted oyako-shinju about a week after discovering that her husband had been having a secret extramarital affair for years, leaving her depressed and ruminating about suicide. The reasons for her despair were personal, and although maladaptive, the method she chose to resolve it was cultural, and very Japanese. Although she had lived in the United States for 14 years, she remained Japanese in her thinking and life style, isolated from American culture. She did not drive, spoke little English, knew nothing of her husband’s business, and had no hobbies or close friends outside the family. In other words, she was virtually without any kind of support system which might have sustained her in time of emotional distress. Social supports have also been found to be important for preventing suicide in Western society (Berger, 1993).
In Japan, the mother-child bond and the mother’s dedication to the child are very important. Why then, is infanticide committed by the mother relatively common in Japan? Paradoxically, it is this very bond between mother and child that causes oyako-shinju. According to Japanese logic, the suicidal mother cannot bear to leave the child to survive alone; she would rather kill the child because she believes that nobody else in the world would take care of the child better than she, and that the child would be better off dying with her.
From http://www.healthhokkaido.com/article/co…
Listen to 22. He speaks the truth.
And don’t even think about staying “for the sake of the kids.” Domestic violence is bad for them too, even if they’re not the direct victims.
These stories make it sound like it is the woman who is under investigation. The police are trying to determine whether she was having an affair?! Fuck off!
This is sick.
Will @19 – we don’t know that this man was beyond reason or thought. I think it’s certainly possible that he was mentally ill, but also possible that he is an abusive fuck who thought he’d take the kids with him as one last ‘fuck you’ to his wife. The discussion on Charles’s post yesterday was interesting… I came away with the thought that committing a heinous crime is not, by its definition, an indicator of mental illness.
Another, somewhat related thought…. There was an oprah show a few weeks ago on domestic abuse. She had one some former abusers, and I was surprised by how many of them asserted that abusing their partners was “an addiction”. This struck me as an attempt to avoid taking any responsibility for their actions — (“I couldn’t stop hitting her because I was addicted to hitting her”).
Anyways, people who do bad things are not always “addicted” to doing those bad things, nor are they always mentally ill. Sometimes people just do bad things because they want to….
as always, thanks ecb.
ECB,
Yes, it does matter how this woman came to be — justly, belatedly, finally — leaving this man.
It does not matter in any moral sense: nobody but he is responsible for what he did.
It does not matter in any societal sense: our society will not conclude from this that abused women should linger within the ambit of dangerous men, as if to mitigate the risk of provoking murder-suicides.
But it does matter in the basic, instinctive way that we humans take a social interest in acts of good and evil, lurid drama and bloody murder. There’s a story here, and its details matter to us because we care about how other humans behave.
ECB, if you’re torqued off because you think “the narrative” is about morality or social justice, get real. It’s just a narrative, literally, about the evil humans do, and the circumstances in which they do it, and human nature loves a narrative.
@26: I think there’s a general feeling that in order to murder your own children, and kill yourself, you’re suffering from some kind of psychological ill. The distinction that makes more sense to me is whether or not they knew what they were doing was wrong, which I think is also the distinction that the courts go by.
I mean, clearly a mentally healthy, clear-thinking person doesn’t do this. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t intentionally trying to perpetrate an evil action, while knowing full well that there was no possible moral justification for it.
…or because they can get away with it.
I agree completely, Erica. That part of the article was fucked up. It was somewhat encouraging to see this line at the end, however:
@ #22. yes do get out. . . but take the kids too!
One thing that troubles me about this story. . . I can’t understand if she was going to leave why would she not take the kids and run as step one. . . not get out, leave the kids with the bastard, and then come back later, ya know?
ECB, you are adding a very valuable element to this story, which is that IT DOESN’T MATTER WHAT SHE WAS DOING, he is the bastard scumsucking motherfucker who was responsible and at fault. The current version implies that it’s OK and understandable if you shoot up your family over perceived adultery. That resorting to horrible violence is a viable option. Thank you for responding with a loud “WTF?!?”
