From Redditor /u/Foopacc:

“My younger brother snapped and killed my mother and himself. He also tried and failed to go after my sisters, who were in the house at the time.

Our entire family suffers from some degree of mental disorder. He was the one who suffered the most from it, and in retrospect there were a lot of things that could have prevented what happened. Our dad ended up offing himself after he turned abusive towards our mom and she moved to get a divorce. We were all pretty young, and my brother was only two so he grew up without a father. Mom always had to work to provide for all of us, so we were left to our own devices for the most part.

My sisters and I would always treat him pretty poorly; it started off as just being directed towards the youngest sibling, and grew from there into us always having a strained relationship. My youngest sister always got into spats with him, and both would always instigate arguments with one another. In time he ended up growing isolated, and was always the odd one out. He was hard to get along with, and inherited our dad’s short temper and stubbornness.

When puberty hit, his mental health got worse. He became more and more argumentative, and he became louder and more threatening. At one point my mom ended up committing him to a children’s psych ward for a time. She was convinced that my father suffered from schizophrenia, and that my brother had inherited that. In retrospect, I think it was truly a combination of anxiety, depression, and ADHD, all exacerbated by his upbringing.

Some time passed, and at one point my mom found that someone had broke into our basement. Nothing was stolen, but that was incentive enough for her to purchase a gun for self-defense. I don’t remember the details, but at one point she gave him access to the key to the gun safe and forgot to take it back. One night he was being incredibly hard to deal with, she was at work and he was texting her and being a d*ck. She made the mistake of texting him flat out that she was going to have to commit him again. I still don’t know why she made that decision. He had said before he would kill himself before going back.

That night she went back home and everything was seemingly normal. At some point he brought the gun out of his room and shot and killed her in the kitchen. My sisters ran and hid in their rooms, locking the doors. He went upstairs to kill them as well, but tried and failed to shoot the locks (it was a .22 pistol, the door knobs were filled with holes, but he didn’t get in). I am still thankful that he gave up after failing to shoot them open; he could’ve have kicked open those doors with no trouble, but didn’t think to do so.

One sister escaped out of her window, but slipped on her way off the roof and broke her back, leaving her a paraplegic. The other waited things out in her room until it was safe to leave and escape through the other sister’s bedroom. The police were already there at that point and brought her a ladder to get down safely.

In the meantime, my brother had gone and shot himself in the bathroom. After some time, the SWAT team threw tear gas grenades through most of the windows and then breached the house, finding the bodies and bringing a close to the night’s violence.

I was in my apartment in another town, away at college. I woke up that night to someone hammering on the apartment call button for my unit, but I ignored it as I figured it was one of my idiot friends. Then someone had let them into the building and I heard them hammering on my door. Imagine my surprise to find three police officers at my door in the middle of the night. I thought I was caught since my apartment reeked of marijuana and I’d just smoked a bowl earlier in the day.

Turns out they weren’t there for the pot, but to tell me that my mom had died. They did not give me more details than that, not that my brother had died or that he was behind it all. My younger sister had told them not to fill me in all at once, as I had to make my way down and she was worried that I would be too emotionally charged to drive safely in the snow. In the end the police drove me to my friends’ house and they took me down to my home town, where I learned all the grisly details. I met with my younger sister and we stayed the night at her boyfriends’ family’s house. We laid in bed crying and talking until the sun came up, then we watched cartoons with the family’s dogs in a light-hearted moment amidst the turmoil.

I think I’ll end the story there. There was a lot that could have changed the way things turned out, but of course that is all in hindsight. Life doesn’t allow us do-overs, so we’ve just had to keep moving forward with what has been handed to us.

I know this will probably be buried, but I never catch these threads in time to do otherwise.”

From Redditor /u/violentre:

“My uncle shot a man and had his children help drag the body to the mud so the pigs could eat it. The man kept hitting on my aunt and telling her ‘I’m going to kill your husband. You’ll be mine.’

Now he’s on the run. The man he killed was an illegal immigrant which, I think, made it difficult for police to pursue the case or if people even reported the man missing. I’m not sure if the pigs ate him or not, I would assume so since I don’t think a body was ever found.

I wouldn’t say there were huge red flags, but he would have my cousins and aunt steal from us whenever they would visit, likely a sign that his wife and children were to afraid to say no to him.

With that said, he was super nice to us and it was pretty shocking to find out what he did.”

