"Tragedy compounded: Killers' parents become instant pariahs," is the title of JoNel Aleccia's report for NBC News. Here's the beginning of this must-read.
As news crews swarmed outside the tile-roofed house of accused shooter James Eagan Holmes’ parents in an upscale suburb of San Diego, a stranger 1,300 miles away in Texas grieved for those inside.
“I’ve been worried about the family,” said Lois Robison, 78. “I know what it’s like to find out your son has killed several people.”
Last Friday, when Holmes allegedly opened fire in a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., his parents, Robert and Arlene Holmes, were instantly thrust into a club that no one wants to join: family members of notorious killers.
Like the parents of Tucson shooter Jared Loughner, Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and Columbine High School killers Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, they’re quickly becoming pariahs, publicly reviled for raising a monster.
But a group organized on behalf of murder victims’ families urges compassion and understanding for the families of murderers, too.
They suffer in a different way than those who lose loved ones to violence, said Renny Cushing, founder and executive director of Murder Victims' Families for Human Rights, or MVFHR, which has organized support sessions for killers' families.
“I became really painfully aware of the ostracism that takes place,” said Cushing, whose father was murdered in 1988. “Immediately, there’s this thought that families must have done something to cause this, that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
That’s all too familiar to Robison, a retired third-grade teacher. Her son, Larry Keith Robison, was executed in 2000 in Texas for the grisly murders of five people, including an 11-year-old boy. He had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia at age 21, three years before the 1982 murders.
Though it’s been nearly 30 years since the crime, Robison still clearly recalls the shock and horror of the early days -- and the reaction of some in the community of Burleson, Texas. Reporters surrounded her home; in ensuing months, some parents asked to have their children removed from her class.
No longer were they Ken and Lois Robison, the local schoolteachers.
“We became the parents of a mass murderer,” said Robison.
It’s a shift that happens quickly as a restless public searches for someone or something to blame for senseless acts of murder, said Cushing.
Related posts are in the victims' issues index.
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