GUILTY CO - Charles, 50, & Marilyn Long, 51, murdered, Burlington, 1 March 2011

[peeples]

I wonder what he used to shoot them??
He must have shot quick to take out both parents before they could wrestle him down.....
I just wonder why???
Mentally ill?
sadistic?
abused?

 

[Soulmagent]

The parents are both in their 50's. The boy was home schooled, Dad blogged about balance , the boy was the top 2 or 3 helpful kid in chruch and complained of boredom. I have to wonder if they boy was as helpful at home with the younger kids.

I am thinking this is going to lead to the boy not getting the fresh air ,activity and space kids need while feeling resentful that the younger kids needed more care and time then he felt he got . Plus he may have had alot of chores having to do with their care.
Baby sitting ,cleaning ,teaching etc. feding.

Not that their is anything wrong with being 50 and having 3 young kids. It is exhausting for me and I am in my mid 30's.

Not a reason to shoot your whole family but I think it may boil down to that along with strict parents. I only ever wished people dead as a kid if they really hurt my feelings. I never shot anyone though.

 

[katydid23]

The parents are both in their 50's. The boy was home schooled, Dad blogged about balance , the boy was the top 2 or 3 helpful kid in chruch and complained of boredom. I have to wonder if they boy was as helpful at home with the younger kids.

I am thinking this is going to lead to the boy not getting the fresh air ,activity and space kids need while feeling resentful that the younger kids needed more care and time then he felt he got . Plus he may have had alot of chores having to do with their care.
Baby sitting ,cleaning ,teaching etc. feding.

Not that their is anything wrong with being 50 and having 3 young kids. It is exhausting for me and I am in my mid 30's.

Not a reason to shoot your whole family but I think it may boil down to that along with strict parents. I only ever wished people dead as a kid if they really hurt my feelings. I never shot anyone though.

bbm

I think you are on to something here, imo. I wonder if the kid tried as hard as he could, doing all of the chores, helping in church, caring for the sibs, but still they criticized him,punished him, and belittled him, neglected him. It was never enough, and he snapped. [ pure speculation]

 

[Nova]

You're right - I don't know if it's escalating but it appears to. I wasn't talking about from the 70's, though, I was talking about from like the 1900's.

But it's a debate I've seen before about crimes: are they more prevalent or are we just hearing more about it b/c of how 'connected' we are these days?

There's a sociological principle that crimes increase geometrically as the population increases arithmetically, and that explains increases in stranger-on-stranger crime. But I don't know if that principle can be applied to intra-family crimes since, if anything, nuclear families are smaller now than a century ago.

Two things seem certain to me: (1) yes, we hear about crimes nowadays that would have been considered "local news" only when I was a kid; (2) when this was predominantly an agricultural nation, some patricides were passed off as farm or hunting "accidents."

 

[CHICANA]

Coming in late here, but based on the parents ages & those of the children, do we know if they were all the bio children of the couple or if he was on any kinds of meds ?

 

[belimom]

Coming in late here, but based on the parents ages & those of the children, do we know if they were all the bio children of the couple or if he was on any kinds of meds ?

Seems like they had more (bbm):

The Longs had seven children, ranging in age from their mid-20s to 5, and the younger children were home schooled by Marilyn Long. One church member, rancher Paul Rhoades, 74, said Marilyn Long grew up in Burlington and attended high school with his daughter.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504083_162-20038517-504083.html?tag=stack

 

[belimom]

Also from the CBS article:

Lee said the boy missed church on Sunday because of a conflict with a school activity but that he called the church to make sure there was a substitute greeter.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504083_162-20038517-504083.html?tag=stack

Was this the Sunday prior to this event? Just wondering if there may be another reason he missed church...? Just trying to figure out any motive/reason here.

 

[oceanblueeyes]

The parents are both in their 50's. The boy was home schooled, Dad blogged about balance , the boy was the top 2 or 3 helpful kid in chruch and complained of boredom. I have to wonder if they boy was as helpful at home with the younger kids.

I am thinking this is going to lead to the boy not getting the fresh air ,activity and space kids need while feeling resentful that the younger kids needed more care and time then he felt he got . Plus he may have had alot of chores having to do with their care.
Baby sitting ,cleaning ,teaching etc. feding.

Not that their is anything wrong with being 50 and having 3 young kids. It is exhausting for me and I am in my mid 30's.

Not a reason to shoot your whole family but I think it may boil down to that along with strict parents. I only ever wished people dead as a kid if they really hurt my feelings. I never shot anyone though.

I just saw a segment on HLN yesterday about how more and more parents are waiting until they are older before they have children. So it seems they are pretty typical by today's standards and started having children in their late 30s.