From Redditor /u/nocountryformen:

“My cousin always had problems. His mother abandoned him for several years when he was young and his father was old school ‘spare the rod, spoil the child’ in a borderline abusive way. He got into drugs very early and showed signs of psychosis as early as his late teens after he began using PCP. He began to talk about scenarios like he was the reincarnation of our dead grandfather’s soul and he was going to come ‘collect’ our still living grandmother.

When he began doing meth he stole from his mother and stepfather. When I was 14 he gave me acid and told me it was just like weed (I was a sheltered kid). He was never violent, but super inappropriate with boundaries like breaking into family members’ houses without asking while they weren’t home and just chilling there and other strange things like that. He rarely held down a job for more than a few months.

He cleaned up, had a baby, and got some health care a year or two back. We thought he was doing better, but he relapsed on meth and shot into a car with six people in it. He killed one woman and injured three.”

From Redditor /u/Neckrowties:

“My dad’s maternal grandmother shot her husband in the forehead with a .22 long before I was born. The warning signs were her having bruises and the occasional broken bone.

Apparently one day she was just waiting with the gun for him to get home all sh*t-faced and abusive. Fun fact: the round didn’t fully penetrate for whatever reason, so he ended up being in the hospital for a couple of days before he finally died. She ended up spending some time in the funny farm, and ended up baby sitting me when I was three or four-years-old. Upon asking my dad if that didn’t seem a little weird to him, he replied ‘Nah, she loved you to death, she wasn’t gonna hurt you… and nobody else was going to either,’ with a weird little cackle afterwards.”

From Redditor /u/dsddsdssssss:

“My cousin killed one of his classmates some years ago.

He always struggled socially, and did have some mental problems. For a year or so, he was taken away from normal school and put into a special program which he hated.

But about a full year prior to the murder, he changed a lot. He was in his adolescent years, and his eyes were opened to all the terrors out in the world, wars and such. It bothered him a lot. He would often talk about these kind of things, about recent mass murders and such, tragedies. He hated it, and he really wanted to do something. That’s why he killed, he needed to know what it was like. He wanted to go and fight terrorists as soon as he finished school. He knew a classmate who walked through the woods on his way home, so he hid and waited for him, and jumped out and stabbed him as he walked past. He said he panicked when the victim started screaming, so he stabbed him over and over and over again.

When he stabbed the guy, he panicked, because he had envisioned a swift stab and the dude falling to the ground, making no sound. The victim started screaming however, and my cousin ended up robbing a woman of her car at gun point, was seen doing so, and was caught.

Following the arrest, the police announced they had been monitoring him, as he had contacted the police, requesting they ship him out to a country, can’t remember which, where he could fight terrorists. He contacted the police rather than the military, as he knew for sure there was no chance with his mental problems, plus he knew he would be required to go through training. He was also gay, and seeing the way gays were treated in different countries really angered him as well. He knew of several terrorist groups who specifically targeted gay people.”

From Redditor /u/LemonFake:

“My paternal grandparents died in a murder-suicide. My grandfather shot my grandmother in their kitchen and then went outside and hung himself on a tree, and my father discovered them when he got home from school. This all happened before I was born and my father’s side of the family wasn’t involved in my life until I was an adult (my mom divorced him when I was little and I never met him/talked to him, didn’t hear from my half-siblings and other people on that side until I was 18).

I first heard about this from my mother when I was probably about 13. She said my father told her this but that she didn’t know whether or not it was true as my dad, apparently, was a compulsive liar. But when I got in touch with my half-sibling and my father’s siblings later on they confirmed it. This happened in the late 1950s.

According to them my grandfather was always a very moody person. He would go days at a time not speaking to anyone and doing nothing but drinking alone, and he hated it when anyone would try to bother him or talk to him. My grandmother was very meek, a bit of a shut-in, and while she was more affectionate to the family than my grandfather she also pretty much kept to herself and didn’t do anything more than she had to for the kids. My father’s siblings told me that there was domestic violence in their relationship, that the most emotion they ever saw my grandfather show was when he was screaming at/hitting my grandmother. After she would try to get him to eat dinner or ask him for money to go grocery shopping or something small and he’d just snap, grab her and shake her, and start screaming at her about why she wouldn’t just leave him alone.

The day this happened my father’s siblings told me was very strange. My grandfather joined them for breakfast before it was time for them to go to school which was totally odd because he never ate meals with them and they remember very specifically that he thanked my grandmother when she put his plate down. He then walked with them to the bus stop and watched them get on the bus, waving at them as it left. They’ve told me that that’s what they remember the most about that day, how nice and attentive he was, because it was so out of the ordinary.

