Monday Morning Crisis Quarterback

For the last six days, the man responsible for the bombing and mass shooting that killed 77 people in Norway last July has been testifying at his trial. He admits that he was the person who carried out the attacks -- there is no question or controversy about that. This trial is being held to determine whether what he did was a crime and, if so, whether he was sane at the time he committed it.

The shooter's view is that this was not a crime. He has an elaborate and fairly paranoid political ideology which, he believes, justifies the attacks as part of a war against Muslims and multiculturalism. Since he was defending his people, he claims, this was not a crime. As far as I can tell, no one expects this argument to win the case.

The question of whether he is -- or was at the time of the attack -- sane is somewhat more complicated. There are two psychiatric reports in play. One says that the shooter has paranoid schizophrenia and was unaware of reality when he committed the crime. The other says that he is a narcissist, but he knew what he was doing and is responsible for his actions. The shooter, for his part, says he is sane.

This case points out some of the big problems with legal discussions of sanity. "Insanity" is a legal term, not a medical or psychiatric one. There are millions of people in the world at this very moment who have a disorder that is listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) right along with paranoid schizophrenia, and they are legally sane. That is, they know right from wrong and can appreciate the consequences of their actions. In fact, there are millions of legally sane people with paranoid schizophrenia.

In fact, one of the mental disorders listed in the DSM is narcissistic personality disorder. In other words, both psychiatrists who have evaluated this man think he has a disorder. What they disagree about is which one, what type (personality disorders are considered to be in a different group or "Axis" from other mental disorders) and whether it impacted his ability to know right from wrong. (In another high profile case, the man who kidnapped and repeatedly raped Elizabeth Smart was found legally sane in part on the basis of a report that said he had narcissistic personality disorder as well.)

On an intuitive level, most of us have a sense that you can't be all there and do what this man did. You'd have to be "sick" or "crazy." But those aren't medical terms either. And obviously your view of right and wrong has to be pretty messed up to think this is OK. But most people who commit murder are legally sane, and most legally insane people don't commit murder.

Where is the line between wrong or bad or evil and insane? Where do messed up values and priorities cross the line into not responsible for your actions? I think that's a question that doesn't have an answer. We have legal standards, and we hope we'll know the difference when we see it.

In my next post, I'll take a look at the impact of the trial on the families of those who died. Stay tuned.

This week, the NPR show On the Media had an interview with Laura Amico, the founder of a website called Homicide Watch D.C. This website tracks every homicide in Washington, DC from the time the crime is committed through the investigation, trial and sentencing. It's a big job in a city that has already experienced 95 murders in 2011 (down from 106 at this point in 2010).

One of the things that makes Homicide Watch interesting is that they often publish information that has not been made public by the police department. Most notably, they publish victim's names before they have been released. The interview on NPR today focused on how they are able to do that.

If you think about it, it actually isn't all that hard. The fact of the matter is that, unless the person is truly unidentified, a large number of people know the identity of the victim immediately after a homicide. Friends, relatives, neighbors, colleagues, classmates etc. hear about it very quickly. These people, in turn, do two things: they go online looking for information about the crime, and they go online to talk about it.

When these folks go looking for information, they don't realize that public information tends to be very meager and come out very slowly. Chances are that they themselves already know more about what happened than is available in the media. They're looking, nonetheless. So immediately after the murder of John Smith, his friends and relations start googling terms like, "murder John Smith Washington November 7." One of the sites they are most likely to find themselves directed to is Homicide Watch D.C., even though it doesn't have any information for them.

Meanwhile, the folks over at the website have a preliminary police report that a male victim died of stab wounds on XYZ street. All of a sudden, the analytics for their website start showing that people are googling "murder John Smith Washington November 7." So the website folks go on Twitter and Facebook, looking for things like "RIP John Smith." When they find it, they can also often find additional information. For example, the full tweet might read, "RIP John Smith, stabbed to death tonight." That's a good clue that the victim is John Smith. Even better, they may be able to find John Smith's Facebook page, where people may be posting memorials and comments about the murder.

At this point, they know the victim's name and they publish it, hours and sometimes days before the police release it. But should they? After all, the police hang onto that information for a reason, and if they have a good reason shouldn't the website have the same reason?

Let's start with why the police are slow to release the name. They want to be absolutely certain they have it right, and they want to be absolutely certain that no close relative will hear about the crime from the media before they are officially notified. The techniques the police department uses to identify victims and the standards they use for "absolutely certain," however, are very different than what Homicide Watch is using.

The police may be waiting on fingerprint confirmation. At a minimum they're waiting for a family member to come down to the morgue and identify the body. Homicide Watch presumes that if the family is tweeting and facebooking about it, they've already identified the body for their own purposes, if not for the police department's, and that's good enough for them. Homicide Watch also relies on the fact that if the murder has made it to Twitter and Facebook there is very little chance that any close relatives don't already know. Another way of looking at it is this -- the police wait until they have identified the victim to their satisfaction. Homicide Watch waits until they see evidence that the victim's family has identified them to the family's satisfaction.

In the end, I actually think publishing the name before it's released officially is something of a service to the relatives and loved ones of the victim. If you have ever been involved in a traumatic event, you have probably experienced the odd feeling that comes when you realize that your world has stopped turning and the rest of the world doesn't know it. Reading media that has no coverage of your event, or inaccurate or minimalist coverage, feels just plain wrong. At least with Homicide Watch, the next time someone googles for information, they will find some confirmation that yes, this awful thing did happen and yes, someone noticed. On balance, I think that's a good thing.

