Jobless, despondent over financial losses…kills his family…and, oh yeah, alcoholic too (high probability)
Headline of the month:
“Jobless dad kills 5, himself”; also, “Father kills family and himself, despondent over financial losses”
We may as well get used to headlines like these which refer, in this case, to the murder-suicide by Karthik Rajaram, 45, as the unwinding of the great credit bubble proceeds. Unfortunately, they will be mostly misleading and thereby fail to help prevent future similar tragedies.
As regular readers know, almost all crime”especially murder”is rooted in alcoholism. Many suicides also have their source in this disease. Readers of “Drunks, Drugs & Debits” (with thanks to James Graham’s “The Secret History of Alcoholism”) also understand that desperate measures are sometimes taken to compensate for a deflating ego. As wealth contracts, leaving the alcoholic less able to inflate his or her ego by wielding power with prestige and money, such measures can take form in the commission of atrocities.
Most people who lose a job don’t kill their family or themselves. Why, on rare occasion, do they? Although the story of the moment is new”and remember, it took five days and a dozen stories on anthrax killer Bruce Ivins to find proof of Ivins’ addictive use”we’ve already got compelling evidence of alcoholism.
Rajaram, who lived in Porter Ranch, California, was a financial manager who once turned a few tens of thousands of dollars into more than $1.2 million in a London-based venture fund. He timed the real estate peak almost perfectly, having sold a $274,000 home his family purchased in 1997 for $750,000 in 2006. He should have had a pile of cash. Somehow, he lost it all.
Neighbors said they saw no problems except one night when they heard a man screaming for hours. Greg Robinson, who fired him from his last job, called him a “very smart guy,”but added, “He had some behavioral problems. He wasn’t reliable…He was not an emotionally stable person. It was a real problem….”Elaborating, Robinson said that Rajaram “would miss phone calls and miss meetings and sometimes couldn’t be found for a couple of days.”That’s an almost-certain indication that he went on alcoholic benders.
One report said that the murder-suicide “offered a chilling symbol of the nation’s economic crisis.”While not every murder-suicide is committed by an alcohol or other-drug addict, there are very few exceptions. More accurately, the murder offers a chilling symbol of what an alcoholic is capable of when he loses everything. Those are the people on whom we need to focus our attention and, where possible, intervene as financial disarray worsens.