… what with everyone killing everyone and all… Editorially speaking, with the American family a shooting gallery, it’s awkward to know how to formulate things when dad kills sonny or sonny kills the whole family or hubby kills wife and then himself or mom kills her four girls… All with guns, natch…
What’s nice is the shooter almost always gets a mention… Not as the shooter haha! Don’t no one, in these obits, put in the er circumstances of the deceased getting deceased… Shooter’s just one of the survivors (if he survives), a member of the grieving family…
Like this latest one, where Haven, who sounds like a sweet, wonderful, kid, was blown away by his stepfather who’s now on trial for manslaughter. Wouldn’t want that detail to mess up the warm family circle you’re drawing on the decedent’s legacy page, so here again the shooter appears you know just as dad! Dad, dad, dad, who smoked the kid while he was sitting on the living room couch (Haven “died at home”) and will go to jail for it…
I mean, you don’t gotta say killed by his dad or anything! Might could consider leaving the name of the killer out of the obit…
June 30th, 2025 at 1:22PM
Unfortunately, I can speak to this one. On 12 June 2009, my brother (and only sibling) Michael murdered our mom and dad with my dad’s home defense pistol. My dad had all the legal paperwork and was a responsible gun owner. Unfortunately, he also had a younger son who is a) a drug addict, b) a psychopath (and I’m using that in the technical sense, not the common parlance), and c) already a convicted felon at the time of the murders (see a) and b).)
Not quite three months after the murders, my brother (who also accidentally shot himself in the process) was charged, and he was convicted four years after that. He missed the death penalty by one vote, and is now serving two life terms without the possibility of parole.
The police actually figured out Mike was responsible very early in the process. I personally suspected it from the moment I heard the news at 3:30 the morning of the 13th. However, when it was time for me to write the obituary, Mike hadn’t been charged with anything yet, and as far as the press knew, he was simply another victim. Given all that — and the fact that I could have been mistaken (I wasn’t, but I could have been), I simply listed him as a survivor.
This didn’t mean that I was trying to downplay what happened. All it meant was that I didn’t want to have to eat those words later. He is my brother, after all, and it could have been necessary for me to have to deal with him thereafter. As it turned out, we haven’t communicated since about two weeks before the trial, where I testified for the prosecution, but as I said, that was four years after the murders.
Things can get complicated.
June 30th, 2025 at 3:47PM
Mondo: I hear you, and I’m so sorry you had to go though all of that. As you note, it’s almost always obvious to family members that a murder of this sort is overwhelmingly likely to have been committed by a family member. But in the immediate aftermath, when obits must go out, there may be pressure to err on the side of super-caution, and include the name of the murderer among the survivors. In the cases I allude to in the post, there was/is no doubt as to the killer.
I remain confused as to why, for instance, the extended family of a person who murdered his entire family (2 adults, 3 children) except for his wounded sister who barely escaped, decided to feature the killer as a survivor, in the same sentence as the sister he tried with all his might to kill.