As you almost certainly know, last Friday a massive explosion rocked Oslo, Norway. Shortly thereafter, a gunman opened fire at a camp run by the Labour Party on a nearby island. In all, 76 people were killed and many more injured. Many of the victims were children.

For a brief time on Friday, it was reported that a previously unknown radical Islamist group had taken responsibility for the attacks. The stories in the mainstream media generally represented two different views of this (we now know incorrect) fact.

View 1 was that this showed how dangerous Muslims in Europe are. View 2 was that this was a case of a small minority of Muslims twisting the religion to suit their own purposes and beliefs, and should not be viewed as typical of all Muslims or the religion itself.

Soon it came out that, in fact, the perpetrator in these attacks was a Norwegian citizen upset over immigration and multiculturalism. Two views quickly emerged about this as well. View 1 holds that this is the inevitable result of dangerous rhetoric on the part of conservatives. View 2 holds that this man is clearly mentally ill, and his actions should not be held against an entire political ideology.

There are certainly parallels between these two sets of views. Either the person responsible is representative of their group or they are the exception but not the rule. But there is one notable difference -- in the first scenario, neither view considers mental illness to be a factor.

What is going on here, in both scenarios, is people's attempt to distance themselves from those responsible. They are not like us. They are other. They are different. That means that we are not at risk of becoming like them, and we are less vulnerable to them because their difference may be easy to detect. In the first scenario, the difference in question is one of religion. American mainstream media is largely a Judeo-Christian business. From that perspective, Muslims, whether a handful of radicals or an entire religion, are not "us."

Once it was clear that the perpetrator was European, however, we regrouped. For those on the political left, it was easy to point to him as being on the political right. For those on the right, however, "othering" him was more difficult. He must be mentally ill.

I actually think that this perpetrator probably is mentally ill. Whether that is the whole story or political ideology also plays a part is open for debate. What is interesting to me, though, is that we tend not to consider that suicide bombers from Al-Qaeda, or Osama Bin Laden, or anyone in that general category may be mentally ill. Some of that is racism. Some of it is the ease of separating ourselves from them if we are not Muslim ourselves.

But if you consider it, the narrative of the Oslo massacre probably should be that these attacks were carried out by a deranged person or persons. What religion or ethnic group they are from is not, from that perspective, all that important.

Mary Jo and Blake Hadley were murdered on Saturday afternoon, allegedly by their 17 year-old son. Specifically, the son posted an invitation to a party at his house then allegedly bludgeoned his parents with a hammer and hid their bodies in the master bedroom. He then hosted between 40 and 60 people for the party that night as his parent's bodies lay behind closed doors in the house.

There is certainly plenty of awfulness to comment on here. There's the horror of a kid killing his own parents and the brutality of how he did it. There's the unbelievable callousness of hosting a party with your parents lying dead in the same house. How unfeeling can one person be?

My thoughts, however, go to a less-examined aspect of this case. There are between 40 and 60 people out there who found out on Sunday that they had partied Saturday night away at a crime scene, just feet away from the victims' bodies. Think about that. How would you feel?

Interestingly, my first thought was that these kids wouldn't care. I mean, who goes to a party at the house of a kid who kills his parents anyway? I had to stop myself. Most if not all of these guests didn't know what had happened. They were doing something that appears unbelievably heartless, but they didn't know they were doing it.

One of the things that people often struggle with after a traumatic event is guilt. We believe, rightly or wrongly, that we should have done something differently and that our doing something differently would have made a difference. Most often, however, we are basing our ideas of what we should have done on information we only got after the event. That's certainly true in this case.

I doubt there was one person at that party who, if the invitation to the party had read, "Come on over to my house for a party. My parents will be dead in the master bedroom," would have thought that was a good idea. At the same time, I'll bet there are a lot of people freaked out by the thought that they were there and thinking, in hindsight, they should have known.

Leiby Kletzky won't be home for Shabbat dinner tomorrow night. He won't be home next week, or the week after, or for any Shabbat or holiday or regular dinner ever again. Leiby was 8 years old when his parents let him walk alone, for the first time, from his summer camp in Brooklyn, NY to meet them a few blocks away on Monday. He took a wrong turn and asked a stranger for directions. Leiby Kletzky is dead, and that stranger has reportedly confessed to killing him and dismembering his body.

There are news stories that upset me. There are news stories that scare me. There are news stories that make me angry. There are very few news stories that make me physically ill. This is one of them.

I've been trying to identify just what it is that has made me feel like I was going to throw up since the moment the details of this case came to light. I've been doing crisis work for a long time, and I've heard some pretty awful stories. The murder of children is always particularly poignant, but this one is different.

I think there are two aspects to this case that cause me to feel that connection in a particularly personal way. The first is that, this week, I sent my own 6 year-old son on a plane as an unaccompanied minor to visit his grandparents in Washington, DC for the first time. We've done this countless times with his oldest sister and it has always gone smoothly.

We are careful, or so we think. We make sure not just that the airline has the information they need to keep the kids safe, but that they know what to do if someone isn't there to pick them up, if their seatmate is bothering them or making them uncomfortable, if they get lost or if someone other than an airline employee offers to take them someplace. We trust that these precautions, coupled with the help of the airline and the common sense of our kids, will keep them safe.  Leiby Kletzky's parents thought there wasn't much that could go wrong, too. They were a few blocks away. He would walk right to them. What could go wrong?

Today, when I went to pick my son up at the airport, I got stuck in traffic. His plane arrived early. The line to get a security pass to go to the gate was slow. The security line was long. I knew that he was off the plane, and I found myself in a panic. We had a plan for this. All he had to do was stay with the airline employees. But what if he didn't?

