On December 9, 2007, 24-year-old Matthew Murray (pictured here with his niece) went on a killing spree in Colorado, opening fire in the early morning at a Youth With A Mission (YWAM) training center in Arvada and then later in the afternoon at the New Life Church in Colorado Springs. His spree left 4 people dead and 5 wounded, following which he committed suicide.

Matthew was 1 of 2 sons born to Colorado neurologist Ronald Murray and his wife Loretta Murray. Matthew’s family was a deeply religious Christian household and he and his younger brother Christopher were homeschoooled since 1990 through high school graduation using Bill Gothard’s “Wisdom Booklets.” His family attended Faith Bible Chapel in Arvada, a church noted for its Christian Zionism beliefs. The Murray family were members of Kevin Swanson’s Christian Home Educators of Colorado, and Christopher was part of a homeschool graduation ceremony held by CHEC in 2005.

After being homeschooled all the way through high school, Matthew attended Arapahoe Community College and Colorado Christian University for brief periods. In 2002, he attended a YWAM missionary training program held at the same Arvada facility he attacked. He did not complete the training, however, due to several reasons: one being health problems that prevented him from doing the requisite field work; others being “strange behavior” such as talking about “hearing voices” and performing “dark rock songs” from Linkin Park that made co-workers feel “pretty scared.” (Court records indicate that the Arvada attack was at least partly inspired by his anger about being expelled.)

Matthew was alleged to be either gay or bisexual and experienced guilt over his orientation. He felt he had to justify it through pointing to the hypocrisy of evangelical leaders like Ted Haggard. He struggled with depression, took Prozac, and was seeing a therapist. He believed his parents were simply using him as a religious weapon or tool, saying that “The only reason [my mom] had me was because she wanted a body/soul she could train into being the next Billy Graham.” He claimed to suffer psychological and other forms of abuse at the hands of his parents growing up, taking particular aim at how Gothard’s teachings influenced his family, at one point writing the following online:

“Me, I remember the beatings and the fighting and yelling and insane rules and all the Bill Gothard (expletive) and then trancing out . (expletive) . I’m still tranced out.”

Gothard himself commented on the murders after the fact, saying that Matthew and his family only used his homeschooling curriculum for “several years” and that his curriculum is “all built around the Sermon on the Mount.” Gothard added that Matthew’s problem was that “he rejected the curriculum,” pointing to Matthew’s love of rock music. “The music we listen to is a powerful force,” Gothard suggested.

While Matthew’s family did not regularly attend New Life Church, his mother Loretta considered Ted Haggard — the disgraced evangelical celebrity who founded and pastored New Life — to be her “favorite pastor.” The Murray family gave money to New Life and Matthew and his mother went to a conference at the church 4 years prior to the attack.

On the day of the attacks, Matthew drove to the YWAM facility in Arvada in the middle of the night. After asking if he could stay the night at the facility (and being denied), Matthew pulled out his guns and opened fire. He killed 24-year-old Tiffany Johnson and 26-year-old Philip Crouse, as well as wounded 24-year-old Dan Griebenow and 22-year-old Charlie Blanch. Matthew then drove to New Life Church. Around 1 pm, Matthew began his second attack, spraying bullets at church members leaving after church service. He struck and killed two sisters, 18-year-old Stephanie Works and 16-year-old Rachel Works — who happened to be homeschooled themselves. He also wounded the sisters’ father, 51-year-old David Works, as well as 40-year-old Judy Purcell and 59-year-old Larry Bourbannais.

Matthew’s shooting rampage finally came to a halt when Jeanne Assam, a volunteer security guard at the church, managed to shoot and wound Matthew. Matthew then shot and killed himself.

In May 2008, Matthew’s parents appeared on James Dobson’s radio show. His father Ronald said they had “no idea he had ownership of weapons or any plan,” blaming the shootings on his son’s “depth of bitterness” about his Christian upbringing. That “bitterness” was expressed by Matthew himself in his handwritten “Letter to God” found in his car after the attacks. In the letter, Matthew wrote,

“The more I read your stupid book, the more I pray, the more I reach out to Christians for help, the more hurt and abused I get.”

Following Matthew’s rampage and suicide, Kevin Swanson (Director of CHEC, which the Murray family were members of) did a radio broadcast on the situation entitled, “Should Pastors Pack?”

