A man whose toddler was among eight people killed in a mass shooting in Erie, Pennsylvania, said Sunday that the gunman was a grandfather who never seemed distressed or out of the ordinary.

“I think that was a front for him,” Julius Windham said as he stood at a memorial to victims of Friday’s shooting, including his 1-year-old daughter Amarianna, her pregnant mother and the woman’s 5-year-old son and unborn baby.

“Him every day, him smiling and being just — you would think of nothing like that would happen,” Windham said.

The 45-year-old gunman took his own life. Authorities have not released his name, but Erie Police Chief Rick Lorah said he was related to seven of the victims. The eighth was a friend of the pregnant woman, he said. Police have not made their names public, either.

Another family annihilator, another man killing his own family.

Their academic paper reveals the first composite picture of family annihilators, revealing trends such as gender, age, motivation and even the most likely month and day that a man will annihilate his family.

"The clearest unifying factor is that this is overwhelmingly a male crime. While 71 family annihilators were identified, 59 were male," said Professor Wilson. "We also found that the rate at which this type of crime is being committed has increased, with the first decade of the 21st century claiming over half of all cases."

Over half of these men, 55 per cent, were in their thirties; 10 per cent were in their twenties and the oldest was discovered to be 59.

August was found to be the most common month for the killing to take place, accounting for 20 per cent of cases. Just under half of all murders were committed over weekends, especially on a Sunday.

"This is partly because the father had access to his children in the middle of the school holidays when he is not at work," said Wilson. "There may also be a symbolic factor as estranged fathers know that by the end of the weekend they will have to hand their children back to the mother."

Facts don't care about your feelings.

Yeah, men statistically commit significantly more murders than women and it's not even close.

I can't say more than that without my comment being deleted.

Do people really use the word patriarch? It gives me the heebie-jeebs.

A certain mod banned me from a huge community here for daring to point out that 95% of family annhilators are male.

Why are they so scared of the truth, I wonder?

Maybe you were contributing to a general fear of men--callously insensitive of you when there's a male loneliness epidemic going on! /s

No one talking about how this guy was a grandfather by 40 at the latest? That seems super young these days. Hard to fit in an education and/or financial security when you're raising a family in your early twenties.

Hard to fit in an education and/or financial security when you’re raising a family in your early twenties.

There's a lot of people who raise families in their early twenties that don't murder all of their family members.

This man chose to murder many people, I wish your sympathy was with the victims and not the perpetrator of this horrific crime that including the slaughter of small children:

Erie Police Chief Rick Lorah said the 45-year-old man was related to seven of the victims in the previous day’s shooting, while the eighth was a friend of the pregnant woman.

Video and audio evidence recovered by investigators included muffled gunshot sounds coming from inside the home just before two “distressed” women arrived and began pounding on the door shortly before 5 p.m. Friday, he said. The gunman then came out and shot them as they ran toward him, before returning inside.

Police arrived to find the two women dead outside. After deploying a drone and robot, they went inside and found the bodies of a 5-year-old boy; a 1-year-old girl on the first floor; two more women and two young men in a stairwell; and the shooter on the second floor.

“Out of respect for the victims and the families, I will not discuss the details of what our officers encountered inside that home,” the chief said at a news conference. “But I want our community to understand the gravity of what happened and the profound impact this tragedy has had on those involved and on our community as a whole.”

That's universally true of anything that happens about 1000 times over 50 years in a country of 250 million people or more. But emotional immaturity, lack of education, bad role models, and strong feelings of failed expectations are things you will see more of if you're more worried about survival than you are about personal development and the odds of things not turning out well increase. From the typical traits linked to family annihilators, it looks like he would fall under the disappointed or savior types, given the comments in the article. More emotional development would help with those, and more personal success would reduce the odds of him responding in this way.