One of the deeply held beliefs about the world that we have as parents is that we can keep our children safe. My kids will tell you that I often say that that is my most important job as a mom -- keeping them safe. Leiby's parents were doing that job as best they could with the information they had. And it wasn't enough. That shakes my own belief in a world that will work the way it should.

The other poignant piece of this case for me was that it occurred in a Hasidic community in Brooklyn. I am not Hasidic and have never been. I lived for a while in a heavily Jewish section of Pittsburgh, PA that had many Hasidim, and as a Jew I feel a connection to that part of my roots. Hasidic communities are famously close knit. You can see this in the sheer number of people who turned out within an hour or two after Leiby went missing to look for him. It may be Brooklyn, NY, but it is a small shtetl in many ways. This isn't supposed to happen. The fact that the accused killer is also an Orthodox Jew, albeit not a Hasid, makes it even worse.

Of course, no one should do this to anyone else. The fact that Leiby was Jewish or Hasidic doesn't make his death any more or less important than that of any other child. But just as it would affect me if it happened on my street more than two miles away, I feel that sense of shock not just that a child was murdered, but that it happened in "our" community. Reading the comments on various blogs around the net, I realize that there is a cultural context to this case that I can't put into words and the commenters clearly don't get. This perpetrator was able to do what he did to this boy precisely because they had a connection and a similar understanding of what their community was like. This didn't just violate the law and human decency, it violated a communal sense of trust. I can't explain it any better than that.

Leiby won't be home for Shabbat tomorrow. In Judaism, we say that the memory of the righteous is for a blessing. May his family be comforted among the mourners of Zion.

Thanks to frequent Quarterbacker Jim for suggesting that my take on this might be a little different than others and that I should blog about it. I needed the noodge.

Last week, word filtered out through what is left of the media here in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that police were looking for a woman from Pittsfield Township named Dawn Fital. Pittsfield is the township just southeast of Ann Arbor, between Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti. Like many areas around here, the homicide rate is incredibly tiny. The Michigan State Police searchable database for 2006 (the most recent year included) shows that there were no homicides. In 2009 (the most recent year for county-wide statistics) there were 9 homicides in the entire county.

At any rate, Dawn Fital went missing on Monday from the apartment she shared with her boyfriend and ex-husband. Police in Indiana picked up her boyfriend on Tuesday after he was spotted digging a hole behind a bank, and he apparently told him he had killed his girlfriend. Her body was found on Thursday in a pond near where the boyfriend was arrested. He has been charged with open murder.

Over the four days between when this story first hit the news on Wednesday and the arraignment on Saturday, there were approximately 12 stories in our local news outlet about it. As much as I'd like to tell you that that's because we are all so stunned that anyone would be killed in our neck of the woods, and while that is not completely irrelevant, I think it is incomplete.

Dawn Fital, a White woman, was allegedly murdered in her own home by someone she lived with, a White man. She was not a criminal, a drug dealer, or a gang banger (and yes, we do have those in Washtenaw County as well). She was not African-American, and she was not male. She was not "supposed" to be a homicide victim around here.

But think about that for a moment. Because if Dawn Fital was not "supposed" to be murdered, that implies that someone else was. The fact that Fital does not meet the typical statistical profile of a homicide victim may be notable, but it should not make her death more important than that of any other person. Everyone who is murdered has a family and friends. Everyone is a human being.

The thing that strikes me -- or perhaps triggers me -- about Dawn Fital's death is that I can count on one hand the number of female homicide victims in Washtenaw County in the 9 years I have lived here. Every one of them was a victim of domestic violence. So in that sense, I guess Fital does fit the profile. The problem is the existence of the profile, and a society that in any way condones a pattern where Black men are disposable as victims of violence in general, and women are disposable as victims of violence by their partners.

Frequent Quarterbacker Jackie sent along a link to an article from the Daily Beast about the murders of Calyx and Beau Schenecker. You probably heard about the murders when they happened at the end of January. The two teenagers -- aged 16 and 13 respectively -- were shot to death in their Tampa, Florida home. The alleged killer, who reportedly has confessed, is their mother, who attempted suicide in the same incident.

Certainly this incident is horrible and worthy of discussion in a blog about traumatic current events. But what catches my eye about the article that Jackie sent along is the headline:

Did This Mom Kill Her Kids?

The article explains at some length that it is incredibly rare for mothers to kill their teenage children. Children murdered by their mothers are almost always infants or toddlers. Teenagers murdered by a parent are generally murdered by their fathers.

The article is a decent one, exploring the unanswerable question of why this mom did what she appears to have done. Their was clearly mounting discord in the family, the mom and daughter were seeking counseling, the mother may have been using drugs and was probably depressed, and the dad had recently deployed to the Middle East with the Army. And it points out that we will most likely never know what snapped in Beau and Calyx's mother to make her kill her own children.

But the headline says something else entirely. Did this mom kill her kids? It sure seems like it. In fact, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of question as to whether she did, only as to why. So why doesn't the headline match the article.

The somewhat boring explanation is that whoever wrote the headline was doing so quickly, skimmed the article, saw the part about this being almost unheard of, and misunderstood the thrust of the article. But I think it was a little more than that.

On the whole, people are very bad at evaluating statistics and probabilities. It is this phenomenon that was at work when a friend of mine, during a research study, asked people in line for a roller coaster what their chances of dying on the ride were and several people answered "50/50." Did these folks actually think that, on average, people die on the ride half the time? That seems unlikely. They didn't understand what "50/50" means. And I think, on some level, the headline writer didn't understand what something being so rare it is basically unheard of means.

The fact that something is unheard of -- even if it has literally never happened ever before -- does not by itself mean that it hasn't happened this time. As the saying goes, there's a first time for everything. What it means is, all other things being equal, it is unlikely to be true.