In June 2013, 13-year-old Darren James Price from Dowagiac, Michigan took a gun to Dowagiac Middle School, ran away after being approached by school staff, then went into the woods near the school and committed suicide.

Darren attended Dowagiac Middle School through 6th grade. Darren was described by a former public school principal as “very nice, polite, a good kid.” He was withdrawn from the school a year prior to his death and was homeschooled for 7th grade. Darren had an unknown number of siblings, all of whom were also withdrawn from the public school district. No reasons for withdrawal were publicized.

The night before his death, Darren stole a handgun from his family. The next morning, he entered school grounds with the gun. A custodian saw Darren with the gun and notified the school principal. After the principal approached Darren, the boy ran into the nearby woods. The school notified the police. A deputy sheriff arrived and approached the woods where the boy was hiding. After seeing the sheriff, the boy shot himself. He died shortly after in a hospital.

Despite initially approaching the school with a weapon, police remain unsure whether Darren intended to attack others prior to committing suicide. To this day Darren’s motive for committing suicide also remains a mystery. The school’s public safety director said, “I wish we had a reason.”

Three children—an 8-year-old girl and two boys, ages 5 and 3—were abused, imprisoned, and starved by their parents, Eraca Dawn Craig (left) and Christian Jessica Deanda, who were domestic partners. The children were homeschooled.

The girl had been chained to the wall with shackles around her ankles and a collar around her neck, reportedly to keep her from stealing food. All three children were emaciated and had hardly eaten for months. The 3-year-old boy was the biological child of one of the women and the other two children were adopted. The women were arrested March 15 on charges of felony child cruelty and false imprisonment and the children were placed in foster homes. Craig and Deanda were scheduled for a preliminary hearing on March 28.

Date: March 15, 2014
Location: Salinas, California

A 12-year-old boy, the son of Michael Marshall, was starved and imprisoned by his father and his father’s girlfriend, Sharon Glass, reportedly for stealing food. Two other children, Marshall’s 10-year-old daughter and Glass’s 5-year-old son, also lived in the home.

The abuse began in 2009 when Glass moved in with Marshall. Glass’s ex-husband, Tony Glass, called child protective services 12 times, concerned that the three children were dirty and had head lice. Officials at the boy’s school also called child protective services several times. Welfare officials investigated in the summer of 2010 but could not find enough evidence to substantiate the claims. Following the investigation, the boy was removed from school in August 2010 to be homeschooled. Though Marshall and Glass claimed that he was then enrolled in a private school, there is no evidence for this.

Marshall and Glass first locked the boy in a closet with diapers to relieve himself and ramen noodles to eat. Later, he was locked in a bathroom after his father zip-tied him to the post of a bunk bed for three days and he chewed through the ropes to escape. On Christmas day in 2011 he was let out of the bathroom to watch his siblings open gifts, while he received a stocking full of coal.

The boy was discovered in March 2012 locked in the bathroom by a family friend, who reported it to the police. He weighed 40 pounds.

Marshall pleaded no contest to eight charges of child abuse, torture and false imprisonment and will be sentenced in April 2014. Glass was found guilty on eight counts of aggravated child abuse and sentenced to 40 years in prison.

Date: March 15, 2012
Location: Titusville, Florida

Shenna Grimm was 16 in 1998 when her mother and stepfather, Narda and John Goff, inseminated her with a syringe full of John’s sperm. Shenna had been withdrawn from school in fourth grade to be homeschooled, but instead she was forced to work as a servant for the Goffs. John Goff had also repeatedly raped and physically abused her.

Narda Goff was convicted in 2002 of helping John impregnate her daughter and was sentenced to three years in prison. John Goff was convicted in 2002 of rape, sexual battery, and child endangering and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. In 2005 an appeals court overturned the convictions; however, in his retrial in 2006 John was again convicted of the same charges and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Date: December 1998
Location: Akron, Ohio

Jesse Briggs, age 10, and his sister Deonna, age 7, were murdered by their parents, Thomas and Dawn Briggs, while on vacation in Oregon. The children were poisoned, then their bodies were returned to the family’s Washington home, where Dawn also died of poisoning and Thomas shot himself to death.

The Briggses belonged to the Church of God, a now-defunct millennialist religious cult, and Thomas Briggs suffered from paranoia, depression, and anxiety. The Briggses homeschooled their children.

