You could be forgiven if, while perusing Twitter these days, you wondered for a moment whether you were taking in some Greek or Shakespearean tragedy.
“Fairfax County Police Chief Kevin Davis says the increase in homicides in the county is due to adult sons killing their parents,” read the tweet from local news station WUSA9.
That same day, across the river in Bethesda, Maryland, police announced the arrest of 20-year-old Elysee Koyangbo in the killing of his father David Beasley.
This could all be a tragic coincidence, and this foul crime is not a new story. It’s one of the oldest stories in the world. Zeus killed Cronos. Oedipus killed Laius. Hamlet killed his stepfather. Smerdyakov killed Fyodor Karamazov. Kylo Ren killed Han Solo.
But Davis sees a trend of patricide — a “plague” to be precise: “Since the beginning of 2021, the county has seen six homicide victims who have been murdered, allegedly, by adult sons inside their own homes,” reported WUSA.
“That’s what’s driving our homicides,” Davis explained. “That’s something that continues to plague the community.”
Plagues are infectious, of course, and they spread through a community. Neither the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention nor the FBI tracks patricides or matricides in real time, and so we do not know whether this plague is spreading or not.
Yes, Joel Gage in Oklahoma was arrested in February for killing his father, as was Kentucky man Timothy Paris. If not a plague, exactly, perhaps the rash of sons killing their fathers is the symptom of a plague: Historically, most patricides are men between the ages of 18 and 30.
And perhaps this plague is caused by the other plague — or our response to it. Young men isolated, less likely to marry, more likely to live at home, less likely to go off to school, might find their darkest demons stirred more than in normal times.
