Trouble since age 8

[Bob Of Burleson]

Before Brief, Deadly Spree,
Trouble Since Age 8

By ADAM NAGOURNEY, MICHAEL CIEPLY,
ALAN FEUER and IAN LOVETT
The New York Times

LOS ANGELES — It was the summer of 1999, and the parents of Elliot O. Rodger were battling over the boy’s deep and puzzling psychological problems as they struggled through a divorce.

Mr. Rodger’s mother, Li Chin, filed an affidavit describing Elliot as a “high-functioning autistic child,” and said she needed more child support to care for him. His father, Peter Rodger, countered with a Beverly Hills doctor, Stephen M. Scappa, who challenged that diagnosis, saying it failed to acknowledge the possibility of “depression or anxiety.” Dr. Scappa said that Elliot, almost 8 at the time, should be sent to a child psychiatrist for more examination and treatment.

Last week, days after Mr. Rodger killed six people on May 23 in a rampage in Isla Vista, Calif., before firing a bullet into his head, his estranged parents released an anguished statement, expressing their distress as they grappled with the final chapter of their 22-year-old son’s long struggle with emotional problems. “It is now our responsibility to do everything we can to help avoid this happening to any other family — not only to avoid any more innocence destroyed, but also to identify and deal with the mental issues that drove our son to do what he did,” the statement said. The parents declined to be interviewed.

For as long as anyone close to them can remember, the parents had faced concerns about the boy’s mental health — a shadow that hung over this Los Angeles family nearly every day of Elliot’s life. Confronted with a lonely and introverted child, they tried to set him up on play dates, ferried him from counselor to therapist, urged him to take antipsychotic medication and moved him from school to school. His mother gave her son the car he thought would help improve his stature — a black BMW — when he went off to college in Santa Barbara; he used it for his lonely explorations of the California coast, as a setting for his chilling farewell video and finally as a weapon as he sprayed bullets from the window and plowed down bicyclists that Friday night.

It is almost impossible to tell if a person struggling with any mental disorder might ever turn violent; the vast majority never do, even those who make threats and preparations to do so. “Most people who go through these steps never act out in a violent way, never go beyond contemplation of it,” said J. Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist in San Diego and an editor of the International Handbook of Threat Assessment. “You can’t predict who will and who won’t.”

Peter Rodger told a friend the other day that his son had been an enigma to the family — distant, remote, unknowable. “He’s such a good liar that I didn’t even know he knew how to lie,” the friend recalled the father saying. Yet throughout his teenage years, friends of the boy and his family saw signs that something was wrong.

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