Blame.

Nobody ever has sympathy for the parents. The only emotion felt towards parents in any kind of situation where their child has made a mistake – especially big mistakes – is blame. You’ve heard them. “It sure makes you wonder about the parents.”
Does it? You can’t wrap your sixteen year old in cotton wool. You can’t watch him day in and day out. He leaves in the morning and comes home of an evening and you assume that he’s gone to school, but you can’t know for sure. You just have to hope to God that everything you taught him in his early years actually sank in and he’s out there being a respectable and sensible human being.

But you can only teach him so much. Somewhere along the way he has to take your advice and teachings and kind words, and run with it on his own. If he falls out of line or makes a terrible, terrible mistake then you can’t really blame yourself. You ALWAYS could have done more. Of course you could have. You could have spent more time with him or hugged him more or… or something. Of course you could have. But really, chances are that whatever he has done has nothing to do with you and everything to do with him.

If a kid commits a murder the sympathy from the general public is directed towards the victim and the victim’s parents. But hey, what about the kid’s parents? Yesterday they had (what they thought was) a happy, healthy sixteen year old son, and now they realise he’s grown up to be a murderer. So, they sue those parents for being negligent parents. Negligent parents? Not necessarily, but whatever they can do to make sure they get even, they’ll do it.

It’s hard to say what could be going through someone’s mind, or what could actually drive someone to be so mad that they’re willing to spend the rest of their life in jail as long as their victim can never take another breath. It’s something that we, as the general public and community, struggle to understand and probably always will struggle to understand. And I suppose it’s not necessarily something that you want your mind to be able to understand either. You question it, but you don’t really want your mind to go there.

So I suppose that, yes, it does make you wonder about the parents.
It makes you wonder how they’re going to keep dragging themselves out of bed of a morning, opening the blinds and face the day. Because they blame themselves and so does everyone else. And that can’t be easy to carry around everyday. It can’t be easy at all.