Homeschooled Pastor's Son Slaughters Family

[lilwriter85]

According to the article, the guns were kept in an unlocked closet. Surprise.

That is really bad especially because they were very young children in the house. Does the article mention if the guns were in locked cases? My dad keeps his guns in locked cases and other relatives who do the same thing. At the same time, older kids can find ways around locks.

[wtfrenchtoast]

That is really bad especially because they were very young children in the house. Does the article mention if the guns were in locked cases? My dad keeps his guns in locked cases and other relatives who do the same thing. At the same time, older kids can find ways around locks.

Nope, I think they were just out in the open in the closet. Probably for easy access in case the family needed protecting...

[gustava]

Apparently, after murdering his family, he had intended to go to Walmart on a murder spree and then die when shot by police. Instead, he went to church and participated in recreational activities.

[Handmaiden of Dog]

However, we are deeply concerned about the portrayal in some media of Nehemiah as some kind of a monster.

Wow, his family sure is tap dancing around, trying to pretend that this kid was just a sweet loveable muppet who had a bad day. Sorry, I don't buy it. Anyone who shoots and kills all the family members close by and then plans to go out and murder as many strangers as possible is a monster. I could maybe cut him some slack if he lost his temper and killed his dad but to turn the gun on a 2 year old?! Damn. That doesn't bear thinking about.

[hoipolloi]

The family's desire to minimize Nehemiah's culpability is understandable but ITA that there's a difference between, say, killing a parent in a fit of anger and slaughtering much or all of your family, including a 2 year old.

As for this:

To be clear, our family has differing views on gun rights and gun control. What we do agree on is that those who wish to score political points should not use a confused, misguided, 15-year old boy to make their case.

We ask those in the media and those who would use the media to make their political case, to not use Nehemiah as a pawn for ratings or to score political points. He is a troubled young man who made a terrible decision that will haunt him and his family forever.

Why would anyone store lethal weapons in an unlocked closet if they know they're living with a "confused, misguided, 15-year-old boy"? The family can't have it both ways.

[YPestis]

I agree with others that say the family was wrong to leave guns and ammunition in an unlocked closest, especially if with young children and at least one troubled teenage boy. Regardless of where you stand on the gun issue, it's never safe to carelessly leave guns and ammos hanging around. Even ardent second amendment advocates believe owning guns requires serious responsibilities. However, that is where the similarity ends. To me, responsibility is not just to individuals who own guns, but to society to protect itself from the occasionally nut that WON'T be responsible gun owners. This pastor's kid is one such nut and his family was irresponsible in their guns and paid the price for it. This situation could have ended in many more deaths if the kid went through with his plan to shoot up Walmart. And all this could have been stopped if the family put aside their selfish desire to fondle their guns and took better care of keeping it out of unsafe hands.

To me, responsible gun ownership means requiring owners to lock up guns and keep them unloaded unless under specific circumstances (i.e living alone or with only adults and/or in dangerous areas), having a mental health database to ensure troubled people at least won't have easy access to guns, and requiring broad background checks to anyone wanting to own an item whose express purpose and design is to kill people.

I'd also support a ban on weapons of mass killing (assault weapons and magazines containing more than a certain number of rounds). We don't allow governments to own weapons of mass destruction, how do we let individuals? Especially individuals that appear to have unstable individuals living with them.

[mebeforee]

