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GRAND JUNCTION — A Grand Junction man allegedly shot his teenage son in the face while he was sleeping last Thursday and then, before firing several more bullets into his dying son's head, told his wife, "I had to kill him because you were ruining him."

Those details were revealed in an arrest warrant affidavit that was unsealed Wednesday in the first-degree murder case of Allen Grabe.


Grabe, 51, is being held in the Mesa County Jail on a $1 million bond in the death of his only child, 13-year-old Jacob Grabe. The boy suffers from a mild form of a neurological disorder similar to autism called Asperger's syndrome.

Grabe was arrested after his wife, Jaquette Grabe, called 911 from a locked closet at about 10 p.m. to report that her husband had just shot their son.

When police arrived at the home, they found Allen Grabe sitting on the front porch with a revolver in his hand. The affidavit said he set the firearm down and said, "I give up."

Jacob Grabe had recently started 8th grade where he was participating in track, was a member of the band, and had just been elected band equipment manager.

That's awful...

That... that sickens me.


M.

That really is awful, Merle. You should've prepared us by having a thread title that was more descriptive and less mysterious.

I hope they throw his ass in with the General Population at prison.

Yes, I agree. what a f*****g murderer!

Yup. Typical. All fathers are just like that.

Let's abolish fatherhood. Females never do anything wrong.

What a basic.

The apple rarely falls far from the tree is my point. Undiagnosed and even diagnosed autism can set a person on a path that seems perfectly logical to them, and feel justified to act on those impulses.
Merle

Last edited by sinsboldly on 18 Sep 2008, 9:31 am, edited 1 time in total.

Unbelievable, disgusting, nauseating and just awful

Wow. My stepdad has threatened to kill me, but I never realized that kind of thing happened. I had this idea of parents as people who don't kill their children. I guess I was wrong; it seems to happen all the time.

I know there's an increased risk of being a murder victim if you are autistic... I remember it as ten times the risk of NTs, but I'm not sure where I got that figure. Anybody know?

Also, what's with the "you're ruining him" thing? At 13, if anybody ruins him, it'll be the kid himself. At that age, you are making your own decisions, and are just gaining skills and maturing emotionally until you can move out. Nothing short of outright abuse (and often not even that) can "ruin" a kid that age from the outside. It's the same old stupid fallacy--the idea that autistic people don't have their own achievements, that their successes and failures can be entirely blamed on or attributed to their parents and therapists and teachers... We do our own learning and growing.

How could you possibly ruin someone's life worse than to kill them, anyway? I smell an insanity plea...

CW... I'm sorry, but what the hell are you on about?


M.

That child could have easily been me. My dad threatened to kill me in front of neighbors. I was accused of stealing candy from the next door neighbor's daughter & the girl who lived across the street. When the truth came out that they lied about the incident, I never even got an apology. A few years later, my mom came at me with a large kitchen knife poised over her head. I survived but both incidences have haunted me for the rest of my life.


I'm not sure there's any punishment that could fit this crime. In prison, he'll probably be separated from the general population. The dad deserves life at the very least! I'd also like to know if there were some events that led up to the shooting of the young boy. For shame, if there was & the mother did nothing to stop it.

The man is clearly insane, making any discussion on the mental state of the kid irrelevant.

Insanity is a legal term that means "he didn't know what he was doing". He knew. This was premeditated murder. There's a big difference between accidentally killing a child while stupidly holding them down during a tantrum, and walking up to said child while he's sleeping and killing him with a gun. And the man turned himself in--evidence that he knew he had broken the law, what he had done, and that it was wrong.

No, he's not insane. An insane person would have done it for some reason other than "she was ruining him", might have been unaware that they were killing someone, might have been actually thinking they were saving them somehow... The few but dramatic murders committed by truly insane people tend to result in a lifetime commitment to a mental hospital; but this man wasn't truly insane.

OK, maybe 13 isn't quite "child" anymore; but the idea of attacking a sleeping person just gives me the idea of such vulnerability that I default to "child" even for a teen. What he must have lived through... I've lain in bed, listening to screaming matches, hoping and hoping that my door would stay closed (if it was there at the moment; sometimes my dad would take my door away to punish me...)

Yes, raising an Aspie child is stressful. So is raising any child. But most people, driven to extremity, would leave the family, not kill the child. There's no excuse for killing a child.

Maybe it's just me, but I think aspies are usually too smart to think that killing someone is a viable answer to one's problems. If sounds like this guy was more schizoid than autist, if anything.

I wouldn't think schizoid, either. SPD just makes you a loner who'd prefer not to have social contact. It doesn't affect your conscience. (I may be biased... I have strong schizoid tendencies, but also a healthy bit of altruism...) If you want to diagnose the man with anything but having done something extremely wrong, you could say antisocial PD, but really, he made a choice--it wasn't out of his control; it wasn't something he did unknowingly. Personality disorders don't keep you from making free choices; they are extreme personalities and there's no compulsion involved.

An autistic person can have antisocial personality disorder; no other disorder predisposes one to premeditated murder. The autism would have been incidental; antisocial NTs are just as likely to kill.

But even antisocial personality disorder (sociopathy, in this case, if you want to be specific) doesn't take your free will, nor take your ability to know what is at the very least legal. It's also probably the most intractable personality disorder--meaning that once they've got a criminal record, the best treatment, short of becoming a lawyer, is probably just to put them in jail so that they don't hurt anybody. (Except other prisoners...)