Date: November 19, 1999
Location: Rochester, Washington; Newport, Oregon

Lauren Kavanaugh, also known as Lauren Calhoun, was freed at age 8 from a six-year imprisonment in a closet where she was systematically tortured, raped, and starved by her mother and stepfather, Barbara and Kenneth Atkinson. The Atkinsons’ other children, who ranged in age from 22 months to 10 years, were also neglected; they did not know how to use a toothbrush or a fork, or how to wipe themselves after going to the bathroom. There is no evidence any of the children were enrolled in school.

Lauren was discovered when her stepfather revealed her condition to a neighbor, who called the police. The Atkinsons were convicted of felony injury to a child and sentenced to life in prison.

Date: June 11, 2001
Location: Hutchins, Texas

Cynthia Guthrie abducted 14-year-old Joseph Chaney from his mobile home in Tennessee and went on the run with him, first to Colorado and then to New Mexico, where she was caught.

Guthrie was a friend of the boy’s mother, Susan Smith, who had asked Guthrie to homeschool her two sons. Guthrie’s sexual abuse of Joseph was first reported to child protective services in July 2002 and investigated. Smith was suspected of neglecting Joseph and his brother, who were removed from her home November 1 and placed in foster homes. Joseph ran away from his foster home on December 1 to go on the run with Guthrie, who was married.

Guthrie was charged with sexual battery by an authority figure and statutory rape.

Date: December 29, 2002
Location: Lebanon, Tennessee

Ixchel Maybury sexually assaulted a 13-year-old boy that she was homeschooling. The Winslow school system had urged Maybury to complete her homeschooling certification, but she had not done so.

Maybury assaulted the boy five or six times between May 1998 and May 1999 and threatened to kill him if he testified against her. Maybury was homeschooling a number of children at the time the assaults occurred.

She was charged with gross sexual assault and two counts of witness tampering.

Date: August 1999
Location: Winslow, Maine

Aidan Edward Bossingham, age 13, was starved to death by his mother, Jessica Lee Jensen. He weighed 21 pounds when he died. Though Aidan was diagnosed with a human growth hormone deficiency, Jensen refused to give him medication and had not taken him to a doctor since 2008. She treated him differently from his siblings, ages 14 and 7. All three children were homeschooled. The youngest child could not spell her name to an interviewer and was not sure of her age.

Jensen was charged with murder.

Date: January 12, 2014
Location: Kenmare, North Dakota

Medical personnel responding to an emergency call in early January, 2007, found an emaciated 11-year-old girl. Some reports indicate that the girl weighed under 30 pounds. The girl was taken to the hospital and then sent to live with her grandparents in South Carolina. Medical authorities reported that she will suffer permanent developmental disabilities as the result of severe long-term malnutrition. The girl’s parents, Melvin and Denise Wright, were arrested and charged with starving the girl. They were found guilty of attempted second-degree murder.

This was not the first time Melvin and Denise had come to trial. In 2000, both were convicted of endangering the welfare of a minor in a case involving their daughter. Their daughter was returned to them and they were required to take parenting classes.

The couple homeschooled their daughter out of racial prejudice, but did not follow Hawaii’s homeschool requirements. When asked about this in court, they reported that they did not know that Hawaii had any requirements for homeschoolers. The couple was originally from South Carolina.

Date: January 7, 2007
Location: Honolulu, Hawaii

Korresha Crawford, age 11, was beaten to death by her 17-year-old sister Cylena, who also assaulted their 13-year-old brother Michael. Two other siblings, ages 11 and 9, were unharmed. The children’s father, Lawrence Crawford, was home at the time. Crawford, a Pentecostal minister, homeschooled the children while his wife Sylvia worked two jobs. However, Cylena was frequently left as the primary caregiver for her siblings.

In 2004, Crawford was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Korresha. Cylena, who was admitted to a mental health facility after the assault, was charged with murder and aggravated assault and battery. Sylvia Crawford was charged with neglect.

Date: January 25, 2001
Location: Elgin, South Carolina

Twin 16-year-old boys were starved, beaten, and tortured by their mother, Jamie Marie Hicks. The abuse was discovered when two of Hicks’ children ran away from home and reported abuse to officials. The children’s stepfather of thirteen years, Vernon Courtney Lovell, knew about the abuse but did nothing to stop it. All the children were homeschooled, and Hicks often talked with her neighbors about her homeschooling practices.

Hicks was charged with aggravated child abuse and Lovell was charged with child neglect.

