Two Young American Male Murderers

Murder is serious business. There is nothing more consequential that one person can do to another than kill them. Humans are more likely to use violence to take the lives of adults of their own species than most any mammal (Ed Yong, “Humans: Unusual-

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ly Murderous Mammals, Typically Murderous Primates,” The Atlantic, September 28, 2016). Homicide is a human universal and across the globe there are vast differences in the frequency of killing (Melvin Konner, The Evolution of Childhood: Relationships, Emotion, Mind, 2010, 717).

In advanced industrial societies, the United States has the highest rate of murders, three times higher than Canada and five times higher than France and Germany (Myriam Miedzian, “Why Our Homicide Rates Are The Highest Of Any Advanced Industrialized Country: It’s Not Just About Guns,” Huffington Post, February 25, 2013). Murder may be an individual act, but it always occurs in a cultural-historical context. It cannot be seen as a primarily psychological event, but benefits from psychohistorical understanding.

In this paper, I will look at murder through the lens of two case studies of American homicides. Some groups of people are more likely to kill and/or be killed than others. In the U.S. in 2016, more than half the homicide perpetrators were under 30 (U.N.R.I.C., “Homicide,” 2014; Statista, “Murder Offenders” 2017).  In 2015, 13.3% of Americans were African Americans, yet they made up 52.3% of all murder victims (Matthew Cella and Alan Neuhauser, “Race and Homicide in America, by the Numbers,” U.S. News and World Report, September 29, 2016). In the U.S. between 2001 and 2010 around 5% of gun-related homicides are committed by those with a diagnosed mental illness (Jonathan M. Metzl and Kenneth T. MacLeish, “Mental Illness, Mass Shootings, and the Politics of American Firearms,” American Journal of Public Health, Vol. 105, 2015).

Both of the murderers profiled here were young men; one was 18 at the time of his lethal action and the other 20 years of age. One had been diagnosed with a mental disorder, the other had not. One is white, the other black. These two case studies of individual murderers represent populations with higher prospects of being lethally violent.

My goal is to go beyond the statistics and show how these distressing human tragedies are both individual and entwined within their social-historical setting. The Naked City film (1948) and television episodes (1958-1963) ended with, “There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them.” There were over 14,000 homicides in America in 2012 and 2013. This is the story of two murderers.

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The first case involves a young African American man, T. J. Mitchell, who later became captain of his high school football team in the predominantly black suburb of Bloomfield, Connecticut. When this athlete was 15, his stepbrother introduced him to Ronald Taylor, a 24-year-old African American man, who provided him with pot and induced him into a sexual relationship. As the initial sexual act allegedly occurred when Mitchell was younger than 16, under Connecticut law Taylor would have committed statutory rape.

To some males a homosexual encounter is an affirmative experience, to others a stain on their masculinity. As Mitchell’s identity was connected to the hyper-masculine world of football, he became the latter. After a few years, he ceased being sexual with Taylor. But the older man would not accept this change. To retaliate, Taylor posted on Facebook that Mitchell was a gay football player, but after a few hours removed it. Taylor, though, threatened to again publicly expose Mitchell. The adult was blackmailing an adolescent to be sexually subordinate.

A viable solution for the victim of rape and exploitation would have been to go to the police. Mitchell was likely scared to turn Taylor in to the authorities as he would have to reveal the homosexual acts. As well, blacks are unlikely to put their faith in the police. Among African American youth, less than half trust the police compared to over 70% of whites and Asians, and close to 60% of Latinos (Jann Ingmire, “Young People of Color Mistrust Police” UChicago News, 2014). After all, blacks endured slavery and were later subjected to lynching, police brutality, and a higher rate of incarceration for committing the same crimes as whites.  As a young black man in America, not surprisingly Mitchell would be less likely to turn to the legal system with his problem. If he had, his life might have turned out differently.

Instead, he took matters into his own hands. He wanted Taylor to stop shaming him. The two met in Taylor’s car on November 21, 2013. Mitchell brought a steak knife with him in case things got out of hand, which they did. There was a struggle, Mitchell took out his knife, and stabbed the older man, who leapt out of the car. The adolescent could have stopped there, could have prevented himself from going over the brink. Instead, his rage led him to make the fatal decision to pursue Taylor, whom he caught, stabbed, and murdered. Mitchell later pleaded guilty to first degree manslaughter with a sentence of 12 years (Christopher Dempsey,

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“Former Bloomfield Football Player Pleads Guilty,” Hartford Courant, October 17, 2014; David Moran, “Emotions Run High As Former Bloomfield Football Player Sentenced In Fatal Stabbing,” Hartford Courant, January 10, 2015).

