Runners-Up: Wade Michael Page commits murder at a Sikh Temple; Rx Sciences Professer Rainer Reincheid (allegedly) commits arson as an irrational (read: alcoholic) reaction to his son’s suicide; Hans Kristian Rausing, megabillionaire, lets his wife rot.
Runners-up for top story of the month:
Wade Michael Page, who murdered six before being gunned down by police at a Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, was described as a “gentle and kind and loving” child by his stepmother Laura Page. She wondered, “And what happened, God only knows, because I don’t.” Let me try and explain, Ms. Page: your step-son, gentle and kind and loving though he may have been, inherited alcoholism. How do we know? He had convictions for criminal mischief and arrests for driving under the influence; as a soldier in 1998 he was demoted for being drunk on duty and was later discharged for “patterns of misconduct”; he was also fired by a trucking company after being cited for driving while impaired. Pete Simi, a journalist who studied and wrote about White Supremacists in California, lived with him for a period of time and reports he “drank heavily.” An evaluation of his behavior (see my work, including Drunks, Drugs and Debits and How to Spot Hidden Alcoholics) shows your step-son was clearly an alcoholic. We cannot begin to predict how destructive a practicing alcoholic may become or when, regardless of how gentle, kind and loving the person may otherwise be. Unfortunately, your step-son engaged in an extreme example of such destructive behaviors. We also know that alcoholics are capable of anything. This is what is meant by “anything.”
UC Irvine pharmaceutical sciences professor Rainer Reinscheid was understandably upset when his teenage son hanged himself after being disciplined by an assistant principal at his high school. Most parents would grieve for years, but would never consider vengeance, which is what Reinscheid allegedly did. He was arrested after setting a series of small fires at the high school, the assistant principal’s home and the park where his son died and now faces several counts of arson. In an email, while reportedly “on medication and drinking a second bottle of wine,” he wrote he had dreams of burning down the school, getting a dozen machine guns, shooting administrators and sexually assaulting at least one of them. He then planned to shoot “at least 200 students” before killing himself, asserting total control, as if to say to the police, “Not even you can touch me.” Non-addicts pale in comparison with addicts in having a need to control everything. Note also that few non-addicts can finish a bottle of wine at one sitting, much less get through part of another bottle, and the number of non-addicts mixing “medication” and alcohol is very low—non-addicts tend to follow the instructions on the package that says “do not drink alcohol while taking this medication”. In addition, non-addicts don’t set fires or dream of burning down schools and killing hundreds of people. And by the way, with a dad like this we should ask what really made his son commit suicide.
Hans Kristian Rausing, 49, billionaire heir to his Swedish family’s drink carton company (his grandfather, Ruben Rausing, invented the Tetra Laval milk carton in the 1960s), was stopped for driving erratically. Drugs were found in his car and, in a subsequent search of their luxurious London townhouse, the body of his wife, Eva Rausing, was found. Her body was largely decomposed, under a pile of clothing and garbage bags that had been taped together in a fly-filled room. Officers were fortunate: the stench was at least partly offset with deodorizing powder. Kristian, in one of the classics in the annals of alcoholically-induced confabulated thinking, explained he couldn’t survive without his wife. He was arrested but quickly exonerated of murder by a judge, who ruled that Eva likely died from heart failure coupled with longstanding drug “abuse” (i.e., addiction) more than two months before being found. During this time, whenever friends or family asked about Eva, Kristian gave vague replies but never, according to reports, suggested anything was awry. I’ve a hunch an addictionologist would have strongly suspected something, but I digress. Eva, who was 48 and the daughter of a wealthy Pepsi executive, was arrested four years earlier for trying to smuggle crack cocaine and heroin into the U.S. Embassy in London. A decision by the judge to drop charges in favor of a conditional caution, which attracted criticism of double standards for wealthy offenders, obviously didn’t do Ms. Rausing any favors; money, as so often proves true, enabled Ms. Rausing to her death. Kristian was sentenced to a 10-month suspended jail sentence that will require extensive drug rehab. He noted, “I do not feel, with the benefit of hindsight, that following her death I acted rationally.” You think? Ah, the lives of addicts; nothing surprises, and yet, in one of the numerous paradoxes that is addiction, the variations in behaviors are so endless they all surprise.