Date: March 27, 2014
Location: Tampa, Florida

In December 1994, 17-year-old Jeremiah Reynolds from Sabillasville, Maryland (along with a 16-year-old accomplice) robbed a convenience store in Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania and killed the store’s clerk.

Jeremiah was homeschooled. His parents are Reverend M. David and Hope Reynolds. His father, a Chaplain at the Joint Base Andrews military facility in Maryland, described him as a kid who “often did good deeds and reached out to help others.” The night before the murder, Jeremiah had an argument with his parents.  The argument arose because his parents had taken away his car keys and grounded him on account of “smoking and other behavior.” Jeremiah consequently ran away from home, taking his family’s deer rifle with him. At some point he met up with his accomplice, Clayton Faxon, who attended Catoctin High School in Fredrick County, Maryland.

Jeremiah proposed to Clayton that they rob the convenience store in Blue Ridge Summit. At the time, 30-year-old Gretchen C. Gross was working alone in the convenience store in the early morning. Jeremiah and Clayton went to the store and demanded money and Gretchen’s keys. They stole $26 from the store’s cash register as well as cigarettes. They proceeded to torture Gretchen and then shot her in the mouth with a rifle, stole her car, and then later set the car on fire.

In May 1995, Jeremiah pled guilty to “third-degree murder and robbery.” In October 1995, he was sentenced to a minimum of 20 years in prison for his role in the murder. His accomplice Clayton was sentenced to life in person for being the one that pulled the gun’s trigger.

On October 2, 2006, 32-year-old Charles Carl Roberts IV barricaded himself and ten young female hostages into an Amish schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania. He proceeded to shoot the girls one at a time, execution-style. By the time the police broke into the schoolhouse, he had wounded 5 girls, mortally wounded 2, and killed 3. He then shot and killed himself.

Charles was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania to his father Chuck, a retired police officer who became a taxi driver for the Amish community, and his mother Terri. Charles never attended public schools, receiving his high school diploma from a homeschool association. 20 years before his rampage and suicide, when he was only 12 years old, Charles molested two of his relatives — girls between the ages of 3 and 5. This would haunt Charles for the rest of his life, and he reportedly was tormented by “dreams of molesting again” around the time of the rampage and suicide.

After graduating from high school, Charles worked a number of jobs, ranging from dishwasher at Good N’ Plenty Restaurant to a commercial milk tank driver for North West Foods. In 1996, Charles married Marie Lynn Welk at Highview Church of God. A year after their wedding, Marie gave birth to Elise Victoria, who tragically died shortly after birth. Elise’s death would also haunt Charles until the day he died. Charlie and Marie later had 3 more kids, who ranged from ages 7 to 1 1/2 on the day Charlie killed himself. Marie described her husband as “loving, supportive, thoughtful” and “an exceptional father,” and Terri similarly described her son as “an excellent family man.” After her son died, Terri mourned that, “I had no idea anything like this was going to happen.”

On the day in question, Charles drove his own children to school then returned home and left handwritten notes to his family. He then drove to and entered West Nickel Mines School, a one-room Amish school house in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania. He came prepared with a vast inventory of equipment and weaponry: a handgun, shotgun, and rifle; 600 rounds of ammunition; black powder, a stun gun, knives, pliers, wires, and wooden planks. He let 15 male students out of the schoolhouse as well as a pregnant woman and three parents with infants. Remaining with him were 10 young female students, ranging in age from 6 to 13. He tied up the 10 girls together. While he “appeared to have plans to molest [the] children” on account of bringing a bottle of sexual lubricant with him, the police arrived almost immediately and no signs of sexual assault were found later. Instead, as soon as the police arrived, Charles’ plans were thrown in disarray. He called his wife on his cellphone and told her for the first time about how he had molested his relatives when he was 12. He also told her he was surrounded by the police. He then proceeded to shoot his young hostages and kill himself.

In 2013, 7 years after Charles’s rampage and death, his mother Terri channeled her feelings of grief and guilt into helping others, including one of her son’s own victims. She spends time with and caring for 13-year-old Rosanna, who sits in a wheelchair and eats through a tube on account of Charles’s attack.

Eric Robert Rudolph is known today as “the Olympic Park Bomber” and a terrorist. Responsible for a string of anti-abortion and anti-gay bombings across the U.S. from 1996 to 1998, he is serving a life sentence at the ADX Florence supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.