This homicide grew out of a young man being abused and subject to social blackmail. The murderer must have been afraid of being outed, shunned, and branded. Mitchell’s being seduced into a homosexual relationship led to much self-division. He did not want to think of himself as being an African American gay man. There is a stigma among many African American males associated with being homosexual (Anthony Lamelle and Juan Battle, “Black Masculinity Matters in Attitudes Toward Gay Males,” Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 47 [1], 2004).

As mentioned, the hyper-masculine world of football that Mitchell inhabited is less tolerant of gay men, and few homosexual football players ever come out. Still, if he had been white rather than black, there would have been a greater chance of his turning to the police, and finding a less self-destructive consequence to his dilemma. In killing Taylor in a rage, Mitchell was attempting to exorcize the homosexual part of himself. Yet the price he paid for his murder was to get himself imprisoned in an all-male jail where he could well be pressured into performing homosexual acts. Homicide can be tragic for both the victim and the perpetrator.

The other murderer was from an affluent, white suburban American family. His parents married in 1981, and he had a brother who was four years older. The father was an executive in a Fortune top 15 company who earned over $400,000 annually; his mother took care of their sons. The couple separated when one son was 13 and the other nine, then divorced when our future perpetrator was 17 and his brother 21.

At age 13 the younger brother was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. Also, at age 13 one hospital reported that he suffered from overwhelming anxiety; the next year another medical facility diagnosed him with obsessive-compulsive disorder (Andrew Solomon, “The Reckoning,” The New Yorker, March 17, 2014). His mother ignored the psychiatric evaluations and rejected the medication suggested. By this time, during the week the mother and younger son lived alone together. She was devoted to her troubled offspring’s care, often acceded to his frequent demands, and thus enabled him. At times, anxiety about her health led to a role

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reversal. She would confide to her child her worries about herself. Surviving emails show the boy comforting his mother. Still, his own troubles dominated. After two years attending the town’s high school, he dropped out, soon after completed three courses at a nearby state university, then around 17 stopped taking classes. He subsequently remained at home where he was solitary, phobic, and depressed. He blacked out all the windows in his bedroom and also became anorexic (Alaine Griffin and Josh Kovner, “New Report on Lanza: Parental Denial, Breakdowns, Missed Opportunities,” Hartford Courant, November 21, 2014; Alison Cowan, “Adam Lanza’s Mental Problems ‘Completely Untreated,’” New York Times, November 21, 2014). He spent much of his waking hours online obsessed with aberrant actions (Ray Sanchez, CNN, October 26, 2017).

This young man became disillusioned with humanity, writing “I incessantly have nothing other than scorn for humanity” and “have been desperate to feel anything positive for someone for my entire life.” He also made dire interpretations of relatively routing incidents, writing that as a child medical doctors would routinely touch his penis, then adds that he and “every child” were “raped by doctors” (Josh Kovner and Dave Altimari, “Documents Reveal Dark Descent Into Depravity,” Hartford Courant, December 9, 2018).

When he was 20, his mother decided to go out of state by herself in the middle of the week and visit friends. The son objected. She went anyway and returned on Thursday. On Friday morning, December 14, 2012, using one of his mother’s weapons, he shot and killed her while she slept. The shooter, Adam Lanza, proceeded to drive to his former elementary school, killed 20 first-graders and six adults, then executed himself in the Sandy Hook Massacre.

In any case, Adam was a troubled individual who for years had toyed with being a mass murderer. Medical agencies recognized Adam had mental disorders but for whatever reasons his mother would not deal with her son’s severe problems. She allowed Adam to be an unemployed dropout who did not receive sufficient medical and psychological treatment.

It is also striking how much similarity there is between Adam Lanza and the profile of serial murders the FBI developed in the 1980s. These males who committed multiple homicides over time

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often came from economically comfortable families, originally with both parents in the home, but in 47% of the families the father moved out before the son was 12. Less than half of serial killers finished high school, and almost three-quarters had a psychiatric assessment detailing mental disorders. Before their murder sprees they had become isolated with aggressive fantasies (R. Emerson Dobash and Russell P. Dobash, Why Men Murder Women, 2015, 106-107). Many such males did not engage in serial killing or the one horrendous atrocity Lanza inflicted on first-graders and school officials.

We likely will never know what propelled Adam Lanza to go over the edge. At some point years before he arrived armed and loaded at his former elementary school, something cracked in his psyche. He became preoccupied with mass murderers and imagined himself as being part of that infamous circle. Adam had closely studied the 1999 killings at Columbine High School in Colorado where two students killed 12 fellow students and a teacher.  Adam had a very large mass-murder spreadsheet, including what looks like a complete copy of the official Columbine investigation (Manny Fernandez, Julie Turkewitz, and Jess Bidgood, “For ‘Columbiners,’ School Shootings Have a Deadly Allure,” New York Times, May 30, 2018).

