A Media Type Who Gets It

I really don’t have anything to say about the piece of human waste called Charles Roberts who just perpetrated this barely-speakable horror a few days ago in Lancaster, Pa., mainly because Philadelphia Daily News columnist Ronnie Polaneczky captured my feelings on this so perfectly.

I DON'T WANT to know the details of the pathetic life of Charles Carl Roberts IV, the milk-truck driver who methodically turned an Amish classroom into a slaughterhouse yesterday before taking his own life.

It makes no difference to me that cops describe the suicide notes he left behind as rambling and weird, an indication that he was unraveling well before he prepared innocent children for their execution.

I care nothing about the mysterious wrong he told his wife he'd suffered 20 years ago, which fueled yesterday's mayhem.

All I care about is that, for a classroom aide and two little girls, the last moments of their lives were spent looking down the barrel of a gun, wielded by a coward who hadn't the guts to leave this world all by himself.

He needed others to pave the way for him.

So he took them.

On a beautiful, golden morning in the Lancaster countryside, the son of a bitch just up and took them.

Contempt is not what we're supposed to feel for people who die by suicide, the way Roberts did.

We're supposed to feel empathy for the deceased, sadness for the family, frustration that a person's profoundly twisted mental or emotional state went untreated, or that the treatment he got simply wasn't enough.

For me, that compassion vanishes when the victim purposely takes another life with his own.

Then I don't give a damn about psychiatric diagnoses or long-ago wounds that still ache in the present tense.

The guy becomes nothing more than a cold-blooded killer with a politically correct excuse for his actions.

I wish I didn't feel this way, because I know that suicide is the preventable, desperate act of a person in pain. I know it shatters the lives of loved ones left behind. And my heart goes out to Roberts' wife and kids, who'll live forever with what he did.

But I can't help it: When a person precedes his suicide with murder - the way Roberts' did, the way last week's shooter did in Colorado - all I feel is rage.

Ann Haas, Ph.D., wishes people like me felt otherwise, but she sure gets why we don't.

She's research director for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, so she knows about suicide - and its awful subcategory, murder-suicide - more than most.

She stressed that suicide is caused by overwhelmingly intense feelings running the gamut from despair and shame to guilt and self-loathing. When those feelings play out against a background of intense rage, caused by any number of reasons, the result may be murder-suicide.

"The facts of this case as we know them really does indicate that this man was deeply disturbed and enraged," Haas said yesterday of Roberts. "No matter what we feel about the circumstances of his life, it's obvious that he was carrying a tremendous amount of unexpressed hostility. And the results were absolutely tragic."

Over the next few days, the full details of Roberts' life will come out. As they do, I doubt I'll feel sympathy for him, the way I would if the only life he'd taken had been his own.

It's hard to feel sympathy for people whose rage makes them kill - whether they're sane or mentally disturbed, locked up at Graterford or dead by their own hand, making excuses before a jury or explaining themselves in a suicide letter.

Either way, the innocent bystanders to their messed-up lives are still dead, whether killed on the streets of this city or shot in a schoolhouse in the hills of Lancaster County.

The only thing Roberts' form of murder spared the world was a long trial and a jury's verdict.

As for a sentence, he delivered it himself.

I try to stay away from topics like this, but I find myself particularly repulsed by the current cycle of this story whereby our august media gatekeepers decide that it’s in the public interest somehow to put something approximating a human face onto this monster.

As Polaneczky says, if he had been a real man, he would have gotten help. Failing that, he would have offed himself without taking anyone else with him.