Eric was born on September 19, 1966. His mother and father (who died in 1981) had extreme beliefs “ranging from hatred of Social Security numbers to a naïve faith in the curing powers of laetrile.” After her husband died in 1981, Eric’s mother Patricia moved herself, Eric, and Eric’s five siblings to Topton, North Carolina. In Topton, his mother — and subsequently Eric — became immersed in the Christian Identity movement, which is “a virulently anti-Semitic ‘religious’ sect that preaches that Jews are descended from Satan and that God made non-whites inferior to whites.” Followers are “fiercely opposed to race-mixing, abortion and homosexuality.” They also are “taught to shun birth certificates, Social Security numbers and marriage licenses,” and have “a taboo on antibiotics.”

A year after moving to North Carolina, Patricia and Eric traveled to Missouri and stayed for several months in a Christian Identity compound. Patricia spent time with Nord Davis, an Identity advocate who “advocated killing gays and those who engaged in mixed-race relationships.” She homeschooled Eric and his siblings except for one year when he attended ninth grade at Nantahala School. (During that one year attending school, he “wrote a class paper denying the Holocaust ever happened.”) In fact, Patricia said that she “was drawn to the [Christian Identity] group by the promise of home schooling.” She reportedly used homeschooling to “drill her brand of idealism and independence into her offspring with a vengeance,” teaching that “the government was  a threat to society” and her ideas about God had a “racist slant” with “overtones of the KKK and Nazis.”

After receiving a general equivalency diploma for high school, Eric briefly attended Western Carolina University. He dropped out after two semesters, though, and then enlisted in the Army in August 1987. After 1 1/2 years in the Army, he was discharged “for smoking marijuana.”

In the time between being discharged from the Army and his string of bombings, Eric grew “increasingly paranoid” about the government and society. Then on July 27, 1996, Eric detonated a bomb during the 1996 Summer Olympics at the Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta. The blast killed 1 person and wounded 111 others. His reason for doing so, he wrote, was “to confound, anger and embarrass the Washington government in the eyes of the world for its abominable sanctioning of abortion on demand.”

A year later, on July 16, 1997, Eric also bombed an abortion clinic in the Atlanta suburb of Sandy Springs, injuring 50 people. A mere month later, on February 21, 1997,  he bombed the Otherside Lounge, a lesbian bar in Atlanta, and injured 5 more people. His last attack was one year later on January 29, 1998, when he bombed an abortion clinic in Birmingham, Alabama, killing a police officer and critically injuring a nurse.

From 1998 until 2003, Eric became a fugitive, “hiding in the Nantahala National Forest of western North Carolina.” During those 5 years, Eric was featured on the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. At the time of his capture on May 31, 2003 in Murphy, North Carolina, Eric was “the nation’s most wanted domestic terrorist.” In fact, former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft called him ”the most notorious American fugitive on the FBI’s ‘Most Wanted’ list.”

Eric was finally captured in May of 2003 in North Carolina when a police officer “spotted Rudolph at about 4 a.m. behind a Save-a-Lot grocery store during a routine patrol.” In April 2005, Eric revealed his motives for all the attacks. After pleading guilty to the attacks, he issued an 11-page statement blaming them on “the legalization of abortion and ‘aberrant sexual behavior.’” Abortion and homosexuality, he explained, were to be met with “force if necessary.” He also said he had no regrets or remorse over the deaths he caused. In August 2005, Eric was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

In 1993, 19-year-old Angela Shannon hand-wrote a death threat to George Woodward, a Milwaukee doctor who performed abortions. The threat of violence might not have been newsworthy in itself, except that Angela is the daughter of Shelley Shannon (pictured above), the anti-abortion domestic terrorist from Grants Pass, Oregon who shot George Tiller in both arms outside his abortion clinic that same year.

Angela was born in 1974 to Rachelle Ranae “Shelley” Shannon in Washington state. Her birth father was married to another woman and Shelley married another man, David Shannon, later that year. In 1980 the Shannon family moved to Klamath Falls, Oregon. Angela’s mother Shelley was a “Christian wife and homeschooling mother,” and Angela and her later siblings were all homeschooled by Shelley. Shelley was introduced in 1988 to anti-abortion material from Last Days Ministries, a Christian commune in Texas that advocates “militancy against abortion” and uses a “language of violence” in their activism materials. Inspired by an Operation Rescue video at the first Right to Life meeting she attended, Shelley became a regular at clinic blockages across the U.S. By 1991 she began to “discuss violent action with other radical thinkers.” She edited a manual for Army of God, a network of Christian anti-abortion terrorists, and started corresponding with imprisoned terrorists. (Army of God claimed responsibility for several terrorist attacks in the 90′s perpetrated by Eric Robert Rudolph, himself a homeschooler.) Shelley considered Michael Griffin, who murdered abortion doctor David Gunn, to be ”the awesomest, greatest hero of our time.”