Do I think having a better education or more maturity before having kids would have helped? I'm no psychologist, and it already looks like there are a number of reasons people make this very unlikely choice, so who can say? But choosing harder paths tends to lead to harder outcomes.

While I have some sympathy for this man, I have far more for his victims and their families, but would much rather we work to change society so that people don't think this is the best option before them.

Categorising the Killers: Four Types of Family Annihilator

Self-righteous: The killer seeks to locate blame for his crimes upon the mother who he holds responsible for the breakdown of the family. This may involve the killer phoning his partner before the murder to explain what he is about to do. For these men, their breadwinner status is central to their idea of the ideal family.

Disappointed: This killer believes his family has let him down or has acted in ways to undermine or destroy his vision of ideal family life. An example may be disappointment that children are not following the traditional religious or cultural customs of the father.

Anomic: In these cases the family has become firmly linked in the mind of the killer to the economy. The father sees family as the result of his economic success, allowing him to display his achievements. However, if the father becomes an economic failure, he sees the family as no longer serving this function.

Paranoid: Those who perceive an external threat to the family. This is often social services or the legal system, which the father fears will side against him and take away the children. Here the murder is motivated by a twisted desire to protect the family.

In all of these cases masculinity and perceptions of power, sets the background for the crimes. The family role of the father is central to their ideas of masculinity and the murders represent a last ditch attempt to perform a masculine role.

"The family annihilator should be seen as a specific category of murderer, for a crime which appears to be increasing," concluded Wilson. "To begin solving this problem the role of gender must be recognised, acknowledging that it is mainly men who will resort to this type of violence."

There's quite a bit that goes into these types of murders.

Update to this story:

Lorah painted a picture of a family living in a home in isolated, filthy conditions. He said the authoritarian behavior of Stone, 45, started after his wife became pregnant with their first child more than two decades ago.

The adult victims of the Oct. 9 shooting previously were identified as Stone’s wife, Michelle Stone, 44; their daughter, Angelina Stone, 24, who was due to give birth Monday, three days after the shooting; sons Jonathan Stone, 19, and Matthew Stone Jr., 21; and two women who lived at other addresses: Lora Roberts, 37, and Twila Tanner, 51. Roberts was Michelle Stone’s sister.

A 5-year-old boy and a 22-month-old girl who were identified by relatives as Angelina Stone’s children also were killed. State law prevented authorities from releasing their names.

Family members told detectives that the elder Stone “restricted when family members could leave the residence or spend time with relatives,” Lorah said. In addition, Michelle Stone “stopped maintaining contact with friends.”

The elder Stone also kept a tight grip over the family’s money, including supplemental government income received for one of the grandchildren, Lorah said.

In 2019, Stone was arrested and charged with threatening his wife with the same .40-caliber handgun that he used in the Oct. 9 shootings. However, at a preliminary hearing, Michelle Stone “changed her original statement and those charges were withdrawn,” Lorah said.

Really terrible behavior, brutal way to live for decades. I'm curious what tipped him over the edge to initiate the killing. Clearly the overall attitude was there from the beginning.

If you read the article, it appears that his pregnant daughter trying to leave when she was due to give birth that Monday may have been the trigger.

Honestly I feel like this is part of why everybody is so fussed about Lindsay Clancy. They finally have a woman to talk about. Just send her to prison like you do with any man who lived through it. You can go NGRI if you really want I'm sure some men do too. But like. It's a thing that happens the only difference is it's usually men so now we have all this very public discourse about whether or not it was postpartum psychosis or not and it's fucking up the juries just getting her safely removed from the public in a clean and orderly fashion. My honest take it that it could have been PPP, I've definitely had PPP patients where the husband is constantly pressuring the treatment team to bring the woman home to take care of the kids for him while she's still plainly psychotic. I also wasn't there and she wasn't anyone I knew or one of my patients so maybe it's also just none of my business? I could go either way on whether she spends the rest of her life in a prison or psych ward but it shouldn't take half the country to pick.