To be fair to the uncle, the media DOES try to take teen mass killers like this and make them fit a particular mold. In terms of being a loner, that's something that is almost always claimed for these killers but often isn't the case. Even Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had a group of close friends, but there was something in their minds that drove them to commit a crime like this. It also doesn't appear to depend entirely on the family. I've spent a lot of time the past three weeks or so researching these kind of crimes because I couldn't wrap my head around Sandy Hook, but all I've come up with is that, like mompom said, this isn't a simple kind of crime. And with each shooting it seems that we come away knowing no more about what causes people to do this. I think one of the major contributors is that the family/friends/community all fail to see that the child needs help. While it's possible this family did not encourage the expression of emotions, and was potentially very controlling, that doesn't actually explain the crime because most people raised in those families don't become mass murderers. And mass murderers can also come out of families that are not withholding or domineering. It's something internal... people are always looking for a scapegoat for it because it's hard to accept that someone can turn out this way without anyone knowing. With people loving and caring for them, living with them, supporting them, etc. It's too hard to think that it could be anyone, even someone in our own lives. So they say oh, it was the video games, oh the music, the movies... then when that can't be supported, they blame the family. Obviously family has a much bigger part in how the child turns out than video games or movies, but I don't think you can heap ALL the responsibility for his actions on them. 15 is more than old enough to know that killing is wrong, and it doesn't look like he displayed any red flags to indicate he was a danger before this point. This was someone who was mentally ill in a way that is often overlooked, no matter the religious or political belief of the family. I personally believe in gun control, but more because I think it will reduce the destruction possible by violent criminals, not because I think it would stop violent crime entirely.

As for the family talking about Nehemiah not being a monster, I think that's something that most families of shooters secretly feel. They just usually don't express that feeling to the world at large, because they understand that the actions are not defensible and clinging to their own image of the kid can be hurtful to others. In this case I think they may be less inhibited by social stigma since he didn't kill anyone outside their own family (even if he'd planned to), so there aren't families of other victims out there that they might cause emotional damage to by trying to portray him as a good person. But friends and family of Klebold for years seemed to believe that Harris had coerced him into shooting at Columbine, because they couldn't reconcile their own experiences of him with the crime he committed. I don't see this family as any more or less culpable for the boy's murders than any other teen killer, and no more or less likely to identify the problems in their child. The biggest issue here is that there's no clear way to identify someone who is harboring violent thoughts, especially if they know that they are not supposed to feel that way and keep it hidden. So these violent kids aren't getting psychiatric help they desperately need because, in cases where the child is self-aware or intelligent, they don't seem to act out the way most troubled kids do.

IDK. The only thing I can say about this is that it could possibly stop fundies from saying 'a Godly person would never do this, this is because of a lack of God in the home, the school' etc. But it's more likely it will turn a No True Scotsman debate, because they can easily just say that he may have said he was a Christian, but was a faker if he could do something like this.

[gustava]

Thanks, mebee, for such a thoughtful post. Some people are just the "bad seed."

[Rosa]

I don't think the bad seed thing is fair, either. There are an awful lot of people out there who have these kinds of impulses, but nobody leaves guns laying around for them to use, and actually acting on the impulse becomes much less common after adolescence (either the urge to hurt others or to hurt themselves)

[mebeforee]

That's true, I think it's neither completely one or the other. But the sad fact is that when a person knows that the violent impulses they feel are unacceptable, they learn to hide them. And some of them begin to fall into violent fantasy, and planning, and eventually it turns into something like this... and if they decide to kill, and have a certain amount of self-control or self-discipline, they can manage it without anyone around them finding out about it until it's too late. I don't necessarily think they are innately bad or that they can't recover or benefit from help, but I also can't blame the family as much when over and over it seems like these kids hide their issues so well. Probably because the kids that can't hide the problems are dealt with earlier, put into therapy or getting into juvenile crime and being put in detention centers or hospitals or whatever... taken away from the opportunity to hurt other people. Obviously having access to weaponry makes it much easier for a person with violent impulses to act on their fantasies, especially someone as young as this boy, and of course the family should have kept their guns locked up - especially with young children in the house. But a boy of his age, if they trusted him, might have known how to access the guns anyway. So this specific crime could have been prevented if they hadn't had the guns, but his mental illness would still have been there and very likely to have eventually come out in a different way. I guess I'm saying that he would still have had the violent urges if they didn't have guns, but in that situation they may have ALL survived any attack from him, and been able to find him some kind of help rather than their family going through such a horrible tragedy and him being in prison at 15.

[NotALoserLikeYou]

They had the funeral. The daughter said:

Annette Griego, one of Greg Griego's adult daughters, told those at the service that her father was a man whose heart was after God.

"My dad never gave up on me. He never gave up on any of us. He never stopped giving us Jesus and so I know he would want us to do the exact same thing for our brother, Nehemiah," she said. "So if you wonder where we stand, we stand alongside our brother."