But  all other things aren't equal. This mom confessed. The evidence points solely to her. The fact that she did it is notable because it's unusual. The fact that it's unusual, unfortunately, does not mean it's not true.

You don't have to be a fan of Speaker John Boehner to appreciate that he got it exactly right today when he reacted to the attack on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in which six others, including U.S. District Court Judge John Roll and a child, were killed and Giffords was critically wounded.

An attack on one who serves is an attack on all who serve.

Eighteen additional people were injured in the shooting, which occurred outside a grocery store in Tucson during a public event hosted by Giffords.  The alleged shooter is a 22-year-old man who, in various social media, talks about himself as the "mind controller" and lists Mein Kampf andThe Communist Manifesto among his favorite books.

I'm not from Arizona and, like many Americans, I knew nothing about Rep. Giffords before today's attack.  Yet the story grabbed my -- and the country's -- attention almost instantly.  If it were just me we could chalk it up to the subject matter of my blog.  After all, my family no longer says, "Did you hear this horrible news?" when something bad happens.  They say, "Do you need a blog topic?"  But it isn't just me.  As I write this than four and a half hours after the shooting, Google News is listing nearly 4,000 news articles online about this event.

To me, this raises two questions of the sort where you think you know the answer until you try to articulate it.  The first is, why do we care about the shooting of someone we've never heard of?  The second is, if we have a reason to care, why do we focus on the fact that Rep. Giffords was shot and not on the death of another public servant, Judge Roll?

The answer to the first question, I think, goes back to Speaker Boehner's remarks.  Understandably, he feels a personal connection when someone targets a member of Congress.  By the same token, we as citizens feel a personal connection because, as the title suggests, congressional representatives represent us. They are our voice in government, whether we love them or hate them.  When someone attacks a member of Congress, we know on a gut level that they are attacking the people that person represents, or at least the people who voted for them.  Whether we ever heard of Gabby Giffords before today or not, the position she holds makes us assign particular and personal significance to her shooting, what it means to us as individuals, and what it means to our system of government.

That having been said, what about Judge Roll?  He was a public servant.  His job was to ensure equal and fair protection of the law for all.  He had received death threats over a recent immigration case, and surely we should worry for our system of government if judges cannot rule without worrying about their lives.  Why aren't we focused on him?

I think there are a couple of reasons.  First of all, eyewitness accounts seem to indicate that Giffords was the first one shot and the original intended target.  In the chaos that followed, she was the only person shot whom everyone knew had been shot.  The news of Judge Roll's death came several hours later, and the story had already been "branded" as being about Giffords.

Still, I suspect that even if Roll had been the target and Giffords had not been there, this would not be as big of a news story.  And I think that's largely because your average person on the street doesn't have a very clear idea of what a District Court judge does.  We understand judges in general, and we understand Supreme Court justices, but we don't have a good mental image of the importance of mid-level federal judges and their day-to-day impact.  We also don't elect federal judges, so we don't feel the connection that we do to members of Congress.  No one out there is thinking, "I know who John Roll is.  He's my judge."

Intellectually, I think that we should care very much about the assassination of Judge Roll, at least as much as the attempted assassination of Rep. Giffords.  But reactions to traumatic events are not about what we think, they're about what we feel in that fleeting moment before our thinking brain takes over. So my gut is focused on Rep. Giffords and her family.  My brain, and the heart that sometimes follows it, also expresses horror and condolences to the family of Judge Roll and the other five people who died in Tucson today.

Jonathan Foster was a 12-year-old boy living with his mother in Houston.  Two weeks ago, a family friend and her child moved in after the friend separated from her husband.  Last Friday, Jonathan stayed home alone while his mom and her new roommate both worked.  When his mother came home, he was gone.  Initially, it seemed like Jonathan might have run away from home, but on Tuesday his body was found, burnt, in a ditch.  An acquaintance of the roommate has been arrested and charged with his murder.

I can't imagine anyone reads a story like this and thinks anything positive.  This is not a feel good news story.  There are some of you out there who read this and think something like, "that's too bad" and move on.  There are others who read this and feel a punch in your stomach.  I am definitely of the latter category.

So, am I an inherently more sensitive person?  Am I morally superior because I notice and care?  Am I weaker, because I am more easily affected?  Is it a female thing?  I'll say it's "none of the above."

This story punches me in the gut for the simple reason that I have a 12-year-old child of my own.  Sometimes she stays home alone while I work.  We have gone over and over various safety rules for when she's alone, and I believe she follows them.  I also recognize, however, that Jonathan probably broke the one that's hardest to remember -- don't open the door for an unexpected visitor even if you know them.  Even if you know them.  It's easy to say in theory, but how may 12-year-olds would find it easy to keep the door closed if the neighbor, an aunt, or a family friend stopped by?  There's the rule, and then there's common courtesy.

I feel a punch in the gut because there is nothing in this story that makes me believe this could not happen to my family.  There is no, "I would never let my child do that" or "My child would never do that" for me to fall back on.  What separates my family from Jonathan Foster's family is depending on how you look at it, dumb luck or the fact that, as far as I know, I'm not acquainted with anyone who would kidnap and burn my child.  That I know of.  I'm sure Jonathan's mother thought the same thing.

Our minds are wired to look for patterns in stories like this.  We look for signals that can help us either know how to prevent such an incident from happening to us or can help convince us that it couldn't happen to us.  The punch in the gut isn't from being caring or sensitive or weak or female.  It's the result of the realization, conscious or not, that the signals, rather than protect or reassure us, are telling us we can't prevent this at all.