There simply is no excuse that would rationalize away something this horrific and premeditated.

I suspect he may have just been tired of his entire family and tried to kill them all.

Lots of parents are strict and set guidelines they expect their children to follow.... yet here we go again.........most all of the children don't try to eradicate their entire families.

It seems in the recent past these type of cases are coming more often now and most of the reasons or motives are mind boggling to say the least. Did he too have the "Me" "Me" "Me" mentality that we seem to see lately? Did he get his feathers ruffled because he didn't want to do chores or expected something material that he didn't get?

I wish we had a forum here that would let us keep up with children who kill their parents. I have never trusted the stats. There are just too many variables for them to get skewed. In a lot of these cases the records of the outcome are sealed due to them being juvenile and those aren't even counted in the statistics.

What I do see is children of a very young age seem to have become more of the 'norm' age range who murder parents these days. 8-9-10-11-12 year olds.

Frightening as heck.



IMO

 

[oceanblueeyes]

Oh, thanks.

I now see they had older children as well.

imo

 

[Linda7NJ]

I just saw a segment on HLN yesterday about how more and more parents are waiting until they are older before they have children. So it seems they are pretty typical by today's standards and started having children in their late 30s.

There simply is no excuse that would rationalize away something this horrific and premeditated.

I suspect he may have just been tired of his entire family and tried to kill them all.

Lots of parents are strict and set guidelines they expect their children to follow.... yet here we go again.........most all of the children don't try to eradicate their entire families.

It seems in the recent past these type of cases are coming more often now and most of the reasons or motives are mind boggling to say the least. Did he too have the "Me" "Me" "Me" mentality that we seem to see lately? Did he get his feathers ruffled because he didn't want to do chores or expected something material that he didn't get?

I wish we had a forum here that would let us keep up with children who kill their parents. I have never trusted the stats. There are just too many variables for them to get skewed. In a lot of these cases the records of the outcome are sealed due to them being juvenile and those aren't even counted in the statistics.

What I do see is children of a very young age seem to have become more of the 'norm' age range who murder parents these days. 8-9-10-11-12 year olds.

Frightening as heck.




IMO

I think they are part of the "quiverful " mindset

 

[oceanblueeyes]

I don't know. Just a respect for them, I guess? I mean, of course we knew we'd get in trouble, but we had seen them at work. I knew guns could kill a deer and was woken up and dragged out of bed to look at a deer (I hated that... :no every time my dad or older brother killed a deer. I knew guns could kill birds and helped my dad clean quail and doves. I didn't hunt but had seen my dad practice at targets and sight in new scopes, etc. When my dad said 'don't touch those guns - don't even go near them unless I'm with you b/c they're dangerous', we KNEW that. We had seen it in real life.

I wish I could pinpoint what it was, but I just don't know. Maybe a healthy respect - and I hate to throw this in - but lack of violent TV shows or video games that would ever make us think of pointing a gun at a person...?

Don't get me wrong: there's not a gun in my own house right now. DH wouldn't dream of it with kids around. I'm not as opposed to them as DH is b/c I was raised around them, but I agree with him there: kids and guns don't mix. Just b/c we didn't bother my dad's guns doesn't mean it doesn't happen. But I think of that more in terms of accidental shootings, which is not what happened in this case, sadly. I think this boy is very troubled or was driven over the edge by something.

Okay, I feel that I'm rambling now... Maybe my example doesn't apply here.

BBM

I still have a lot of faith in children who are brought up around firearms. Millions of children enforce that faith eveyday. We cant become hysterical, although it is easy to do in these type of cases, but we must remember millions upon millions of children live in home where firearms are kept and who do these overwelming vast majority of millions of children hurt with the gun? No one.

So to me it isn't the weapon that makes someone do this...it is the killer. It is the individual child, which so far is still a rarity in this country compared to children who do not do these unspeakable crimes.

To me what is increasing is the anti-social child but yet still most of them don't eradicate or try to eradicate their parents or entire families.

It cant be all about violent movies or playing violent video games because if that really was a factor we would see cases of kids killing parents or others increase to an epidemic proportion since millions upon millions of children are doing the same activities day in and day out.

IMO

 

[WhyaDuck?]

Since he lived and was homeschooled in a very religious household, do we even know he was allowed TV and video games, etc?

 

[Linda7NJ]

Since he lived and was homeschooled in a very religious household, do we even know he was allowed TV and video games, etc?

Having a very close friend that's quiverful, homeschools and home steds my guess would be NO on the video games, and very limited approved by parents tv programming.

 

[oceanblueeyes]

Something is very off with this boy's story.

