Murder suicides - One killer but how many victims?

It has happened again – several bodies found in a house and police ‘not looking for anyone else in connection with the incident’. Code for one of the deceased attacked the others and then killed themselves. The latest case is in a small community in Northern England.

Horror; outrage; how can they have done this? - usually to their close family or friends; why did he have a gun?; why did she set the place on fire? ; how could we have stopped this?

Just a few of the thoughts and debates that emerge as days go on. The killer is a monster, different to us, evil, twisted and escapes our justice by executing themselves.

But...

In an online community I am linked to we had news of something similar. Far off in a distant land someone not known to me but known to many as a kind sensitive but emotionally and mentally struggling woman, had died in one of these situations, she had shot and wounded family members before killing herself. 

The  community conversations have been full of confusion, pain, anger and grief.  One commented that they wished they could go back to the world before the news, a world where people who did this were sick monsters and not people like us – but it is too late for that, all sorts of grey shades everywhere.

There is no excuse, no allowance, no justification for the shooting and taking lives of others as happened here, or even the wounding in the far off case.

And yet when someone does something that far out of character, someone who is known to struggle with mental distress, can we dare to call them monster?

What might we do if internal agony takes away our ‘right mind’ and possibly our inhibitions moral and otherwise? How many of us have known deep anger, rage, pain – but have had the resources to control it, express it less harmfully, even to suppress it in the moment?

Very rarely are the mentally troubled a risk to anyone’s lives but themselves – though those around us are affected by our illness.  In times like this where the effects are so tragic let us not judge the killer solely by this one act in their life.

In the case currently in the news the family of Michael Atherton have commented briefly on their shock, grief and lack of understanding how the man they knew could have done such a thing.

It is easy to point out 3 victims and a killer – but the family have 4 people to mourn, not 3 as the newspapers do, and it is the 4^th victim that will be the hardest, most complicated, to grieve.

Let us pray for them, and for those whose pain takes them to the extreme.

NOTE: In both cases mentioned I have no direct insight nor claim it, media stories are only ever part of any truth, and my thoughts are more generic than specific