In April of 1992, Shelley began committing acts of arson against abortion clinics in Oregon. Her first target was the Catalina Medical Center in Ashland, Oregon. During her acts of arson, Shelley often brought Angela along as an accomplice. Indeed, by the age of 18 Angela had become ”a fellow anti-abortionist as well as a daughter,” who “would faithfully convey Shelley’s sentiments and her doctrine should the need arise.” (Angela was actually first arrested at the age of 14, during a blockage and protest against the Lovejoy Surgicenter.) Mother and daughter targeted clinics in Portland and Eugene as well, and also traveled to Sacramento, California and Reno, Nevada to napalm clinics.

In February of 1993, Angela arranged to meet a friend of hers that she met during an anti-abortion event at the Sacramento airport. While they visited, Angela gave the friend a sealed envelope and asked him to mail it for her because “she did not want the letter traced to her.” Her friend did as requested, and days later the envelope was received by George Woodward, a doctor who performed abortions at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The letter, opened first by George’s wife, said that if the doctor “had not ‘stopped killing’ by March 16, 1993, the writer would ‘stalk’ him down and harm him and his family.” It concluded with the following threat: “If I hear you are still killing when I get to town I will haunt you and your wife day and night and give you no peace. If you continue, I will hunt you down like any other wild beast and kill you.”

In September 1993, police searched Angela’s apartment and discovered material indicating her guilt in the death threat. She was sentenced several years later in 1997 to 4 years in prison. 2 years later Angela’s mother Shelley was also sentenced to 20 years in prison, declared by a judge to be ”a terrorist for firebomb attacks on women’s clinics in three states.” Shelley was already serving a sentence from 1993 for shooting George Tiller.

In 1988, during a 13-day stand-off with police, John Timothy Singer (in wheelchair, above) — son of infamous fundamentalist Mormon John Singer — shot and killed Lt. Fred House from the Utah Department of Corrections. The stand-off was prompted after John Timothy’s brother-in-law detonated 50 pounds of dynamite at a Latter Day Saints meetinghouse in an attempt to “resurrect” the elder John Singer, himself killed 9 years earlier during his own stand-off with police.

John Timothy Singer is the son of John and Vickie Singer. (Son will hereafter be referred to as “John Timothy,” father as simply “John.”) His grandfather, John’s father, was a Nazi who served in the Schutzstaffel (SS). John himself served in the Hitler Youth at the age of 10. John eventually moved to the U.S. (where he was originally born) and married Vicki. They were both Mormons who raised John Timothy along with 6 other siblings on a 2.5-acre farm and compound in Marion, Utah. In 1970 John was excommunicated from the Latter Day Saints Church due to his advocacy of polygamy. He continued his advocacy for years and in 1979 took a second wife, Shirley Black, who was still married to another man with her own 4 children.

In 1973 John and Vickie withdrew all their children, including John Timothy, from public school in order to homeschool them. Homeschooling was necessary for “shielding the children from a system tainted by sexual promiscuity, drug abuse and racial mixing.” While the decision to homeschool created tensions between the Singer family and the local school board, the Singers were allowed to homeschool for several years. In 1979, however, custody of John Timothy and the other children were withdrawn from John and Vickie after they were found guilty of child neglect and abuse. Vicki, however, blamed the verdict on “state authorities and church officials who were angry at [John's] practice of polygamy and refusal to send his children to public schools.” After he refused to give up custody, police came to his compound to arrest him. Refusing to surrender, John drew a gun and officers proceeded to shoot and kill him.

The death of their patriarch greatly impacted the rest of the Singer clan, including John Timothy and his brother-in-law, Addam Swapp, who married one of John Timothy’s sisters. On January 16, 1988, 9 years after the stand-off between their patriarch and authorities, Addam said he “received a divine revelation” and decided he could resurrect the patriarchy by bombing a public Latter Day Saint building. After doing so with 50 pounds of dynamite, Addam and “14 other members of his extended family” — including John Timothy — holed up in their compound, in a bizarre repetition of the 1979 incident. Police surrounded the compound once again, and the stand-off ended when John Timothy, while wheelchair-bound, ”fired a rifle as Lt. Fred House and another corrections officer prepared to release police dogs on the property.” John Timothy fired a total of 10 rounds, and Lt. House was struck and died.