He supposedly called 911 and said THREE people had been shot.

Well there are four victims.......not three.

And the two children were also stabbed. Does that mean he shot them and stabbed them?

So did he lie about the shooting? Or did he stab the children and maybe his parents rushed in and caught him and he then shot them?

Its a little confusing imo.

BURLINGTON — A 12-year-old boy is being held on suspicion of killing his parents before gravely wounding his younger siblings in a violent rampage that shocked residents of this plains town near the Kansas border.

Charles Long, 50, and Marilyn Long, 51, were found dead in their Burlington home Tuesday evening after the boy called 911 to report that three people had been shot.

Ethan, 9, and Sara, 5, were also found in the home. They were flown to an undisclosed Denver hospital.

Investigators said the children were in critical condition but declined to reveal their injuries. Their church pastor said the children had also been attacked with a knife.


http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_17525725

 

[southcitymom]

Is it escalating? I honestly don't know, but it's my understanding that murder rates in general have gone down since the 1970s.

It's true there have been guns since Europeans arrived on the continent, but patricide and matricide go way back, too. See Sophocles and Aeschylus.

Agree completely. As I've stated a few times on WS, my opinion is that we just hear more about these things because of a global 24-7 news cycle that wasn't around years ago.

There's really nothing new under the sun when it comes to murder.

 

[southcitymom]

I think we hear more now because of a 24/7 news cycle and ease of broadcasting all over the world. Not waiting for the "6 o'clock news" or the one newspaper in town. We are saturated with it.

That said, I think it is alarmingly common...



My Dad (Grandad, friends etc...) were all hunters too, avid! Not a gun safe or cabinet among them, my Dad kept his guns on the top shelf in the master bedroom closet. We were told never to touch them or go near them without an adult there (my Dad). When he had them out, went hunting or whatever we were not discouraged from touching them or asking questions, even shooting (while out on a trip with him). We also helped him reload all of his own ammo, which was kept in the drawer in the closet. I don't know what would have happened if I had gotten a gun down, but I didn't EVER, my Dad told me not too, so I didn't, to my knowledge, neither did my sister.

Also, in my house growing up, and now with my kids the rule was "Guns are not toys and toys are not guns" we never had toy guns, I chose not to play with toy guns at friends houses (maybe I was scared, I don't know) and I do not allow my children toy guns. I don't follow a ton of my parents rules that they maintained when I was growing up for my children, but this is one that I do.

My experience of the vast majority of little boys I know is that they will turn just about anything (sticks, candles, paper towel rolls) into a gun or other weapon. If they don't have a toy gun, they'll create one!

My prayers for this family.

 

[southcitymom]

Marie, I agree. But I don't think a healthy discussion detracts too much.

Back to the case, though - I do wonder what caused this boy to do this. And I pray that the siblings will recover... Prayers for them and to the family.

I think it's important to discuss gun safety and control when cases like this arise. I don't see it as a side issue or as detracting from the pain of those harmed by firearm violence.

 

[WhyaDuck?]

There are multiple threads about guns and kids in the more theoretical threads, which can be used (and linked if you wish) to keep case threads for case-specific discussion.

 

[belimom]

Something is very off with this boy's story.

He supposedly called 911 and said THREE people had been shot.

Well there are four victims.......not three.

And the two children were also stabbed. Does that mean he shot them and stabbed them?

So did he lie about the shooting? Or did he stab the children and maybe his parents rushed in and caught him and he then shot them?

Its a little confusing imo.

BURLINGTON — A 12-year-old boy is being held on suspicion of killing his parents before gravely wounding his younger siblings in a violent rampage that shocked residents of this plains town near the Kansas border.

Charles Long, 50, and Marilyn Long, 51, were found dead in their Burlington home Tuesday evening after the boy called 911 to report that three people had been shot.

Ethan, 9, and Sara, 5, were also found in the home. They were flown to an undisclosed Denver hospital.

Investigators said the children were in critical condition but declined to reveal their injuries. Their church pastor said the children had also been attacked with a knife.


http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_17525725

Now that IS interesting... Just throwing this out there for thought: what if this boy did only shoot three of them?

 

[oceanblueeyes]

Now that IS interesting... Just throwing this out there for thought: what if this boy did only shoot three of them?

I am wondering what the weapon really was.

Has LE said the parents were shot?

I know he said three were shot but at that time he was trying to cover it up that he was the one who did it. So could he have said shot thinking the police would think he wasnt the one who did this if they were found stabbed and there were four victims instead of three?

Something just doesn't seem right. I think he was making up a story to make it look like he wasnt the guilty one.

Hopefully we will get more clarification about the parents and the little children.

IMO