PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) – Three girls are dead in central Washington, and the search is on for their father.
Wenatchee police say the girls’ mother called Friday saying they hadn’t returned from a custodial visit with their father, 32-year-old Travis Decker.
Horrific… I know he killed himself already. I know there is no real justice in this world. I can’t stop my primal brain from wishing stringing him up by his feet and torturing him to death would bring those girls back or prevent others from doing the same. Edit: He ziptied thier hands and put plastic bags over their heads to suffocate them. This is not a mental health thing, this is an evil incarnate thing.
Family annihilators are almost always conservative men, and their reasoning invariably involves the belief that women and kids first and foremost exist at the pleasure of the patriarch. He was likely emasculated by his divorce.
this is an evil incarnate thing.
This is a human thing.
Infanticide of both kin and non kin is a rare but incredibly well documented part of our behavioral repertoire.
There’s an urge to distance ourselves from someone who does this, to say that he is evil, a demon, not human. But he’s us. In very specific and awful conditions, this is what we’re capable of.
As much as I resent the guy. I agree with you. I’m not saying everyone, under the right conditions would be capable of this, but I would hazard many more of us than anyone wants to acknowledge are. Distancing ourselves from it only makes it harder to understand and recognize in the future.
The thing is we distance ourselves because it goes against our very instincts ground into us from the very evolutionary get go. The amount of fucked someone has to be to kill their own kith and kin amongst a social species like ourselves is immense. Hell my own family commits a mass bit of kin slaying every two hundred years or so historically, but even with that teenagers and children are usually left alone it’s more so removing geriatric or entrenched members.
Nah. We label stuff good or bad for a reason, to say it’s all ‘a human thing’ is just meaningless reductionism. Of course we are capable of it. Humanity is capable of what every human has ever done, got it. He’s not me, speak for your fucking self.
I’m unable to fathom how someone is able to harm or kill their children or family. I literally cannot comprehend how someone has that in them.
That’s not the point though. The point is that this isn’t a one-off occurrence. It’s terrifying how often people end up murdering their spouse and/or children, it happens somewhere in the world every day, and has been documented to happen throughout history. Thus, it’s clear that even though most of us can’t even comprehend how anyone could do something like this, it’s reductionist to write it off as “inhuman”. It’s very clear that a terrifying amount of people have it in them to do something like this under the correct circumstances. Most of those people probably couldn’t even imagine how anyone could commit a crime like this before they themselves do it.
It’s sickening, and it’s evil, but it’s very clearly a human behaviour. I still have an urge to call it “inhuman” because the behaviour is so unimaginable to me, as it is for most people.
News has had a weird focus on state patrol not issuing an amber alert but I think the right time to intervene would have been when he failed to get an evaluation and counseling.
Even with mental health issues, I can’t understand how a person could kill children like that. Those poor girls and that poor mom.
