Dad does seem to have checked out on his daughter a long time ago, probably when she was 14 and he became aware of her habitual lying. I can actually believe that he smacked her a few times that morning following her all-night out, when he asked her repeatedly where she had been and she kept replying- "I don't remember." No doubt with that infamous smirk of hers.
I can also believe that he was always emotionally distant with his whole family, rigid in many ways and controlling, that his wife felt very subservient to him and followed his lead when it came to disciplining and parenting CMJA, even when she knew better. I'd bet too that the rage CMJA has consistently directed at her mother across the years is in some part based on what she processed long ago as her mother's emotional betrayal of her.
I think all that, but in the end feel no sympathy for any of them. What kind of person drops his wife off to speak with police detectives accusing his daughter of murder, then drives away?
But...... So what if her father was emotionally deficient, if he indeed was. I'm in my 50's and have rarely met anyone my age who had a father who was huggy-loving and emotionally there for his kids. Big deal. 99.99999% of us lived through it without becoming psychopathic killers. Daddy didn't make her do it.
And her mother? So what if she felt controlled and subservient or whatever else. I feel the same contempt for her that I do for George Anthony. Sandi Arias knew something was very wrong with her daughter, and it was her responsibility as a mother/parent to get her daughter help. Moreover, it was her moral and ethical responsibility to the community to get that help because she knew her daughter had a pattern of becoming violent when she was enraged... witness hitting her little brother with a baseball bat and the kicks she aimed at her own mother, and I'd guess many more incidents we know nothing about.
I'm sure I sound harsh and judgmental, but no apologies; these opinions are hard earned. I grew up with 4 brothers. One was the real deal genius, unlike CMJA, and even as kids we all knew he was odd and different. My mother ignored his screams for help for years. For example, when he was 13 he went through a phase that lasted for months during which he would only communicate to any of us via cartoons he drew, in his locked room, which he would slip out under his door. We, his siblings, were instructed by my mother to dismiss this as quirkiness, and to not ask about it or discuss it with her or anyone else.
By the age of 16 my brother had come rather completely off the rails. He began slipping notes under our doors threatening suicide. My mother's response was to arrange a 3 week vacation in Greece with her boyfriend, and within a week of those notes, she was on a plane, flying out of the country. Her parting gifts to me were three.
First I was told to postpone my plans to move out (I had already lined up an apartment and a job a long long distance away) Two, I was told that I was responsible for taking care of my brother. The last gift was a blank check- literally-- to be filled out to the psych hospital of my choice when the time came, which she had to be hoping would be while she was out of range of any responsibility, a point made clearer by the fact that she didn't provide me with a contact number in Greece.
So, at the grand age of 18 I had a crash course in the vocabulary of psych wards and treatment options. I learned what it felt like to see someone you loved have a complete breakdown, and I learned, at 18, what it felt like to have the responsibility for making sure that a loved one didn't kill himself or hurt anyone else, what it felt like to call for help at that point in crisis when he had to be committed to a psych hospital, what it felt like to give permission for many treatment options but to refuse, in the face of doctors' insistence, to allow shock therapy, because the library books I had read advised against that barbarity, what it felt like to agonize if I had made the right choices... an agony that lasted for many many years afterwards.
I always knew that what my mother had done, not done, and what she asked of me was horribly wrong. It was only when I became a mother myself that I realized, in every cell of my body, how utterly unfathomable it is for a mother to not want to do every last thing, always, 24/7, to take care of her child. To insist upon that sacred right and obligation, if need be. To fight tooth and nail and claw to do the right thing, if need be, even if the right thing isn't obvious or easy, even if doing the right thing for your child means huge emotional and/or financial sacrifices, even if means fighting that child every inch of the way to get help.
In my mind, Sandi Arias failed her daughter, pure and simple. That doesn't make her responsible for what CMJA is or what CMJA has done, but IMO, it makes her unworthy of sympathy or compassion. She sure won't get any from me.