Yeah, I just finished it. I don't think the term "disturbing" quite covers it.
There was something seriously wrong with this individual from an early age and what is chilling is that he describes it with enough accuracy to recognize the long slide down. Obsessive detail with early life - could you name your playmates from age 4? I couldn't. Complete obsession with sex and rejection. Raging hatred against anyone who had a normal relationship (excepting, curiously, his parents). Conviction that he deserved a life of luxury due to some sort of inherent virtue that he goes into no detail over. A delusion that he was a perfect gentleman. Acts of overt violence against random couples. A Day Of Retribution that he planned literally years in advance.
It's a long, repetitive screed, and it took some patience to finish. One thing stands out: he had unbelievable anger issues - he describes them in detail - and nearly everyone around him knew it. He couldn't even get a driver's license until he was 18 - in California? He couldn't finish anything. He felt that two weeks working out would give him an attractive physique. He dropped out of classes, because, as he tells it, he couldn't stand to see happy couples in front of him. After months of karate study he was still a white belt who couldn't out-spar a 12-year-old without dropping into rage mode. This was a very, very damaged human being.
His birth mother strikes me as impossibly supportive, or at least so he describes her. Only toward the end does he admit that she has been supporting him financially through it all. He is reduced to begging for new laptops from his mother at 19 - the thought of earning them himself appears not to have occurred to him. A distant father who he blames for lack of support. A step-mother who tried to help him by flying him to Morocco. A brother whose life he saves - I am intensely skeptical - and who commits the outrageous crime of having satisfactory social relationships his elder brother is denied.
Scary stuff. The only crime his victims committed was being young and normal.
Yes. He was obviously very sick.
Apparently, he had uploaded a bunch of videos to youtube, which he removed when his parents found them. Then he uploaded them again right before going on his murderous rampage.
Why didn’t his parents get him help when they first saw the videos? Is the mental health system so messed up that even wealthy people cannot access care?