Yesterday, the BlogHer network syndicated my last post about what you could say to your children if they asked about the woman who killed her two children.  A commenter on their site (with tongue firmly in cheek, I'm guessing), wrote,

You mean leaving my kids in a bubble until they're adults (and possibly after) isn't an option? Sad.

As much as I'm sure she was kidding, I also know where she's coming from.  All of us, as parents, have moments in which we want to be able to insulate our kids from the outside world (in my case, it was the day that NPR "outed" the tooth fairy for my 8-year-old daughter, who, although very knowledgeable and savvy about all sorts of things, still believed).  We know we can't keep them isolated forever, but how long is reasonable, and what should we or should we not be keeping from them?

Obviously, some of this is going to depend on your personal style, your personal values, and the circumstances in which you are raising your children.  A friend, for example, once told me she was not going to tell her children that other religions other than hers existed before they were about 10 years old.  She (a Roman Catholic in a very Roman Catholic community) might possibly be able to accomplish that.  I (a Jew in a predominantly Christian society) may not choose to tell my kids about other religions, but I probably can't keep the information from getting to them if I intend to, say, take them to the mall in December at all.

There are some rules of thumb I think represent best practice for deciding what to expose your children to and what to say to them.  These ought to apply to any circumstance, even though those circumstances may be wildly different from family to family.

1.  If they're going to hear about it anyway, and you care about how they understand it, they should hear it from you.  Please note that this has to do with whether they are inevitably going to hear about it, not with whether you want them to inevitably hear about it.  This applies particularly to high profile news events which other children may be talking about or which they may hear or see snippets of in passing on TV, radio, at news stands, or overhearing telephone conversations.

In 2009, one of the women who worked in the lunch room at my school was murdered by her boyfriend.  A parent was concerned that we told the children that she had been "found dead" and that this implied homicide, which she did not want her children to know.  While we can quibble over the words and whether they were the best way to phrase things, the notion that these children were not going to find out that this staff member was murdered was not realistic -- all of the kids were talking about it and it was all over the news.

2.  If there is a reasonable chance that they are going to hear about it, and if and when they do they will feel betrayed by the fact you didn't tell them, you need to tell them.  This applies to all kinds of situations where we decide kids are better off not knowing, but they beg to differ when they find out.  You may think you're doing your kids a favor telling them the dog went to live in the country, but when the neighbor expresses condolences that their dog was hit by a car they will not only be shocked, they will be mad at you for lying.

3.  If you are finding the news or the situation extremely stressful, the kids will know something is up, so you need to talk to them.  No matter how horrible the situation, if you are noticeably upset and the kids think things are so bad you can't tell them about it, what they will imagine is far worse than reality.  You also, by not talking, send the message that they can't talk to you, so if they do find out they won't have anywhere to go.

4.  Talking honestly does not mean giving gruesome details.  It's OK to speak in generalities and then only give specifics if asked.  For example, we told the kids that our lunchroom staff person was found dead.  Only some of them wanted to know how she died, and we could say that we didn't know the details but the police believed that someone hurt her on purpose.  That was good enough for most kids, and we could answer more questions about who and how for those who were asking.  We could also talk about what they were more concerned about -- is someone out there attacking people -- by listening to the melody as well as the lyrics of their questions.

5.  Don't assume you know what they're thinking or feeling.  There's an old joke about the boy who asks where he came from.  His parents explain about the birds and the bees in some detail, and he says, "That's funny, my friend Johnny comes from Chicago."  Sometimes, just answering the specific question asked is what the kid is looking for.

6.  If they're asking, it doesn't really matter whether you want them to know about it yet.  There are things that all people eventually come to know about -- murder, rape, child abuse, and sex are just a few -- that we'd just as soon our young kids didn't know about.  However, if and when your child asks you what one of those words -- or some other along the same lines -- means, you have to answer them in a kid-appropriate way.  If you refuse, you send a powerful message that they are never to ask you about such things. 

Which brings us back to #1, above -- if they're going to find out, wouldn't you like to be in control of what they hear?

A 30-year-old woman in Irving, Texas called 911 on Monday and told dispatchers she had just murdered her two children, ages 2 and 5.  A tape of the phone call records the mother saying that she tried to poison them with bathroom cleaner and strangled them with a wire when they refused to drink it.  One child died later that day at the hospital, and another died late Tuesday.  In her phone call, the mother says that she killed her children because they were autistic, and she wanted normal children.

This horrific case has enough layers in it to seemingly match any agenda of any commentator or blog writer anywhere.  In searching for information about the case, I have found a great deal of commentary from organizations supporting families with autistic children, talking about the level of stress that parents are under.  I have also found a smattering of people bemoaning the fact that this mother will almost certainly plead insanity.  Then there are your death penalty advocates, and your assorted anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant types.

I will not pretend to know what brought this woman to do what she did.  This case is horrible no matter how you analyze it.  And while I may have opinions on some of the political issues that others have raised, in the absence of any real information about how this case may more may not relate to those I will keep them to myself.

That is not to say, however, that I don't have a proverbial horse in this race.  One of my first thoughts upon hearing about this is to wonder what I would say to my own children if they heard about it.  I have no interest in exposing them to this news, and there is no reason to.  But kids hear and see things that we don't mean for them to know about all the time.  What would you tell a child who asked why this woman killed her children?

Let's start with what a child who asks about this is really asking.  If your child is old enough to read or to comprehend a verbal news broadcast, then he or she already has the facts, such as we know them, about this case before asking about it.  And yet, kids still ask.  It's not that they're forgetful or simpleminded, it's just that they don't have the words to ask what they really want to know.  They are not asking why she did this in an attempt to find out why she said she did it (i.e. that her children were disabled).  They are asking what we all are asking, which is a more global, "How on earth could anyone do this?"  On top of that, they are asking for some idea of whether the notion of a mother killing her children makes sense to us.  They want some help gauging just how common this is, which in turn helps them gauge just how likely it is to happen to them.

