The Oxygen channel recently featured an episode on the Freeman brothers, Bryan and David. In 1995, they committed matricide and fratricide.
Why did they kill their mother and father? News reports said it was because the boys became neo-Nazis. This is true, but it is incomplete.
Most news stories said the brothers were raised in a strict religious home, and that they rebelled against their parents, who were Jehovah’s Witnesses. After they rebelled, they took to drugs and alcohol, and it was in a rehabilitation center where they met Nazi skinheads.
As it turns out, these accounts are seriously misleading. The evidence shows that the boys did not rebel against their parents until after they were bullied by students because they were religious and wore a suit and tie to school.
Why does this matter? If school officials had been attentive to the bullying of the Freeman brothers, perhaps they would have intervened, and perhaps future events might have been different. We will never know. Had it been a gay or transgender person being bullied, they most certainly would have intervened.
