I've been in the newspaper business since 1980 and there have been moments that really tugged at my emotions.
Thursday was one of those days.
When the decision was made to try two youngsters - ages 15 and 12 - as adults for murder it stirred all manner of thoughts in my head.
(I agreed with the decision to waive them to adult court. If you can't waive this juvenile crime to adult court, what crime can be waived?)
But I wondered, how could these kids allegedly plot to kill another human being? The stepfather of one of them, no less. They are accused of each taking a handgun and firing two shots each at the one boy's stepfather. How could they do that?
It's not like I hadn't been thinking about the case since the shooting occurred on April 20. But Thursday's hearing and the information that it brought to light really drove the whole thing home.
I thought back to when I was 12 or 13 in middle school.
I remembered doing a bit of plotting of my own. But I was plotting how to steal a cigarette from my dad's pack, or steal my first kiss from a girl with whom I was most assuredly deeply in love.
The thought of gunning somebody down and driving to Arizona? Completely unthinkable. Unfathomable.
Then I thought about the families involved. I thought about how in the blink of an eye, lives were forever altered and dreams shattered.
It's unbelievably unsettling.
Equally unsettling is the likely eventuality that we will never really know why kids kill parents.
Child psychologists give reasons and have theories. They say the number one reason a kid kills is because he or she feels trapped in an abusive situation.
But in this case, there is absolutely no evidence of abuse of any kind.
In fact, the evidence is quite the contrary. A friend of the victim said the victim would give his stepson rides on his Harley. The victim bought dirt bikes for he and his stepson to ride together. The stepson went fishing with the victim in the victim's bass boat.
Friends, neighbors and acquaintances of the accused all say they were "good kids," or "good students."
Nobody saw it coming.
The number two reason that children kill parents is because they are severely mentally ill. An October 2009 article in Psychology Today notes that only occasionally do mentally ill children kill their parents.
They generally are kids who have lost contact with reality. Their cases usually are well documented, with multiple attempts at therapy that have failed. Most of these cases are never tried because the killers are judged mentally unfit.
But there is no evidence of any mental illness in either of the accused. By all accounts, they seemed like normal kids to all the people around them.
One of the accused did have an incident last year with a BB gun. He apparently fired BBs at a man on a riding lawn mower, striking him several times. He was placed on probation.
But does that level of mischievousness signal what was to follow?
I hope not, because when I was in middle school I had a Crossman 760 BB/pellet gun. So did my neighbor. You could pump that thing up to 25 times. At that level of compression, you could shoot a BB through a license plate.
The neighbor and I had BB battles in our back yards. We hid behind trees and fired at each other. We had two simple rules. No more than one pump and no head shots.
We spent hours shooting BBs at each other. Lots of laughs - and welts. Perhaps we unwittingly invented the precursor to paintball.
But I digress.
The point is, I hope that firing BBs at someone doesn't qualify you as mentally ill.
Then there is the third type of kid who kills a parent. According to Psychology Today:
"There are those few children who seem to kill without any remorse, yet whose parents seem to be loving and kind. The dangerously antisocial child ... These are the kids who kill their parents merely for some sort of instrumental, selfish end - never having to ask before borrowing the car again, for instance."
This is truly unsettling to me - kids killing parents for some seemingly trivial reason.
It's chilling - and more than a little bit scary.
How is our culture turning kids - at however small a number - into sociopathic killers?
Sissella Bok is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, Harvard School of Public Health.
In her book, "Mayhem," she examined the effects of violence in media on young people.
She noted that young people's lives are saturated with graphic violence in ways that are different from generations before them."We have movie role models showing violence as fun, and video games where you kill, and get rewarded for killing, for hours and hours. ... It is very combustible mix, enraged young people with access to weapons, exposed to violence as entertainment, violence shown as exciting and thrilling."
There's no argument that violence is more graphic then ever before in movies and TV. And the video games? The graphics and animation is unbelievable. I've watched my son play Halo online before. It's incredible.
And kids these days have a fairly unquenchable thirst for these things.
Maybe violence is like alcohol. Lots of people can have an occasional cocktail before supper or a glass of wine with their meal to no ill affect. Other people can't stop drinking once they start.
Maybe the vast majority of kids have no trouble separating fantasy from reality when it comes to violence, while a few fail to make the distinction.
Problem is, this all just speculation. Despite tons of studies and research done on the issue, experts aren't close to a consensus on why kids kill.
The experts also have no clear idea of how these kids are able to hide what must be a severe emotional disturbance from the people closest to them.
