My ex beat his mom to death when she, after having bailed him out of jail for a dui while he was still a child and in high school, told him he was ruining his life with alcohol and if he didn’t watch out, he’d end up a loser or in prison. That’s somewhat harsh and probably feels bad from your mom, but it’s also a pretty standard attempt at good parenting that was probably intended to be a wake-up call.

For what it’s worth, she was 100% right, he did end up in prison and a loser.

For context, I met him a year or so after he got out, and he lied to me about basically every aspect of his life, to the point that I only even found out about the murder a few days after we broke up. I didn’t intentionally date someone who murdered their mom.

I had, however, already made bad dating decisions before meeting him, which was actually protective, because I’d learned the hard way not to argue emotionally. Especially important, because I did actually break up with him because his drinking was out of control and he did seem to be turning into a loser (I don’t use the term a lot, but he started casually scamming people for small amounts and kept getting fired from jobs because of something totally out of his control that was less and less believable every time. He just wasn’t contributing anything positive to the world nor was he enjoying his life). I’ve thought a lot about what might have happened if I’d told him that plainly.

I realized after we broke up that he’d been skimming my ADHD medication (along with literally any pills he could find, including some for a friend’s congenital heart condition with zero psychoactive effect) and selling it as Molly to my friends and me. A few months later, my friends and I realized that he’d been the person who stole my purse with my rent money in it on new year’s. He didn’t even “mysteriously find” my phone (it was a tracphone, there was zero value in it to anyone but me) or any ID cards to help me out a bit, just stone cold watched me try to replace everything and scramble to pay double rent with no ATM access in the first week of January. So yeah, petty scams. I’m autistic and a bad character judge (no, really?), he could have literally scammed me forever if he’d had a little planning ability. I know this is coming off like I support big scams, but it just makes it seem even stupider in the end. Like, stealing my $500 rent gets him $500, which is pretty good. It loses me (at the time a college student working part time as a waitress) $500, a phone, a beloved purse, my ID, debit, and insurance cards, which is worth way more than $500. Plus, he again had a trust fund! I think he really did like me, too. He just didn’t know how not to take advantage of people. I have a google alert set for his name and he got arrested for violating the restraining order his next ex had against him to beat her up (not enough to charge him with attempted murder, but I haven’t read the details). I tried to get one at the time, but the process to get one would have made all the information about my schedule and addresses available to him before a decision was made. I just moved and bet on him not remembering the one or two trips to my sisters house well enough to get back there, which he didn’t.

I’ve also wondered a lot about what was wrong with him. He was absolutely an alcoholic, but even if he started very young, alcohol addiction doesn’t immediately turn you into a monster (my sister started in early high school and she was totally out of control with drinking, but she didn’t cause pain just for the fun of it much more than other teenagers, but maybe that’s luck) and it’s pretty difficult to empathize with bludgeoning your mother to death for what should be a pretty transparent attempt to help you (even small children know that they get yelled at for scaring their parents when they wander off- parents being emotionally invested in their kids can’t be a surprise, plus he was generally pretty perceptive). It could be that his mother or both parents were abusive and either the words or the intent of what she was saying wasn’t reported by the neighbors, but his dad still had limited contact with him and had set up a trust for him during his time in prison that would provide him with enough money to survive, but not enough to get into much trouble every month, which seems like a pretty reasonable way for a loving parent to react to something like this- make sure he’s safe and stay in his life, but at arm’s reach. He could also have just been missing some combination of foresight and sympathy for his whole life, but that’s the second worst option. The worst one is that he was a completely normal kid who made one ghastly violent decision because his brain wasn’t yet mature and he was still tipsy, got shuttled off to a crucible of trauma for two decades and then spent the rest of his life taking the resultant guilt out on those around him.