DENVER (AP) - A young man who killed four people at a church and a missionary training center had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and harbored bitterness for being an outcast, his parents said in their first extended comments.
Matthew Murray gave no indication he was about to explode in violence, though, they said in an interview to be broadcast Thursday and Friday on James Dobson's Focus on the Family radio program.
Although Ronald and Loretta Murray have issued statements to the media, the devoutly Christian couple gave Dobson their first public impressions of what led their 24-year-old son to go on his rampage in December.
Focus on the Family provided an advance copy of the broadcast to The Associated Press. On the program, the Murrays met the parents of two sisters who their son had killed. The sisters' parents forgave the Murrays' for their son's actions.
According to interviews and Murray's own Internet postings, Matthew Murray was a disturbed young man in search of belonging. He dabbled in the occult, briefly joined the Mormon church and turned against charismatic Christianity.
The Murrays said their son had problems communicating and writing because of his ADHD, was brilliant at computers, and felt rejected and marginalized, unable to forgive his perceived tormentors.
"The lesson is that unforgiveness leads to this bitterness and then opens you up to the spirit of Satan, to the spirit of whatever, and when that occurs, it becomes a power that people cannot control," said Ronald Murray, a neurologist.
"It will begin to control you ... and I think that's what happened with Matthew," he said.
Murray said that his son "had never expressed a desire for violence toward anybody," and that neither he nor Matthew's mother knew he owned weapons. "We were not clued in to the depth of his bitterness," Ronald Murray said.
"He was told he was loved every day," Ronald Murray said. "... There were people reaching out to him and he didn't reach back." What his son ultimately did "just was not Matthew," his father said.
The Murrays said Matthew was taking medication for ADHD, but they did not disclose which, whether he took it regularly or was on it at the time of the shootings.
The prescription of drugs such as Ritalin to treat ADHD, especially in young children, is controversial.
A year ago, the Food and Drug Administration asked ADHD drug manufacturers to develop guidelines to alert patients to "possible cardiovascular risks and risks of adverse psychiatric symptoms associated with the medicines."
Russell Barkley, a South Carolina psychologist who specializes in ADHD research, said that the drugs, if taken regularly, reduce aggression and anti-social behavior.
While studies confirm that at least 25 percent of children with ADHD experience anti-social behavior, the majority do not get violent, he said.
Even so, one study Barkley conducted showed that 22 percent of people found as children to have ADHD had carried out an assault with a weapon by the time they reached adulthood.
"It's a sad situation, but I doubt that ADHD alone was the sole contributing factor to the violence," Barkley said.
"As always, a combination of factors" leads to such outbursts, including low self-esteem, victimization, hyper-sensitivity to slights and access to guns.
Murray killed two people at a Youth With a Mission training center in suburban Denver, slept in his own bed at his parent's house that night, then drove 60 miles to Colorado Springs, where he killed two sisters at New Life Church. Continue >>
RSS