"We stand confident that God will take this tragedy and use it for something good," she said.

[hoipolloi]

Great comments, mebe.

"We stand confident that God will take this tragedy and use it for something good," she said.

Let's hope it takes the form of God leading some of these gun nuts to lock up their guns, or, better yet, divest themselves of their arsenals if they know they've got "confused" and "misguided" people living in their homes.

[Chicken bones]

Amen, hoipolloi!

[fakepigtails73]

I agree with others that say the family was wrong to leave guns and ammunition in an unlocked closest, especially if with young children and at least one troubled teenage boy. Regardless of where you stand on the gun issue, it's never safe to carelessly leave guns and ammos hanging around. Even ardent second amendment advocates believe owning guns requires serious responsibilities. However, that is where the similarity ends. To me, responsibility is not just to individuals who own guns, but to society to protect itself from the occasionally nut that WON'T be responsible gun owners. This pastor's kid is one such nut and his family was irresponsible in their guns and paid the price for it. This situation could have ended in many more deaths if the kid went through with his plan to shoot up Walmart. And all this could have been stopped if the family put aside their selfish desire to fondle their guns and took better care of keeping it out of unsafe hands.

To me, responsible gun ownership means requiring owners to lock up guns and keep them unloaded unless under specific circumstances (i.e living alone or with only adults and/or in dangerous areas), having a mental health database to ensure troubled people at least won't have easy access to guns, and requiring broad background checks to anyone wanting to own an item whose express purpose and design is to kill people.

I'd also support a ban on weapons of mass killing (assault weapons and magazines containing more than a certain number of rounds). We don't allow governments to own weapons of mass destruction, how do we let individuals? Especially individuals that appear to have unstable individuals living with them.

Count me OUT on the mental illness database. First of all it would violate tons of privacy laws; second, it would put even more stigma on people suffering from a mental illness, stigma which we already have too much of thank you very much. Third, I doubt that tragedies such as this pastor's son and the Newtown one last month would have been prevented even with such a database being operationnal in all 50 states: if the gun owner is too dumb to keep his or her guns stored safely in a locked unit and if that loving parent practically raised their kid at the shooting range for many years while knowing (or refusing to know) that he suffers from a diagnosed mental illness or a personnality disorder, then what can you do? No amount of censoring so-called violent video games, music and movies will help, and neither will wrecking the lives of millions of innocent people by putting their names and info in a database for the only reason that they're ill.

[RachelB]

Count me OUT on the mental illness database. First of all it would violate tons of privacy laws; second, it would put even more stigma on people suffering from a mental illness, stigma which we already have too much of thank you very much. Third, I doubt that tragedies such as this pastor's son and the Newtown one last month would have been prevented even with such a database being operationnal in all 50 states: if the gun owner is too dumb to keep his or her guns stored safely in a locked unit and if that loving parent practically raised their kid at the shooting range for many years while knowing (or refusing to know) that he suffers from a diagnosed mental illness or a personnality disorder, then what can you do? No amount of censoring so-called violent video games, music and movies will help, and neither will wrecking the lives of millions of innocent people by putting their names and info in a database for the only reason that they're ill.

Thank you for that, fakepigtails73. Stigmatizing mental illness does not encourage people who might benefit from treatment to seek it. And I can very quickly think of six people in my partner's family and my own who have a diagnosed mental illness (three with depression, two with bipolar, one with schizophrenia). None of them ever have caused any harm to anyone else. It grieves me to see mental illness equated with a propensity for violence, when people who have a mental illness are likelier to be victims of violence than to perpetrate it on others.

[mebeforee]

Dear lord... I followed this story a bit when it first happened, but I just saw a link somewhere and it sounded familiar, so I clicked it. The ad before the video was for some musical based on 50 Shades Of Gray and it was probably the most offensive and inappropriate thing I have ever seen. The website for any news agency should at least take mass murder cases off their usual advertising queue, especially if committed by a minor.

[NotALoserLikeYou]

Might as well update the story. All I could find was he is charged as an adult, 5 counts of first degree murder and is pleading not guilty by reason of insanity.