Long Branch shooting: Rare for minors to kill family members, expert says

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Residents woke up on New Year’s Day to news that a 16-year-old boy had been arrested and accused by authorities of murdering his mother, father, sister and a family friend in Long Branch.

Long Branch shooting: 16-year-old in custody after killing family, friend

What’s unusual about that, according to University of South Florida Professor Kathleen Heide, who has written two books on family killings, is that the alleged offender is a juvenile.

“Based on the research that’s been done in the field, you’re looking, at most, one case a year” when a juvenile kills multiple family members, said Heide, who spent decades studying cases in which people kill their family members.

About five times a year an adult kills multiple family members, she said. More common is when a person kills a parent, which happens roughly five times a week in this country, according to Heide and a 2013 Psychology Today report. That might seem frequent, but such cases account for only 1 percent of U.S. murders.

Parricide – murdering a parent – is on the rise, accounting for 15 percent of family homicides in 1980 but 37 percent in 2008, according to the study.

“Children killing their parents is the fastest growing type of family homicide,” Mario Garrett, a professor of gerontology at San Diego State University, wrote for Psychology Today.

Heide said in just more than 20 percent of parricides it is a juvenile who kills a parent, noting it is far more typical for an adult to kill a parent. 

Offenders are typically white males in their mid-20s, she said. And when a juvenile is the offender, she said, it’s typical that a firearm was used.

“An adult who gets angry and has homicidal thoughts can put the brakes on and go ‘this is wrong,’” she said. “A juvenile, because of brain development, it’s much harder for the juvenile to stop, think, deliberate and weigh consequences.

“That underscores the importance, if parents have firearms in the home, to secure those weapons. Even though the risk is very, very low, juveniles, again because of brain development and impulsivity, are much more likely than adults to react and not put the brakes on.”

More: Long Branch shooting: mass slaying no bizarre anomaly

Monmouth County Prosecutor Christopher J. Gramiccioni said the 16-year-old charged in Sunday’s killings used a Century Arms rifle that was registered to a family member. 

In her work, Heide has evaluated 50 people, mostly juveniles and young adults, who commit such crimes and studied thousands of cases to help answer a question that comes up after each unfathomable killing, no matter where and when it happens: Why?

Heide said in most cases an offender fits into one of four categories:

• severely abused: an individual who kills a parent because of physical, sexual, verbal or other abuse
• severely mentally ill: a person with a documented history of mental illness
• dangerously anti-social: a person who kills for selfish reasons, such as an inheritance or freedom, such as to date someone they wish 
• enraged: a person who has anger toward their parents and erupts into lethal rage, sometimes after an argument or extended conflict, and can be fueled by alcohol or drugs 

Heide stressed that mental health evaluations and research are necessary before coming to conclusions about why a person committed an act.

And she noted that there’s even less known by scholars about the motives of juveniles who kill, because it is so rare.  

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Family killers are most commonly fathers, and are sometimes called “family annihilators” – but what, exactly, are those?

According to David Wilson, director at the Centre of Applied Criminology at Birmingham City (UK) University, they can be hard to predict.

So-called family annihilators generally do not have criminal records or exposure to mental health services, according to a paper Wilson co-authored.

“The clearest unifying factor is that this is overwhelmingly a male crime,” Wilson said in an interview with phys.org. “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.”

A forensic psychiatrist told the Asbury Park Press that family killers sometimes believe that killing their families and then themselves is the only way to keep their families together.

“A normal healthy independent person knows that they can forge on in life even after the loss of a relationship,” Dr. Park Dietz told the Press in an interview after an August murder-suicide in Lacey. “But there are a great many people who are so dependent on another they can’t see a future without them.”

It’s not yet clear what led to the shooting at a home in Long Branch, which unfolded just minutes before midnight Sunday. That will be part of an ongoing investigation, Heide said. 

Authorities charged 16-year-old Scott Kologi with four counts of murder and a weapons offense.

The victims were identified as the Kologi’s father, Steven Kologi, 44; mother Linda Kologi, 42; sister Brittany Kologi, 18; and family acquaintance, Mary Schultz, 70.   

Stacey Barchenger: sbarchenger@gannettnj.com; @sbarchenger

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