ELLIOT ROGER STORY/STATEMENT ANALYSIS; "the original Incel"

 

STATEMENT ANALYSIS ON ELLIOT ROGERS; the 'original Incel'

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INTRODUCTION:

LOS ANGELES — It was the summer of 1999, and the parents of Elliot O. Rodger were battling over the boy’s deep and puzzling psychological problems as they struggled through a divorce.

Mr. Rodger’s mother, Li Chin, filed an affidavit describing Elliot as a “high-functioning autistic child,” and said she needed more child support to care for him. His father, Peter Rodger, countered with a Beverly Hills doctor, Stephen M. Scappa, who challenged that diagnosis, saying it failed to acknowledge the possibility of “depression or anxiety.” Dr. Scappa said that Elliot, almost 8 at the time, should be sent to a child psychiatrist for more examination and treatment.

Just days after Mr. Rodger killed six people on May 23 in a rampage in Isla Vista, Calif., before firing a bullet into his head, his estranged parents released an anguished statement, expressing their distress as they grappled with the final chapter of their 22-year-old son’s long struggle with emotional problems. “It is now our responsibility to do everything we can to help avoid this happening to any other family — not only to avoid any more innocence destroyed, but also to identify and deal with the mental issues that drove our son to do what he did,” the statement said. The parents declined to be interviewed.

For as long as anyone close to them can remember, the parents had faced concerns about the boy’s mental health — a shadow that hung over this Los Angeles family nearly every day of Elliot’s life. Confronted with a lonely and introverted child, they tried to set him up on play dates, ferried him from counselor to therapist, urged him to take antipsychotic medication and moved him from school to school. His mother gave her son the car he thought would help improve his stature — a black BMW — when he went off to college in Santa Barbara; he used it for his lonely explorations of the California coast, as a setting for his chilling farewell video and finally as a weapon as he sprayed bullets from the window and plowed down bicyclists that Friday night.

He fled two high schools after begging his parents, in tears, to rescue him from what he described as a bullying environment. When he was a sophomore, a school administrator said, he suffered a panic attack — standing immobilized in the hallway — until a teacher went outside to ask his mother, waiting in a car, to come get him. He apparently never returned to the school.

The older he got, the more his parents worried about his future.

“They were concerned: Could he be easily taken advantage of? Could he be an easy target for some kind of a scam or whatever?” said Deborah Smith, a Los Angeles high school principal who encountered Mr. Rodger at two of the schools he attended. “Would he be able to navigate the world on his own?”

He seemed to have grown only more withdrawn after he left home for college. After Mr. Rodger returned to his apartment one night after being beaten up at a party — he had, by his account, tried to shove a girl off a ledge — Chris Pollard, a neighbor, sought to calm him.

“He started saying: ‘I’m going to kill them. I’m going to kill them. I’m going to kill myself,’ ” Mr. Pollard recalled.

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ELLIOT ROGERS STATEMENT ANALYSIS

1. "All your girls, rejected me. And I hate all you men who are sexually active."

       -"all girls" fall into one broad category 

       -black and white thinking

       -jealousy, insecurity

       -feelings of inferiority

"if others can have it, and he cannot, he will make it so NO ONE can have it"

2. Roger seemed to be focused on the superficialities in others, namely, attractiveness, was a quality he most admired. Perhaps, Roger even falsely believed that ATTRACTION was the KEY to success. Bringing the side effects of anger and uncontrollable jealousy.

3. Roger made many sensational claims about his own perfection,

in terms of his looks, success with women, and how his wants to be popular. He falsely believed that achieving popularity would make him successful with women.

4. "No one ever liked me. I have shown affection to women, but they have NEVER returned my interest."

      -back to more black and white thinking

     -theory of inevitability; pre-determined to be "alone", never have a girlfriend/ as though at 22, not having achieved having a girlfriend was a reflection of his failure as a man, failure for his sex drive to thrive. He had no insight into why women were not interested in him. He tried to cure most of his problems by buying very expensive clothes, and driving a Mercedes. He couldn't fix his "insides" by changing his "outside appearance."

5. DICHOMOTOMY: Rogers holds polar opposite belief systems that clashed, and kept Roger at impasse. He both HATED ALL women, bc he felt personally rejected by ANY and EVERY girl who "rejected him" in his mind. At the same time, while having some disdain and hate for all women, he also, at the same time, more than anything, wanted to have a girlfriend; the one thing he seemed he could not achieve. He felt he had no ownership in the rejection; that is was almost predetermined/fate. How one would reconcile these different, but strong positions, together, is unclear.

6. "I will take great pleasure in ending your life."

   -statement made the day before his "rampage of violence", on a video Roger recorded, he made the above statement. Referring to what he called his "Day of Retribution." The day after making this statement, Roger took the lives of 6 others, and lastly, his own life.

   -sadistic nature to statement

   -taking pleasure in the pain and suffering of others

   -never came to any conclusions on sense of self, who he was as a person, or any resemblance of an "identity."