@31: The mother just decided she didn’t need to be a doormat after all this time. Persuading the kids to leave dad would have taken time and effort: Kids often think whatever living situation they have is normal, and they’re reluctant to leave even Psycho Dad.
I know this bit unrelated to the present discussion but is there some sort of official fund to help this woman out? I can’t even imagine what she’s going through right now having her children murdered and being blamed for it.
The neighbors did know what was going on and they complained to the authorities multiple times. Yet another failure of CPS. Thanks a bunch, assholes.
@29,
You know, it’s entirely possible that he simply didn’t love his children, in which case murdering all of them would not have been that difficult, especially considering that he already was a violent fuck. I’m not saying this has to be the case (Plenty of abusers love their victims, at least as much as they’re capable of love.), but not loving one’s children is not necessarily evidence of mental illness.
Second-guessing why she left without taking the kids is disingenuous at best. I’d pretty much bet money that she’d tried and tried to find a way to do just that for 17 years, and finally decided to save herself and get the kids as soon as she could. She may have made the decision because she didn’t believe he’d kill the kids, but was very sure he’d kill her. Whatever her reasons, they are irrelevant. Without standing in her shoes, I do not presume to judge her actions.
She did not cause the deaths of her children by her action or inaction. What caused the deaths of the children was their fucking father deciding to SHOOT THEM. Let’s question HIS rationale for doing that instead.
Family annihilation. Does it not freak anyone else out that this particular phenomenon – a man killing his entire family and himself – happens often enough that it has an actual term for it?
So what kind of mother leaves her children with a dangerous psychopath? Under any circumstances? Ever?
@31 – I don’t have all the facts, but, it seems to me as if she had literally just made the decision to leave, like, that day. Maybe she had a plan to get the kids as well and hadn’t implemented it, or maybe she was just at the “I need to make a plan” stage.
And @29, yeah, that’s sort of what I was trying to get at. Sometimes, people know what they are doing is wrong, and they do it anyways, because that’s what they want to do. I’m not saying that’s the case here, because it’s a pretty extreme situation, but, I can imagine this guy thinking he would take this woman’s kids away from her (knowing it was wrong to kill them), and then deciding to kill himself.
@37: If you knew this man was a dangerous psychopath before he killed his kids, why did you not contact the authorities?
@22 for the useful win.
just more invisible male privilege. thanks for calling the Times out, Erica.
I completely disagree, and from the sound of the article she broke up with her husband long before this happened. The breakup, being her not loving her husband anymore, has still ignited this conflict (though I doubt anyone is blaming her, the guy is obviously unstable). Of course by her account she wasn’t involved with another man, however to her husband, who I’m sure she never explained her visits to a casino with male co-workers with, it looked fishy, just as it was when one of my ex-girlfriends did the same to me. Did she cheat on me? I’ll never know (just as we’ll never know here), but from accounts from her friends and family I still can’t shake off the feeling that she did. That doesn’t mean it’s excusable to ever resolve the conflict with violence, but it doesn’t mean the violence didn’t start from the breakup and it would do a great disservice to everyone involve to cover up the why.
If for whatever reason a new theory arises, like “mental defections cause man to go into murderous rampage” then I’m sure the media would love to report on it. However since the asshole killed himself the only logical conclusion is that the breakup caused it. That’s not to say “if only she stayed with him longer he wouldn’t have killed those kids”, because the reality is that she probably stayed with him to long if anything. I don’t see anyone considering self-preservation selfish or uncaring. And from what I can gather from the stories she wasn’t leaving a happy home, it was obviously quite broken.
@35: Yeah, I can go along with that, but murdering people simply because you don’t love them isn’t normal, rational behavior. Heck, even if he hated them with a burning passion, the right thing to do would be to get as far away as possible, perhaps even by committing suicide. I stand by my assertion that any cold-blooded murder requires the perpetrator to be mentally unhealthy by the standards most of us would hold to; and by my assertion that this does not mean they aren’t responsible for their actions.
Thanks for keeping on this ECB, and thanks Fnarf @22 for putting this into perspective.
