The reasons that Roberts left behind — a child who died shortly after birth, an admission of molesting young relatives when he was 12 and the urge to sexually assault children again — just don’t seem to be enough to justify a shooting rampage, according to several psychiatric experts.

“It’s hard, even for me, to imagine why a 32-year-old would pick these very vulnerable, helpless children,” said Dr. Jerome Gottlieb, a forensic psychiatrist and president of Lancaster General Medical Group.

“The reasons I see on the news don’t account for it. There are lots of people in the world who have committed sexual offenses against children, and feel guilty about it, who don’t do this. There are lots of people who suffer the death of a child who don’t even approach anything like this,” Gottlieb said.

The crime doesn’t fit the common scenario of a murder-suicide either, Gottlieb said. More commonly, a husband will kill his wife because she’s having an affair and he can’t live without her, or a mother kills her children so the father can’t have custody.

Homicide-suicides rarely happen among strangers, according to the Centre for Suicide Prevention in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The statement on the organization’s Web site was based on an analysis of 16,245 homicides in Chicago. At least 9 out of 10 were family-related.

Roberts’ crime does not fit the typical profile of school or workplace shooters either, said Dr. Robert Sadoff, clinical professor of psychiatry at University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. These shootings tend to be revenge killings for some personal offense the shooter believes happened there.

“This is not students killing students,” Sadoff said. “This is an adult killing helpless, vulnerable children.”

Sadoff suggests that Roberts’ anger played a major role in the Georgetown man’s decision to kill the children. In anger, Sadoff said, “We do go after people who are vulnerable because we are more likely to succeed.”

He could have just shot himself, Sadoff agreed, but some people are so angry they don’t want to go alone. They want to take someone with them.

“Clearly this was suicidal,” Sadoff said. “Apparently he wanted to make a statement and show how angry he was.”

His anger could have been complicated by the compulsion Roberts said he had to molest children again, said Perry Hazeltine, a clinical director at Samaritan Counseling Center in Lancaster.

If Roberts was living with his past guilt and having thoughts of doing it again, he probably didn’t think he could tell anyone, Hazeltine said. When you can’t process your bad thoughts, things are likely to get worse, he said.

Carl Malmquist, a professor of sociology at University of Minnesota and a homicide expert, said it is “very likely that people will say, ‘he’s a great guy; a great husband,’ because they weren’t getting under the surface.

“Family and relatives usually have no idea what’s going on in this man’s head,” he added. “My guess is he’s probably struggled with it for years.”

“The sicker a person gets, the more likely they are to blame the object of their problem,” Hazeltine said. Roberts probably felt “a real primitive anger toward the children, if he felt that was what was causing the feelings.”

Hazeltine’s reasoning seems logical to Dr. Alan Felthous, professor of psychiatry at Southern Illinois University School of Medicine. He co-wrote an article with Dr. Anthony Hempel analyzing homicide-suicides in the Journal of Forensic Sciences (September 1995).

In the article, the authors identify a very rare type of person who kills people or a group of people whom he doesn’t really know before committing suicide. Felthous calls this person the “pseudo-community-pseudo-commando killer.”

Typically, this person brings a small arsenal of weapons and ammunition to a public place in daylight. He doesn’t plan an escape route for himself, indicating his plan to die, either by his own hand or by the police.

“The ... killer may never have had a real-life encounter with his victims, but he targets a particular group or community of people,” according to the article, “Combined Homicides-Suicides: A Review.”

The killer can target a group of people with similar qualities. He develops a delusion that the group is out to get him, taunting him or conspiring against him. Often he tends to be somewhat paranoid, a characteristic that people can hide.

In Roberts’ case, that group could have been young Amish girls.

“It’s also possible,” Felthous said during a phone interview, “that while it didn’t reach delusion proportions, this group of people represented someone important to him in his fantasy life. Regardless to what extent, he perceives them taunting him in some way.

“If he was having fantasies of them and having other stressors, it’s conceivable that he would direct his hostilities to this group of people.”

Roberts identified other stressors to his wife in a suicide note and in a phone call to her. He admitted molesting younger relatives when he was 12. He also admitted how depressed he was since the death of their first child.

He wrote: “It has changed my life forever. I haven’t been the same since. It affected me in a way I never felt possible. I am filled with so much hate, hate toward myself, hate toward God and unimaginable emptiness.”

Severe depression is a logical cause for a suicide attempt, psychiatrists agreed. As for the confessed molestation, Hazeltine suspects there is more to the story.

“I would most expect to hear of some violence that has been done to (Roberts),” Hazelton said.

It certainly would not be unusual for someone who has been a sexual predator to have been molested, said Gottlieb, though it’s not a given. It’s also possible, he said, that Roberts never molested anyone. It could have been a delusion.

Gottlieb cautioned the community against making simple explanations when no one can know for sure what was going through Roberts’ mind.

“The simple explanation is that this man was very troubled and apparently was able to hide it from a lot of people,” Gottlieb said. “There is no way to make sense out of what he did.” blog comments powered by Disqus