Article: Murder-suicide answers elusive

Oak Harbor

Ottawa County Sheriff's deputies are still struggling to understand what happened Saturday morning at 964 N. Leutz Road.

More so, perhaps, they and an entire community are trying to understand why it happened.

Deputies say Alan Atwater, 31, shot and killed his wife, Dawn Atwater, 30, and their three children -- Ashley, 4, Isaac, 2, and Brady, 1 -- before turning the gun on himself.

Alan called sheriff's dispatchers at 12:11 a.m. Saturday and calmly told them his family was dead -- that he killed them, and he was going to kill himself.
Deputies entered the Oak Harbor farmhouse at 2:52 a.m., finding everyone inside dead.
Sheriff Robert Bratton said his deputies are still investigating, and they have no more information now than the day it happened.
Bratton defended his department's response to the murder-suicide.
"We followed proper entry protocol," Bratton said. "We activated SWAT, which took awhile."
Days later, questions linger.
"I know people are speculating whether lives could have been saved," Bratton said. "Keep in mind there could have been a shootout. People have called law enforcement to say they have killed people and it's a setup, we end up shooting everybody."
Monday afternoon the Lucas County coroner's office said it's still conducting autopsies.
Family members and deputies, meanwhile, said Alan and his wife had apparently been having marital problems, but nothing that would have hinted at something like Saturday's slaying.
Alan worked at Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station as an instrument and control technician, calibrating the instruments and testing equipment inside the facility, said Todd Schneider, a FirstEnergy spokesman.
Schneider said all employees who have access to the plant are required to undergo periodic psychological, drug and alcohol testing to continue working at the plant.
Schneider wouldn't disclose the date of Alan's last psychological evaluation, or the results of the test. He confirmed, however, that Alan was an employee.
For now, investigators can't answer the biggest question of all: Why?

Murder mindset
Randolph Roth, a history professor at The Ohio State University, specializes in the history of violent crime and deaths.
He said experts are attempting to compile statistical information in hopes of answering this question: What triggers an individual to kill others?
Roth said he's unfamiliar with the past weekend's slayings in Oak Harbor.
He spoke about his studies, rather, which examine hundreds of years of killings.
For instance: Husbands who kill family members -- and then themselves -- often portray specific traits.
"The husbands are usually, in those circumstances, controlling and possessive," Roth said.
While more marriages were violent before the 19th century, they rarely ended in the death of a spouse. Most women stayed and endured the abuse because they didn't have the financial means to leave, Roth said.
In the 1830s and 1840s, society started to see that trend change as women became independent and had the means to leave, he said.
"There are less incidents, but we see an increase of more violent behavior over the last 200 years as an artifact of equality and freedom," Roth said.
A possessive violence creeps into a minority of men.
"They cannot handle this independence and the thought that things could be so intolerable with him she would leave," Roth said.
Roth said his research has shown that when a man kills his family, he is more likely to murder his entire family, believing the children are better off dead rather than outliving the parents and being raised by someone else.
"The woman should not live without him and the children cannot live without him," Roth said. "When a woman does this, she almost never murders the husband."
One factor for this, Roth speculates, is the controlling nature of the relationship -- it makes sense for the woman to continue to see the man as an authority figure.
Another difference between men and women who murder family members and then themselves: Their tools of choice.
It's rare for a woman to commit murder-suicide, but when she does it's often by one of three means: Drowning, a non-corrosive type of poisoning, or overdose of sedatives, Roth said.
Even so, the overwhelming majority of the perpetrators of murder-suicide -- 95 percent, in fact -- are men, according to the Violence Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

Seeking help
Kristen Rand, legislative director at the Violence Policy Center, said almost 90 percent of all murder-suicides are committed with a firearm.
"There is usually a tremendous amount of stress, either in the breakup of a relationship or financial," Rand said. "A gun increases the chances an argument will increase the fight to homicide."
While domestic violence will never end entirely, there are things that can be done to address the problems, Rand said.
The most important thing a person can do: Recognize when a relationship is harmful or violent and leave before it continues to escalate, Rand said.
Society, meanwhile, needs to provide adequate funding for domestic violence shelters. It also needs to provide sufficient funds for counseling violent partners and the victims, too.
Another solution may not be so easy.
People cannot be afraid to ask for help, Rand said.