Erica, I love that you’re covering this and please keep hitting them on it. And FUCK YOU Pierce County Sheriff’s Department for focusing on whether or not what she said was true. It’s been established that she wasn’t involved in the crime, WHO FUCKING CARES WHAT SHE WAS DOING? It’s not her fault that her abusive fuckhead husband decided to go murder-suicide their five kids and himself. I can only wish that he’d decided to go with the “suicide” part first.
@42: However since the asshole killed himself the only logical conclusion is that the breakup caused it.
The only logical conclusion is that the breakup triggered it. Faced with the prospect of his wife’s escaping his control, he decided to punish her in a way she would never forget, as long as she lived. But this is the logic of a sick, sick, individual.
Yet another thanks to Erica, for pointing out what has been driving me crazy about the story in the news. It drives me crazy how biased this story has been. How is she EVER to blame for him killing the children? It doesn’t matter how angry and hurt he was…
@36:
I don’t think anyone would suggest she somehow caused the death of her kids by not taking them. . .
@#38 . . . could be she was just at the “I need to make a plan” stage.
. . .dang. Any moment I feel in danger / scared, whatever. . . the first image that flashes in my head is my son. . . so it is hard for me to wrap my head around the story. . . that’s not judging, it’s just not understanding someone else’s world.
@42-
The point that ECB is making is not that she might or might not have been having an affair, but that the story is being told in such a way as to make HIS actions HER fault, instead of placing the blame solely on HIM where it belongs.
It doesn’t matter why she left him. He decided to kill his kids, which is never an appropriate response. His behavior is the problem here, but the news media were saying that her action “sparked” his murdering his children. As if, if she had been a better spouse he would never have done that. If she had gone home and told him she was leaving with the kids he just would have added her to his body count.
I appreciate this post.
I’ve been reading the comments on the stories on The News Tribune’s site. They’ve sickened me.
I wonder if people feel justified in taking shots at this women partly because of prejudice about this family’s “trailer” lifestyle.
Believe me, there are plenty of educated, accomplished people out there who have found it nearly impossible to extricate themselves from abusive relationships. I was one of them. It took me 30 years.
Maybe the ugliness and hysterical quality of the early talk surrounding this will give way to some thoughtful discourse on abuse, mental illness and judgment.
@43,
Fair enough, I was just challenging the assumption most people make that parents who kill their own children must be mentally ill. There’s the implied belief that all parents must love their kids, therefore, to commit such a heinous act, they must be extra special crazy or something. Parents who don’t care about their children are the exception, but they unfortunately do exist.
@39
I didn’t, but apparently the mother did: “She said she had told him previously about years of physical and verbal abuse she and the children had endured at her husband’s hands.”
Sounds like just the kind of person a good mother abandons her kid with.
years of physical and verbal abuse she and the children had endured
1. They all endured — nobody died.
2. Even with Mom gone, Psycho Dad still had plenty of punching bags to beat up — who knew he would rather destroy his remaining toys?
She is absolutely not to blame. She may have been leaving her husband for another man. She may not have. If she was, yeah that sucks, people don’t deserve to be cheated on in a marriage, especially with kids. But stuff like that happens every day. You deal with it like a rational person, pick yourself up, and move on.
Nothing ever causes someone to kill someone else (except maybe that crazy scene at the end of the movie Se7en). But no wife, no matter what level of assumed promiscuity, will ever be to blame for giving cause to a mentally disturbed husband killing 5 innocent children. Never. Anyone who says otherwise has some serious impotency and jealousy issues.
p.s. – I’m a dude, not like it really matters.
@49 Why must this be? causality doesn’t imply culpability. Angela CLEARLY holds no moral cupability in this situation; this is true even though it IS very likely that the breakup, combined with her husband’s antisocial nature, precipitated his actions. the fact that he had a reason in his mind doesn’t absolve him in any way, and the Times isn’t trying to do so.
the fact is, if she had not gone to the casino that day, it’s possible that her family would still be alive. Even so, (allow me to repeat myself for clarity’s sake – I don’t want to get piled on) there’s NO WAY that a reasonable mind could conclude that this tragedy was her fault, because there’s no way she could have known that her batshit crazy husband would do what he did.