In September 1988, John Timothy was charged with murdering a police officer and was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 5 years of probation. He expressed remorse for killing Lt. House but defended his actions. During his trial, his defense counsel described him as ”someone living one hundred years ago in terms of his background and education” due to his “intensely religious background” and being “confined at home.”  Numerous other members of the Singer family were also charged and sentenced after the stand-off. John Timothy was released from prison in 2006 and returned to Utah to serve parole.

In May 2013, 15-year-old Aza Vidinhar from West Point, Utah was babysitting 2 of his younger brothers, aged 4 and 10. When Aza’s mother returned home, she found the younger brothers dead, stabbed to death by Aza.

The Vidinhar family had 6 children, 4 of whom were adopted. Aza’s father was an engineer for the Air Force. They lived in “a wonderful neighborhood” where “kids are usually outside playing.” Aza was enrolled as a 9th grader at West Point Junior High as a member of the track team; in the school he was an honor student. However, his mother homeschooled him for other subjects. Aza was a quiet kid who had a speech impediment, was “socially awkward,” and kept to himself. Neighbors described him as “different” and said he was once found “throwing dozens of rocks over a fence.” While he was quiet and awkward, neither he nor any family members had a history of mental illness. Two years prior in 2011, Aza was in the news for running away from home.

On the day of the attack, Aza’s mother left him home alone with two younger siblings, Alex (10) and Benjie (4), while she took his other siblings to a dance recital. (Their father was away in another state.) Upon returning home, she found the dead bodies of the two children. Aza was nowhere to be seen. His adopted brothers later found him wandering miles away from home with traces of blood on his clothes.

Officials hesitated at first to charge Aza, though they arrested him and placed him in the Farmington Bay Youth Detention Center. As of August 2013, officials were determining whether Aza was fit to stand trial. In November 2013 he was charged with two counts of felony murder, with another hearing set for 2014.

On July 26, 2001, 14-year-old Brandon Warren from Kenly, North Carolina shot and killed his 13-year-old brother Bradley and his 19-year-old sister Marnie Rose. He then turned his gun on himself and committed suicide.

All of the Warren children — Bradley, Brandon, Marnie Rose, and their older brother Ellis (21) — were homeschooled by their parents, Boyd and Nissa Mae. The family had a history of interactions with social workers due to dysfunction and the children having visible bruises. In fact, in just the 2 months prior to the murder-suicide, social workers talked with the parents 11 times but “the Warrens routinely turned them away, forcing them to get a court order for each visit.” Their house reportedly had “rotting food, animal feces on the floor.” Shortly prior to the murder-suicide, Social Service inspectors had “warned the parents that if they didn’t clean up their home, they could lose their children.”

The Warren family’s troubled state, however, went back a decade. In 1991, the parents were convicted of child abuse in another state, Arizona, where they also homeschooled. After the conviction, the family moved to their current home in North Carolina.

On the day of the attack, Brandon accessed his mother’s .22-caliber rifle and used it to kill his siblings and then himself. A motive was never publicly stated. However, Nissa Mae’s reaction to losing three of her children was chilling: she told a detective that she would “rather God had them than Child Protective Services.”

While Brandon was ruled to have murdered his siblings and then committed suicide, Brandon’s parents were also charged in the case due to squalid living conditions. Boyd and Nissa Mae were both charged “with misdemeanor child abuse and storing firearms in a manner accessible to a child.”

Homeschool advocates immediately dismissed any connections between the Warren family murder/suicide and homeschooling. In April 2002, Jeff Townsend — president of North Carolinians for Home Education — said he “didn’t see any connections between home education and the teens’ deaths.” But in 2003, the case received heightened media attention due to a CBS report entitled, “A Dark Side to Home Schooling.” The report, which prominently featured Brandon Warren and his family, received the attention mainly because its title provoked a huge backlash from homeschooling communities. Later that year, Rep. Todd Akin — himself a homeschooling father from North Carolina, most recently known for his “legitimate rape” comments — spearheaded a signature-gathering effort and recruited 33 Congress members — 32 Republican, 1 Democrat — to publicly denounce the CBS report.