In the words of one of my mentors, when children ask questions we need to listen to the melody, not just the lyrics.  If your child asks you why this woman killed her children, here are a few things you might think about saying:

• I don't know.  It's hard to imagine how someone could do that, and it's very upsetting to hear about.
• She must have been more upset than I or anyone I have ever met has ever been to do something like that.  I have never even thought about doing anything even close to that, and I never would.
  
• Nobody really knows.  However, I would guess that she had an illness in her mind that made her think that was an OK thing to do.  I'm sure that if she had a healthy mind, she would not think it was OK.
• That is a really scary story, isn't it?  One of the reasons it's on the news is that things like that are so unusual that it gets everyone's attention.  We are hearing all about this story, but let's not forget that it's something that's really, really, really unlikely.

Kids need to know that we take their questions seriously, that we will answer them when we can, that we will admit when we can't, and that we will try to help them with the feelings that motivate their questions even when they can't quite put them into words.  And then, when we're done, we can slip back to adult company and admit, amongst ourselves, that the question of "why" is still bothering us, too.

Police officer Craig Shaw of Lancaster, Texas, about 20 miles south of Dallas, was shot and killed on Sunday while responding to a shooting at a local housing complex.  Another officer returned fire, killing the suspect, who had, in turn, shot Jeremy McMillan.  The shooter turns out to be the son of Dallas Police Chief David Brown, and McMillan appears to have been targeted at random.  His two young children were in the car with him when he was shot, and emerged covered in their father's blood but unhurt.

We know that the death of a police officer in the line of duty represents a major and complicated critical incident.  Even for those in law enforcement in other jurisdictions, line of duty deaths can be very personal and very traumatic.  The death of Officer Shaw would probably have an impact -- possibly a big one -- on Chief Brown by itself.  The death of his son obviously would, by itself, as well.  And the notion that his son killed someone, too, would be a big deal.  Now Chief Brown has all of these things to contend with at once.

Last week, I spent some of this space trying to get inside the mind of a mother whose daughter killed her son.  While Chief Brown's situation isn't exactly the same, it's not far off.  When someone you love commits murder, it severely tests what you believe about family loyalty.  It's hard to be "loyal" to a family member who has done something so awful, but it takes a big person to reach out to the family of the victim in this situation.  When the victim is themselves someone you care deeply about, your loyalties are torn even further.  And when your loved one, the one who committed murder, is dead themselves, it's hard to know which way to turn.

It's both important and very difficult to remember that, while Chief Brown's son may be at fault for this entire situation, Chief Brown himself is not, nor is his family.  People never know what to say when tragedy strikes a family.  That is only compounded many times over in this situation.  The tendency will be for people to put their energies elsewhere, figuring that comforting the Shaws and the McMillans are much more important than comforting the family of a murderer.  However, this is as much of a tragedy for the Browns as for the two other families. 

We don't like morally ambiguous situations.  We want it to be the case that either we are glad that the shooter is dead or we're not.  If we're reflective in this situation, however, most people will come to the conclusion that there are two conflicting truths in this situation.  The first is that the shooter's death was necessary to prevent further violence (and some of us might say he got what he deserved).  The second is that the death of Chief Brown's son is a terrible loss to his family.  It's hard to hold those two things in our minds at the same time.  I hope enough people close to the Chief can do so to provide comfort and support following this awful incident.

A man biked to a Del Taco restaurant in San Bernardino, California this afternoon armed with two handguns.  He walked inside, walked over to a table and opened fire on a family of four.  He then shot himself in the head.  The father of the family died at the scene, and an 8-year-old boy died shortly after arriving at the hospital.  A 5-year-old boy and his 29-year-old mother are in critical condition, as is the 56-year-old shooter (there are conflicting reports, with some indicating that he has also died).  Reports indicate he is the woman's stepfather.

This story is horrific, of course.  In the next day or two we'll be hearing more about the relationships among the shooter and the victims and about what his motive may have been. 

In this lull while we wait for more information, it's interesting to contemplate why we think that more information will be helpful. If we think about it for any length of time, it's obvious that, at least for most of us, there is no motive strong enough to justify this kind of premeditated violence, particularly against children.  No matter what we find out, this story is not going to stop being horrific, so why do we care?  Most would chalk it up to macabre fascination with other people's tragedies, but I think there is more than that. 

We generally think of family members as "safe."  They are not the people who, when we see them walking towards us on the street late at night, cause us to cross the street.  We may or may not like our families, but most of us are not afraid of them.  At the same time, we also know that there are people who, with good reason, are afraid of members of their family.  Abusive spouses and parents, disturbed children and other violent relatives are out there, and their families, quite reasonably, fear them.

For those of us who aren't afraid of any of our relatives, it's hard to fathom that someone close to us could try to kill us in broad daylight in public.  This incident must be different in some way, and we want to know how.  This is not just because of morbid curiosity.  We are looking for evidence that, while we don't fear our families, this family had a reason to fear the mother's stepfather.  If we can figure out the motive, we can reassure ourselves of two things:   First, that the same motive doesn't exist in our own families, and second that this was that "other" kind of family -- one of the ones where people knew they should be afraid.

