It has to be the worst nightmare for any parent. You get that call...the call that anyone with a child would dread getting. It is some law enforcement agent telling you your child has been murdered.
You would think this would be an exceedingly rare occurrence. It is so heinous and so unforgivable that only the person on the absolute fringe of society would commit such an act. Yet each month, it seems, we hear another instance of some young person killing some other young person and a lot of times a motive for the murder is elusive.
I try to remember if all of this kid on kid violence went on when I was growing up? Maybe. Maybe my family shielded us from the awful news. Maybe the media only covered a news story if it were relevant to the area in which I lived. I do know this: whether it is truth or just perception, it seems like kids are killing kids at an alarming rate and for virtually no reason.
The answer as to whether the incidence of youth on youth murder that occurred during our childhood was as prevalent as it is today can be found at this link. Apparently it did, and it did a long time before that too. This is a chart of school centered murders and massacres from elementary through college by year. It made me gasp to see the sheer number of incidents and how far back they began keeping records of these crimes. This chart includes any incidents that occurred and were on record all over the world:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school-related_attacks
The middle and high school shootings, the shootings and stabbings on college campuses, the drive by shootings every night in Boston, LA, Detroit, Miami, Chicago and all major cities in the US illustrate the point that for some reason, a lot of kids in Generation Y seem to place little value on human life. They are so used to the awful headlines that they really aren't even afraid anymore.This is the world THEY have grown up in. I can't imagine going to school and having to worry about somebody coming in and assassinating friends and teachers. That is out of the realm of my experience and it seems terrifying to me. Our kids have grown up after the Columbine massacre; in a time where lock down drills go hand in hand with fire drills at school.
There was a trial in the news recently in Massachusetts. A young man, John Odgren, 16, stabbed a freshman, James Alenson,15, to death in the boys bathroom in 2007 at the Lincoln-Sudbury High School in Sudbury, a suburb of Boston. Odgren didn't know Alenson. He just felt compelled to kill somebody that day and Alenson had the bad luck of being the next one to come through the bathroom door.
John Odgren has Asperger's Syndrome, a condition that is on the Autism Spectrum; it had also been suggested that he is bi-polar and has ADD. One other thing that was mentioned was that he had been bullied at school and had been suicidal. All of those situations taken together could paint a picture of a very troubled person. The defense attorney tried to convince the jury that his client was temporarily insane right before he killed the other student. I know a little bit about Asperger's and I never heard the association between having Asperger's and being insane. I don't think there necessarily is an association between those two.
I read a blog on the Psychology Today website about this case.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/radical-behaviorist/201004/john-odgren-guilty-aspergers-not-guilty
The author of the blog mentioned that all of these psychological issues taken together could cause a child with Asperger's to act out in a problematic way. But is this cluster of neurological and psychological issues considered insane? I don't know. Did Odgren know right from wrong? I am not sure.
I watched developments in this trial because I was unsure what I would have done if I had been on the jury. I had utter and complete sympathy for the Alenson family. Their son did nothing other than to go to the restroom that day. He didn't know his killer. If any of Odgren's family members felt he was a danger to himself or others, why was he attending a mainstream school?
The jury found Odgren guilty of 1st degree murder. He planned to kill somebody that day so it was premeditated. He is supposed to spend the rest of his life in jail, no possibility of parole. I have mixed feelings about that outcome. I feel good for the family James Alenson. They got the justice they deserved. Odgren should probably have been dealt with differently before this incident happened. If he were in a place that could have recognized his propensity toward violence, this may not have happened at all. Maybe he did not receive the assistance he needed to manage with the Aspergers, the bi-polar disorder and the ADD. If not, that is on his parents and the school. The whole situation is awful though. I am glad I was not on that jury!
There was a murder in the news this week involving two students at University of Virginia. So far George Huguely has admitted to kicking in the dorm room door and slamming the head of his former girlfriend Yeardley Love against the wall repeatedly. Love died that night and was found by her roommate in a pool of blood. What made an otherwise normal (seeming) college student, Huguely, fly into such a rage that he beat his ex girlfriend's head into the wall until she died? It is incomprehensible that nobody saw any warning signs in this boy's behavior. How can someone hold so much rage and that rage not be evident to anyone else that knows him?
In my not too distant memory I can recall the Virginia Tech massacre, the murder last year at Yale University and a fatal stabbing of a football player on the campus of University of Connecticut, where my son was a freshman. It is all so scary and we are so helpless to explain the reasons and the causes of this kind of behavior. As a parent, our children's safety is constantly on our minds.
I am not sure if there are any encouraging words to say on this topic. We need to be there for our children; we need to get them help if they have psychological difficulties, are bullied, or are troubled. In extreme cases, like that of John Odgren, some children should not be placed in a mainstream school setting where they could be a danger to the general population.
The teenage years through the early 20's are a time of raging hormones, changing personalities, and fluctuating brain chemistry. Young people straddle the line between good and bad at this time in their lives. They push the envelope and then retreat back. Luckily for us, the majority of them end up on the good side when their growing and changing starts to wane. There are always going to be a few that end up on the bad side and those are the ones we are all going to have to look out for.
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