They’ve all said that they think he already knew what he was going to do that morning when they left for school. One of my father’s sisters has told me that it wasn’t even shocking that he would kill himself or their mother; the only thing surprising about it was that she never thought he’d shoot her (there was apparently some confusion about it because none of them even knew that he owned a gun), and that she always thought he’d end up strangling her to death or going too far while he was shaking her and ‘bash her head into a wall or something.'”

From Redditor /u/Czarcastic_F*ck:

“My grandfather died and my grandmother remarried a pretty great guy, Ron. Ron had a brother, Robert.

Ron and my grandmother lived in Louisiana and we’d frequently drive down there to visit them for Thanksgiving. My father, Ron, and Robert would go duck hunting and we’d dig up some crayfish. We played hide-and-seek with Robert while dinner was being cooked. I sat and talked with him about my life view as an 11 year old. We ate dinner, drove back home, no issues.

During the same time period, he picked up a drifter, killed her, and threw her body off a bridge. He eventually was caught and the family was devastated. They tried him for two murders, but he confessed as many as 48. When you read through his confessions, the case is terrifying. There were times he came to visit while we all lived in Colorado Springs and he killed people. He even sent letters to the police.

The truth is, nobody could tell. There was no telling sign. As a kid, nothing seemed off about him. Even his own brother was shocked.”

From Redditor /u/Sh*ttyDriverHere:

“My aunt killed three people. Two were strangers that tried to rape her, with one being successful; the other was her brother, who molested her a lot as a child and teen.

I’m pretty sure the brother and a stranger were stabbed to death, but I’m not sure about the third. For the stranger she stabbed, it was basically a mugging gone sexual and eventually fatal. When she went to the police station they didn’t believe her, called her names, and then told her to go home. I think they ruled the brother’s death as some sort of a freak accident because she’s only told her story to a select few within the last year. When she told us about the second stranger, she was a little fuzzy on details but said there was a lot of blood and it was raining. I believe she may have shot him (she’s a bit freaky about guns) and then she ran away.

She was always super aggressive and had strong views when it came to violence against people. For example, she used to always say she didn’t understand why people fight or are surprised when one dies, because it’s an automatic life or death scenario and one has to win. She also had ticks [sic], such as whenever you woke her up or surprised her, she would have her fists balled and be in a fight stance. One time, she sucker punched me with the force of the gods and that was the last time I woke her up within six feet. I used to think her views on death were a bit funny, because she was so nonchalant and even got kinda pissy when people asked her why she wasn’t emotional after some funerals of close friends and relatives.”

From Redditor /u/froaway1555:

“My uncle murdered his wife while the kids were in the house. He shot her, cut her in half, then killed himself. There were a few signs. Every time I visited them, you could tell he was having trouble with my aunt. They were always so passive-aggressive with each other. They took turns being the aggressor in their arguments, but I never suspected that he would murder her. They also had really loud sex. I found out later they were into BDSM, but surprisingly, he was usually the submissive one according to their friends.”

From Redditor /u/skornenicholas1:

“Technically, my grandmother is a non-convicted murderer and it was not remotely unexpected to any of us. She grew up in a farming family that provided known monetary support to the Klan. With over 1000 acres, much of it woodland, they hosted multiple Klan events, and allowed them to hide out from the cops when the crackdowns began.

I know for a fact that my grandmother and her husband were in the Klan. They held multiple outdoor rallies behind the house I grew up in. There were also multiple lynchings held nearby, in the past, not during my lifetime that I am aware of. I loved growing up been absolutely surrounded by largely virgin oak & pine forests, but once I learned the history of this place, I never could shake it.

She is in her late 80s, incredibly racist, cruel, hateful, and frequently exhibits psychopathic symptoms by mocking the suffering of anyone she deems ‘inferior.’

A few years ago she was driving to a church meeting around sunset, and killed a 90-year-old man, who was African American, by hitting him with her car more than once. She claimed he was laying in the road, but that was clearly a lie. He was walking in the middle of it, and that she thought he ‘was a trash bag.’ Upon impact, she then backed up over him in her truck, with front and back tires. Obviously, he did not survive this.

Notably, she avoided all criminal charges, she even kept her license; yes, she is still driving to this day. She did, however, lose a civil case, and clearly said the following as she left the courtroom ‘Killing a n***** didn’t use to be so expensive.’

I am so sorry that all of this is a true story, growing up next to her was as terrible as you would expect, and I got out as soon as humanly possible.”