Not sure what I was most disturbed by in the story–the blame placed on the mother for “igniting” the murders or the blame placed on the children by the mother. If you read her statements she basically shifts responsibility onto the kids for why this happened. Everyone is fucked. Like Erica, I am totally over men’s crazed sexual jealousy and the ways in which it affects our society.
Katehed….
What a bunch of bullshit, “I am totally over men’s crazed sexual jealousy”.
people, the overwhelming majority of people, go bat-shit when they discover infidelity.
I am not arguing this guy was a total loon and there is no excuse for killing…
However, show me the woman or man who is gonna be all calm, cool and collected, when they discover their spouse in unfaithful. Discovering something like this is pure trauma.
Don’t believe me? Try it some time.
Thanks ECB – you are right on.
— the fact is, if she had not gone to the casino that day, it’s possible that her family would still be alive.–
Or she could’ve been added to the body count, which seems a likelier outcome to me.
Way to report, ECB!
@59, a point I concede. The guy very likely would have gone nuts at some point regardless of the actions of anyone external to him, barring some time spent in serious counseling (even then…). My point, however, is that noting the environment in which he went off the deep end isn’t the same as blaming the people who were around when it happened.
the language involved is imprecise, which is why I think there’s so much emotional turmoil surrounding this thing. there are two ways to think about it, the first of which is the current tack taken by the Seattle Times:
If the guy can be said to have made a decision (and therefore be fully responsible for his actions, then it almost by definition has to have been in reaction to something else – his relationship falling apart. While it formally leaves the question of the mother’s guilt unanswered, you’d have to believe that she knew beforehand that by trying to quit the abusive relationship, her husband would go after the family; no one but the trolls have even posited this possibility.
If his murderous rampage was really out of the blue (voices came to him and told him to kill his kids), then he was really and truly insane, and he actually bears LESS responsibility, since he was…insane. Again, the mother bears no responsibility.
I guess there’s also the possibility that he is just completely evil and decided one day for no reason but the sheer pleasure to shoot up his family. That’s the stuff of horror movies, and sadly, every once in a while, reality.
#60–Report? This isn’t reporting. This is commentary and/or analysis.
Reporting would be if Erica managed to talk to Angela Harrison or anyone else involved for that matter.
What bothers me is the sense I get from Erica’s two posts on this topic that in her mind, it’s offensive that Angela Harrison is even part of the story…that the story should begin and end with “Insane man kills children and self.”
It is human nature to wonder why…that’s why “why” is one of the 5 “W’s” of journalism…and it is one of the hardest to accurately determine and report on.
That difficulty is one reason that conjecture about the “why” of a story becomes the focus of the extended news cycle– the follow-up stories after the purely observable facts of the initial story have become known.
It is Erica’s commentary that “Breakup ignites dad’s rage” is automatically meant to be read the same as saying “Woman causes man to kill children”–which, to me, is a leap of logic that I’m not willing to make with her.
I think she’s reading what she wants to read into this, based on her prevailing opinion and suspicion towards the way that the media covers certain stories as being inherently misogynistic–but, that’s my commentary/analysis and I don’t happen to automatically share that same bias.
I actually agree with Erica’s take on the STORY, which is that this man’s actions are unjustifiable under any circumstances, no matter what the irrational “why” might be reported to have been. I just don’t agree that the headline wording from the coverage of this story indicates a sense that the actions were somehow justified.
That’s where we differ.
The elephant in the room seems to be that the mother is an obese, chain-smoking, cheap-tattoo clad skank who started pooping kids out of her cooze at age 13.
@63: Are all your adjectives supposed to add up to a point?
@64 well, it’s not quite a rape joke, and it’s not quite a trailer-trash joke. I think it’s the rare breed of internet troll who couldn’t decently scandalize if he was handed a picture of the Queen defecating on a Sudanese amputee.
I re-read that section several times to understand what I was reading. Your interpretation, ECB, is right on.
Yeah, yeah, we’re trying to “make sense” of the tragedy, but to speak to the women, get the facts, and then call her a liar because she contradicts a raging lunatic/murder and/or faceless relatives AND then to have this third-hand information as a tacit justification for the murder/suicide is unacceptable.