Why do we need that reassurance?  Because the alternative makes us want to hide under our beds and never come out.  The alternative is that any family, anywhere, any time can go from peaceful to violent.  The alternative is that the people we consider "safe" are not safe, in which case we are not safe, even if we think we are.  No one can live a normal life believing that violence could erupt without warning at any moment.  We all know, somewhere in the back of our minds, that random violence does occur, but for the most part we live life as though it doesn't, and we don't want evidence to the contrary, thank you very much.

I don't know anything about this family -- not even their names.  In the days ahead we'll find out whether this attack was at all predictable.  Whether it was or not, however, will not change the fact that half of this family is dead, and the other half will have to live with that loss and this traumatic experience for the rest of their lives.

In February, a professor in Alabama was charged in the shooting deaths of three of her colleagues at a faculty meeting.  Soon after, it surfaced that she had also shot and killed her brother in 1986 in an incident that was ruled at the time to be an accident.  Today, she was charged with murder in her brother's death.  Because the Alabama charges will take precedence, it is unlikely but not impossible that she will ever go to trial in Massachusetts.

The details of the brother, Seth Bishop's, death are worth looking at, because in hindsight this case is pretty odd.  In 1986, his sister loaded a shotgun in her bedroom, fired a shot and then brought the gun downstairs.  She and her mother, who was in the room at the time, reported that as she tried to unload the gun it went off, killing him.  She then left the house and tried to steal a car from an auto dealership.  She pointed the gun at police when they arrived but was eventually convinced to surrender.  In her room, authorities found a magazine article about another highly publicized case where a man killed his parents and stole a car from an auto dealership in an attempt to escape.  However, in this instance the sister was held for only a couple of hours before she was released without charge.

It's easy for me, 24 years later, to describe this in such a way that it seems the police were at best incompetent in this case.  How does someone try to steal a car and hold police at bay with a shotgun and not get charged?  I can understand believing the shooting was an accident, but the escape wasn't.  Why didn't her actions cause police to look more carefully at the shooting?

The thing that gives me pause every time I read about it, however, is her mother.  Judith Bishop says she was in the room when her daughter shot and killed her son, and she says it was an accident.  How can you watch your own child be murdered and stand by the murderer?  How can you not at least be angry at the reckless behavior that caused the accident, if you really believe it was an accident?

I can't know what was going on in Judith Bishop's head that day, but she has to have been stunned.  Whether or not she was actually in the room, her daughter had shot her son and he was dead.  Her first reaction -- the typical reaction -- would have been "this isn't happening."  So on that level, it makes sense that she told the police that it didn't happen, at least not on purpose.  Admitting to the death of her son was hard enough.  The possibility that her daughter did it intentionally would have been too much to process and accept right away.

Once the shock started to wear off, presuming that the shooting was intentional, Judith Bishop was faced with an agonizing situation.  Not only was her son dead, but the only person to blame was her daughter.  Her choice was to say that her daughter did it intentionally and, effectively, lose a second child soon after the first, or to stand behind her daughter and help herself believe that this was all a terrible accident.  She didn't make the right choice, but she made an understandable one.

If Seth Bishop's sister had been charged in 1986, she most likely would never have gone to graduate school or gotten her job in Alabama.  Most likely, her three colleagues would still be alive.  The charges today are little comfort to those families.  Following traumatic death, our minds naturally turn to blame.  Today, I'm guessing those families are pointing their fingers at Judith Bishop, who now, finally, has tragically lost her second child.

image:  Braintree High School 1986 Yearbook

This week, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has a study from New York University about the affect of traumatic exposure on children's IQs.  Specifically, researchers looked at the IQ scores of children in Chicago who lived in a neighborhood where a murder had taken place, whether or not they had witnessed it, and compared them to children in the same neighborhood who were not tested close to the time of a murder.  They found that, for 7-9 days following the murder, children's IQs dipped about one half of a standard deviation, or 7-8 points.  Given the disparity in crime rates and demographics in American neighborhoods, the researchers surmise that this effect might account for half of the noted gap between the average IQ scores of African American students and their White counterparts.

For people who work with children, and for people who work with people exposed to trauma, this finding is not particularly shocking.  Anyone who has experienced a homicide in their neighborhood can tell you that they feel distracted and not 100% functional for a week or a week and a half afterwards.  Educators have long noticed the dip in academic performance for children who are experiencing stress at home.  The notion that this can be measured scientifically is not much of a stretch.

Apparently, for some people, however, it is.  The Reuters story on this new study is followed by a number of comments, some of which are really disturbing.  One commenter writes:
There are many things wrong with this comment, and I am only going to skim the surface.  The least offensive reading of this is that the commenter misunderstands how the study itself was conducted and presumes that the children who were not exposed to homicide lived in a different neighborhood than those who were.  The most offensive reading is that the commenter is so steeped in their own privilege and the societal racism that comes with it that they cannot even imagine that a study that exposes that privilege and suggests that poor, African-American children may actually be just as smart as anyone else has scientific validity.  My personal opinion is that both of these things are true, at least to some extent.  There is, however, another factor at work here -- a really fervent attempt by the commenter to distance themselves from the violence itself. 

Nobody wants to live in a neighborhood with a high homicide rate.  If you do not live in such a neighborhood now, you also would like some reassurance that you are not at risk of winding up in one so you can feel secure and not spend a lot of time and stress worrying about it.  If you acknowledge that it is some combination of luck, inherited privilege and societal discrimination that has some people living in those neighborhoods and you not living there, then that opens up the possibility that your luck might change.  You might someday live there, and might someday be in danger.  But if your living situation is caused by something inate -- say, inborn intelligence -- then you are not at risk.  You don't have to worry about living in such a neighborhood because only dumb people live there, and you are not dumb. 

