Reply to NYT Times interview with Brian Kohlberger’s sister

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I believe BK was always a problem child, however, I do not believe his parents had reason to think he would turn into a quadruple murderer.  I don’t blame his family at all, but I find the sister’s interview self serving and a bad look.  [/quote]

Of course he was. He was morbidly obese, bullied, then lost a ton of weight. He clearly seems to have autism and who knows what else. He was weird, at best, and scary to the women around him and they had meetings to discuss his off putting behavior. But the family saw nothing. How odd.[/quote]

Oh what medical credentials do you have that allow you to diagnose autism without examining a patient? [/quote]

I said he “seems” it’s not a diagnosis. But his lawyers say the same thing so maybe you’ll take their word for it. It’s pretty obvious.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/24/us/bryan-kohberger-death-penalty-autism-diagnosis[/quote]

+1 which means he was displaying odd behaviors for a very long time. He should have been under a psychiatrist's care with close monitoring and appropriate meds. [/quote]
Brian was 28 at the time of the murders, had just graduated from DeSales University and had been accepted into a good PhD program with recommendations from recognized professors.

How do you force an adult to not only see a psychiatrist, but also take the recommended meds? Police: my son is wearing gloves and calling me at 6am - please take him to a locked psych facility and let's mess up his PhD studies and assure he never graduates.

It's one thing if a person has acted out violently in public and put others at risk. It's another that he has ASD traits and odd behavior. In order to lock up this one rare murderer, we are going to have to lock up a ton of people who act odd, but have never threatened others with violence.[/quote]

Never threatened others with violence? Looks like he had a physical altercation with his sister. Someone in here acted like that was totally normal, but I don’t agree with that. She tried to force him out of the house and he grabbed her hands. What’s up with that? [/quote]
I agreed above that the sister's claim that Brian wasn't violent, then mentioning he grabbed her hands didn't line up. But no one called the police, no one pressed charges at the time. And maybe the sister was more the aggressor during that argument, who knows?

So now mom calls the police and says, hey, my 28yo son got into an argument with his sister 7 years ago and they both were fighting each other, but my son secured her hands so she couldn't hurt him, so will you please commit him to a mental facility because he might be violent in the future?

It's just not practical to lock up all these people with odd behaviors. We stand a better chance if they have threatened strangers with unexplained violence, police were involved, charges were involved, etc. But getting into a shoving match with your sibling and grabbing her hands to keep her from hitting you or hitting you back? I just don't think this rises to locking people up or forcing them into psychiatric care and forced meds.[/quote]

Well, there were certainly signs at work:

“She said Kohberger would stand at the assistant’s desk, even directly behind her at times, looking over her shoulder as she worked. Another professor was asked to escort the assistant to her car after work because of Kohberger’s behavior, according to the documents.

One student said whenever she looked up, Kohberger, who was a teaching assistant in her class, was “always” staring, according to the records. He rarely spoke to students, she told police. She felt he would time his exit to leave when she did and then follow her to her car.”
…

“Mark my word, I work with predators, if we give him a PhD, that’s the guy that in many years when he is a professor, we will hear is harassing, stalking, and sexually abusing … his students,” one of Kohberger’s teachers told her colleagues during the meeting, according to the documents.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/19/us/kohberger-washington-state-university-peers-police-interviews-hnk[/quote]
PP you responded to, and yes, these are scary behaviors. When I last read about the case, I heard Brian was about to lose his TA position. I don't know if kicking him out as a student would have been the next step.

But it's so hard to leap from these weird, disturbing behaviors, to taking these behaviors to a court of law and asking the state to arrest him and/or "lock him up"?

I just don't see how we only siphon out the bad guys who will go on to do heinous things, without locking up a bunch of weirdos who we worry might do terrible things, but would have just continued to be oddballs who never became violent.[/quote]

We need to at least move past the idea that nobody could have seen this coming because he was acting perfectly normal.[/quote]

I don't think anyone has ever claimed that he behaved perfectly normal. I think the issue is that you would normally expect some history of escalating acts of violence before someone commits a quadruple murder, and we just have no evidence of that. Yes, staring at women and making them uncomfortable is bad. Yes, getting into an argument with his sister where he was restraining her hands is not an example of a normally functioning person. But neither of those things make me think he's literally about to murder someone. They make me think he sounds troubled, he should see a therapist, he might have anger management or a neurological issues, etc.

But not that he is a murderer. He wasn't normal, but if all we knew about him was what his family or employer knew, I would not have expected him to kill anyone. Even the comment by the professor in that meeting concerning him at school, what was her concern? That he would get his PhD and become a professor who harasses and assaults students. That's awful and I'm really glad she spoke up. But that's not the same as murder.

I feel like the only way you could have anticipated he would do this is if his purchase of the knife online had been flagged in a way that had alerted his family or employer, or if, as people suspect, he was casing this house for some time before the murder, that behavior had been known and flagged to his family or employer. But how?[/quote]

I find it impossible to believe his family didn’t have some inkling of what he was really like. He seems deeps disturbed at best. The sister is being dishonest.[/quote]

It's hardly impossible to believe.  You are disturbed that something like this could happen so you are scrambling for an explanation, but it is perfectly believable that people would not know this guy would go to this extreme.  [/quote]

Agree. They probably accepted many of his odd behaviors as normal for him.