Unlike the poet John Keats who was half in love with easeful death, Lanza was fully in love with vengeful, violent slaughter. As there are war lovers, Adam became a lover of hate and murder. Adam is one of too many who both fantasize about slaying others and then commit an atrocity that usually results in their own demise. His hate of himself and others dominated Adam’s turmoiled existence. In returning to his elementary school to enact his long-fantasized project, he was symbolically killing himself.

Individuals as disturbed and destructive as Adam are not unknown in other societies. Contemporary America has resources that can help assist those with Adam’s level of disorder and has other cultural patterns that would not stop his path to mass murder. Psychiatric research has given us an increased ability to diagnose and treat mental disorders. Yet medical alerts did not penetrate his mother’s defenses.

Adam refused to see his father, his older brother was on his own, and other kin lived out of state, leaving Adam and his mother residing alone in a 3,100 square foot house on over two acres of

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land.  A single female parent living alone with a 20-year-old son is relatively new. Through much of history humans tended to live with or near extended families. A divorced mother in her early 40s with a young adult child in her home and getting over $200,000 alimony annually was until recently an extremely rare phenomenon. Who knows if having Adam’s problems being addressed by a larger nearby familial structure would have made a difference? In the past his mother would likely not have been the sole one actively concerned on a daily basis with Adam’s disturbed psychological state.

In the Internet age isolated in his darkened room, Adam surfed the net and found multiple sites concerned with violent atrocities that reinforced his deadly fantasies. The recent phenomenon of the web gave Adam a channel for his darker impulses that may not have as easily gotten the same reinforcement before the personal computer was widely available.

Also, Adam Lanza lived in a rabid gun culture. Among developed countries, the U.S. has by far the highest per capita rate of firearm related murders. Americans are 20 times more likely to be killed by a firearm than individuals living in other economically advanced nations (Marc Fisher, Steve Vogel, and Steve Hendrix, “Gunman kills mother, then 26 in grade school rampage in Connecticut,” Washington Post, December 14, 2012). The lowest rate of gun ownership in the industrialized world is in Japan, which has the least number of gun related deaths (Sarah Boseley, “High Gun Ownership Makes Countries Less Safe,” The Guardian, September 18, 2013).

In the U.S. in 2009 there were 310 million legally available guns and 308 million Americans around the same time (William Krouse, “Gun Control Legislation,” Congressional Research Service, 2012, http://www.census.gov/2010census/data/).  Adam Lanza used a legally acquired AR-15 Remington assault rifle to shoot 154 bullets in five minutes, firing off a round about every two seconds. He caused 26 deaths with this assault weapon (Esha Ray and Larry McShane, “Gunmaker’s ads influenced Adam Lanza to buy AR-15 assault rifle for Sandy Hook massacre, lawyer says,” New York Daily News, November 14, 2017). Between the Sandy Hook atrocity and February 2018, there were at least 239 shootings at American schools, with 438 shot and 138 killed (Jugal K. Patel, “After Sandy Hook, More than 400 People Have Been Shot in Over 200 School Shootings,” New York Times, February 15, 2018).

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Manny Fernandez and colleagues report that that “school shootings have become the American equivalent of suicide bombings — not just a tactic, but an ideology.” These violent endeavors appeal to adolescents and young men who may be “depressed, alienated or mentally disturbed.” They see school shootings “as a way to lash out at the world and to get the attention of a society that they believe bullies, ignores or misunderstands them” (Fernandez et al., NY Times, May 30, 2018). This American phenomenon of copycat school shootings is made easier in that, in 2016, there were about twice as many guns per capita as in 1968 (Scott Horsley, “Guns In America, By The Numbers,” NPR, January 15, 2016). Our rabid gun culture presents an ideology and opportunity for disturbed men to slaughter school age youngsters.

Among these two Connecticut crimes, we have one young man who killed as a defensive-aggressive gesture to stop an adversary from shaming him, and another highly disturbed individual committed an atrocity in imitation of other school shootings. The acts that led to both killing incidents were aided and abetted by this technological age. It was Taylor’s posting on Facebook that Mitchell was gay that precipitated the lethal confrontation, and Lanza was active on Internet sites about school shootings and found the Columbine plans online.

Both also in part are products of historical phenomenon. For many non-blacks who were raped, turning to the police would have been an easy choice. For blacks such as T. J. Mitchell, law enforcement have been perceived as oppressors rather than equal enforcers of the criminal statutes. Adam Lanza lived with one parent rather than two, isolated from other relatives. His family constellation was more common in the 21^st century than in most of human history. The human tragedies of these and other homicides cannot be understood separate from their psychohistorical context. For instance, as individual as Adam Lanza’s actions were, they were as much a product of his society and time as of his disturbed personality. American mass school killings most often take place in affluent white communities by disturbed young white males in the equivalent of suicide bombings. Adam Lanza’s and other comparable mass murders are preventable tragedies. They recur in a culture that would rather endure youngsters being slaughtered in school than taking actions that would effectively control the right to bear arms.

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