Let’s all go pick cherries!
I Have looked at all the comments regarding what some people think about the husband’s behaviour after he discovered his wife was leaving him for another man (believe me she was) and what he did afterwords. They describe him as selfish and controlling and murderous. These things may be true but what I fail to see or hear from any of the commenters is the fact that both of these individuals reaped what they sowed. Human behaviour isn’t that difficult to understand or diagnose. This woman had other outlets to remove herself from the home. Clearly her newly conveniently concerned family could have taken her and her children in. It’s not that hard for a woman to trick a simple man (and this man was) into believing that she’s taking her kids to visit her family and just stay there with her family while she tells him that she’s leaving him. But no lets dissect what she did do after work she decided to go with a “concerned” male co worker and decided to go to the Muckleshoot casino, mind you a Casino……not a place to have a cup a coffee to talk, or speak to a family member. And then after that she decided to go to a convenience store (probably to get some condoms) where she gets confronted by her Husband and child. Her child asks her to come home but no she decided she would rather go with her “concerned” male friend and deal with it later.
So the question I gather to ask is what did she think would happen. I mean seriously didn’t she know this man? Didn’t she think to herself “what’s the worst thing he could do to hurt me”? I’m not excusing her husband or any man who decides to hurt their families. But what I am saying is this woman reaped what she sowed. As the prince said in Romeo And Juliet ………….All are punished
FWIW, I remember that some people blamed Andrea Yates’ husband for what she did.
@62:
Right the fuck on.
1. This woman had other outlets to remove herself from the home.
And they were?
2. Clearly her newly conveniently concerned family could have taken her and her children in.
Who?
And many people who would be willing to take one person in, who would not be so willing to take six people in.
Moreover, the kids apparently did not want to leave their home and their dad.
3. It’s not that hard for a woman to trick a simple man (and this man was) into believing that she’s taking her kids to visit her family
The man tracked her movements using the GPS in her cell phone, so I’m gonna say your plan wouldn’t work.
4. after work she decided to go with a “concerned” male co worker and decided to go to the Muckleshoot casino
Which happened to be her husband’s workplace. Maybe she wanted to explain to him why she was leaving him.
5. this woman reaped what she sowed.
Do you have Asperger’s syndrome? Because you seem to lack all human feeling, as well as any knowledge of human nature.
Hey, folks, the person who’s responsible for those five kids deaths is the person who pulled the fucking trigger.
P.S. In her own words, “For the longest time,” she said, “I’ve tried and tried and tried to leave.” But the children always begged her to stay, she said, because they wanted to remain a family.
They didn’t want to leave psycho dad. Hard to believe, but kids don’t actually want to be separated from their abusive parents. Growing up, I had some experience with foster kids, they don’t want to leave their parents and they don’t want to be adopted by a “nice” family. They want their real parents back, no matter how abusive.
P.P.S Seriously, who cares why she left him? It doesn’t really matter. The pig would have killed them (and probably their mother) no matter what. From previous experience with battered women, the abusers in their lives have a “If I can’t have them, nobody can” mentality. Plenty of times the abused spouse tries to leave (with the kids) and daddy-kins will kill them all. It’s about ownership. They can’t stand the thought of their “property” getting uppity and disobeying.
http://www.vpc.org/studies/dv5intr.htm
It’s hard to protect your kids when you’re dead, too. The best thing you can do for everyone is to get yourself out of the abuser’s power. Then you can work to get the kids out of the abuser’s power too. But you can’t do a damned thing for the kids if you’re dead.
At least he killed himself. These sorry white women who have been found guilty of killing their percious children get off with an insanity plea…., but it’s funny how they forget to end their lives. Angela Harrison, played a big part in this man snapping,by her leaving her family
( remember her oldest cried herself to sleep that night).
If you are in an abusive union get out! There are too many resources available for “BATTERED WOMEN”. To keep using the “I Was Scared” excuse is really getting old. Most abused women would be too afraid to have an open affair in front of their controlling and abusive mate. She wasn’t, and I wonder why was she so bold…………