Also he was a PhD criminology candidate so they thought he was turning himself around and using his past difficult experiences for good.

One point that has not been brought up is that doing a PhD is incredibly stressful and isolating for many. My DH, brother, DD and her husband all have PhDs and they all came at considerable personal cost. DD came close to a nervous breakdown. The academic culture around PhD candidates generally underestimates the mental health challenges and isolation involved. PhD Supervisors are often woefully inadequate in terms of supporting and motivating their grad students - rather they are often exploited and harshly critiqued. Boot camp mentality for getting them through.

I think PhD candidates should be screened for mental health before being allowed to enroll in PhD programs - and much better supported though the process. [/quote]

It's such a weak cop out to say nothing could have been done. There are always insights, lessons learned, takeaways. Even in the event of hot car deaths, cars have been improved to alert drivers to check the back seat. But apparently in this case we're supposed to just throw our hands up and condescend to others that they are "scrambling for an explanation." rather than try to figure out what went wrong and where.[/quote]

If you have a concrete suggestion for how we could prevent something like this from happening again, I think people would be very open to it. Like if you wanted to talk about how we need to change our approach to mental illness and diagnosis of neurodiversity in K-12, and do a better job of ensuring kids get the support they need earlier, rather than suffering and perhaps developing deep dysfunction that could make them more violent later, I would be very interested in that. As a society, we abandon a lot of families to navigate or weak and piecemeal mental health infrastructure on their own, and a lot of mental health services are simply out of reach for most families because of cost and availability. Perhaps if Brian had been screened earlier for autism and received better support for dealing with his weight issues and the bullying he experienced, he would not have later developed a drug dependency and whatever deep well of anger or psychosis led him to commit this crime.

If, however, you are just here to criticize his family for not magically navigating what appears to have been a difficult mental health profile and a crappy system better in order to prevent murders they could not possibly have known were in the future, I don't care what you have to say. You get that whatever mental health issues Brian has likely have a genetic component, right? So you're angry at a group of people who may also struggle with neurodiversity and other mental health issues, but who have not killed anyone and to our knowledge not hurt anyone, for not doing what many families struggle to do?

I know it is easier to get mad at his family than to look at systemic issues in our mental health system that are expensive and overwhelming to address, but it's not actually productive. It won't help anyone. I feel pretty confident Brian isn't going to kill any more people and I don't think his sisters or parents are murderers either, so I'm not sure what the point is in trying to tear them apart, except to just create more misery in the world.[/quote]

The family hasn't even acknowledged he was troubled. Let's start there. [/quote]

They have acknowledge that he is troubled. They just also say they never expected him to kill anyone and that he was never violent.

You clearly desperately want a very specific narrative here. You want them to say he was always like this and they saw it coming, that he tortured animals as a kid and they turned a blind eye. That he was violent at home and used violent language and that they ignored it and just looked for ways to get him out of the home and make him someone else's problem. That they knew he'd one day snap and kill someone and that when he did, they acted to protect him because they are bad people.

Anything short of that, you are mad at them and blame them for the murders. But with if that's not the truth? What if Brian was always a little weird but they were his family and loved him, and he could be kind and gentle at home and they thought that was his "true" self and his weirdness and anti-social behavior were due to him just being different and misunderstood, or later due to getting bullied for his weight, or later due to his drug addiction? What if they truly never thought he'd hurt anyone and actually worried that he'd get hurt, because of his struggles with mental health and addiction? What if they viewed his behavior in November/December of 2022 as normal for him, troubling but maybe reflective of having a hard time acclimating to his new home and PhD program, maybe suspected the program wasn't going very well but not wanting to bring it up in case it was painful for him and triggered an addiction relapse? What if they knew something was wrong but could not even wrap their heads around the idea that this person they've known all his life, who they've celebrated birthdays and Christmases with, who they've see as a tender, lovable human being, had brutally murdered four college kids? What then?

Do you really think they would have welcomed him into their home, slept in a house with him, for weeks, if they believed he was a murderer? Would you?

They didn't know.[/quote]

Brian Laundrie's mom did. It's certainly not out of the realm of possibility that a family can know what he's like and be under the same roof. There is a lot of enabling and coddling to get to this point, you just refuse to see it.[/quote]

Oh, you have true crime brain rot. This explains so much.

Do you not get that this is a different case? Brian Laundrie killed his fiancé, not four total strangers. Laundrie's mom not only knew the victim -- they had lived together and known one another for years. Laundrie was also a suspect in Gabby's murder immediately, his parents KNEW he was a suspect, and they knew Gabby was missing and later that she had been killed. Do you not understand how different that situation is from one where a man killed four people in Idaho and his family, who lived on the other side of the country and didn't know any of the victims or almost anything about the crime, did not immediately realize their son/brother was the murderer?

Some of you need to step away from the podcast app and the Netflix docs and read a book and take a class on basic logic and critical thinking.[/quote]

Oh that makes it so much better. 1 murder is ok but 4 is too many? Or something? Maybe try making your point again. [/quote]

You just have to read one more sentence in the PP to get it. Please try harder.[/quote]

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