The fact that I can explain why someone would think this way, and how it relates to an understandable wish to distance ourselves from violence, should not be misconstrued to mean that I agree with the commenter or approve of what they wrote.  I think this comment is truly repulsive.  We all have a natural urge to distance ourselves from certain types of things.  In this instance, if it's all the same to you, I'll distance myself from this commenter and their way of thinking.

image copyright istockphoto/akajeff

Joran Van der Sloot confessed on Monday to the murder of a Peruvian woman.  If the name doesn't ring a bell*, perhaps the name Natalee Holloway will.  She's the American who disappeared on a high school graduation trip to Aruba in 2005. Van der Sloot and his brother both spent time in jail as suspects in her murder, but were eventually released.  Van der Sloot has apparently admitted that, on May 30 of this year (coincidentally exactly 5 years since Holloway was last seen), he murdered Stephany Flores Ramirez, 21, after he found her looking through his computer at files about Holloway.

The Peruvian media is all over this case.  According to the Christian Science Monitor, newspapers in Lima are calling Van der Sloot a "psychopath" and a "monster."  Perhaps we can understand why.  CSR also reports that the papers are drawing a connection to other murders of women by foreign men, and warning young women to be careful.  The implication is that foreign men, as a group, are dangerous, and that Van der Sloot is the prime example.

Aside from selling newspapers, there is a good reason why people make this sort of generalization at moments like this.  Our brains are wired to look for patterns and connections among different stimuli.  In nature, the ability to notice what signals that a predator is about to strike is very important for survival, so it's not surprising that humans evolved to have this ability and this tendency.  When something bad happens, we automatically look for the pattern that will warn us the next time and, hopefully, save us from the next predator.

The problem here is that we also tend to see patterns that are completely irrelevant, and to attribute meaning to them.  In this instance, the Peruvian press has hit upon the pattern that Van der Sloot, and some other suspects and convicted murderers, are all foreigners.  They extrapolate from that the idea that women should be careful of foreigners.  The problem is that being foreign is not what made these men murderers.  I'm not familiar with the crime statistics in Lima, but my guess is that there are many more murders of women by Peruvian men, just going by sheer numbers.  Nobody is suggesting that women stay away from Peruvian men, or from all men, though.  Those aren't interesting patterns for our brains to latch onto -- they're not specific enough.  Foreign men are.

Being wary of foreign men in this situation makes about as much sense as being wary of blonde men, or men with short hair, or men who are 6 feet tall.  All of these things may describe Van der Sloot, but none of them is a remotely reliable signal that someone is a murderer.  We could also suggest that women should avoid men whose first name starts with J, or who have three parts to their last name.  Somehow, we manage to understand that these patterns are meaningless.  The pattern of people being from a foreign country, however, also taps into some deeply rooted fears of the unknown and biases against the "other," and so newspapers can get away with publishing what is almost certainly an equally meaningless theory.

It is probably a good idea for women to be careful, period.  They should probably be especially careful around people who are larger and stronger than they are who they don't know -- often this will be men who are relative strangers.  Where someone is from is not a useful piece of information in avoiding psychopaths.  It's too bad, really.  The world would be a lot safer if picking out the predators was that easy.

* Once again I've violated my rule about not naming perpetrators.  This story is only getting press, however, because of who the perpetrator is, so it seemed to make sense to publish his name.

Guadalupe Rosas, 59, was working at her register in an Apex, North Carolina Target store this morning when a man she had once been involved with walked in and shot and killed her.  When police arrived and confronted him, he shot and killed himself.  About 150 people were in the store at the time of the incident. The Target corporation issued a statement this evening and said that the store would be closed tomorrow "so that we can focus on taking care of our team." 

Certainly there is plenty of work for counselors to do in this incident.  Aside from the obvious fact that this is a violent death, it is the death of someone at work.  While Ms. Rosas may not have been a public safety professional in the line of duty, she was nonetheless part of a team that worked together, and she, unlike her colleagues, did not survive her shift.  This will make for a more complicated set of reactions in her coworkers, from wondering if "it could have been me" to anger that she put everyone at risk to guilt that they even entertained such a thought.

In addition, there are 150 people from all walks of life who were not sure they were going to survive their shopping trip this morning.  News reports include statements from people who hid in a storage room, a man who was shopping with his young son, people who were smashed up against the doors in the panic, and someone who reported seeing flipflops and sandals strewn in the parking lot where people had run out of their shoes.  Many people ran to a nearby Lowes store where staff tended to those injured in the evacuation and waited under lockdown for police to arrive.  Every one of those Target patrons, as well as those staff and customers at Lowes who helped, potentially will have intrusive sensory images from the incident, whether they find themselves picturing the sandals in the parking lot or the shooter pointing a gun at them.  Many of those people thought they were going to die, and that is a serious risk factor for post-traumatic stress disorder.

Then there are the police officers on the scene.  Everyone is different, of course, and undoubtedly at least some of them will have no regrets that the shooter killed himself.  He was, after all, a "bad guy."  Others, however, will be troubled by the visual image of actually seeing him do it, and by the knowledge that they were right there but powerless to stop him.

This is another one of those times when having multiple different trained crisis teams responding and supporting people could be very beneficial.  Ideally, Target has either its own team or an Employee Assistance Provider with trained CISM providers available.  The police department, we can hope, has its own team with trained cops and mental health professionals and maybe a chaplain.  If we're really lucky, there's also a community response team to support the customers and the folks from Lowes.  Of course, this not being an ideal world, it's entirely possible that Target is sending in a couple of company psychologists with no trauma training at all, the police department will tell its people to "buck up," and no one will do anything for the customers at all.  That happens all the time.  I just hope folks are a little more prepared to recover in Apex.