Like many I’ve been constantly refreshing news and Twitter feeds over the past couple of days, going back and forth between the deadening horror of it all. I don’t know if I have a lot to add to the other moving and profound takes that I’ve already seen, but one dimension to this that I haven’t seen discussed:  

I’ve already written on the Amish community’s moving response to a similar nihilistic massacre in their own community. Now, although the theology on this is clear, I would not personally expect any of the victims’ families to extend the same kind of forgiveness to the killer. I don’t know if I could forgive somebody who killed my own family members, and that is their own decision to make. It’s between them and God, and I won’t think less of them if they choose not to given the horror of what happened. 

However, regardless of their relationship with the memory of the man who killed them, by all accounts there is another family who is facing a similar if not greater horror. One of the central tenets of our theology is that we only have to answer for our sins, we do not inherit them from our parents. Assuming that that man’s family was not involved in this atrocity, they are also victims here. 

While the Latter-day Saint families affected have and will receive an outpouring of support, and rightfully so, this family will receive little such comfort. My own writing can’t do justice to the special kind of hell they might be feeling when your loved one dies in such a way that even privately mourning them seems inappropriate, so I’ll quote Orson Scott Card’s moving post, written as only Card can, about the similar situation of the family of Charlie Kirk’s killer:

That father, those parents, face a grief even greater, I believe, than the grief of the widow and children Charlie Kirk has left behind, who will grow up being proud of their father’s legacy, sharing in the glow of the love so many strangers had and have for him. But the assassin’s family will live with the grief of his choice, without remedy, remembering when he was little and they had so much hope for him, and now facing the loss of hope because he closed all the doors of honor for himself. And yet I know, I know, that they still love their son. Because that is a love that cannot be broken, though the loving heart may break.

Charlie Kirk does not need my prayers for his soul, though my wife and I are praying for his widow and children. Yet I also pray fervently for the family of the assassin, who cannot be comforted or assuaged.

By all accounts the shooter’s family has already had a rough life. His son was born with “a rare genetic disorder in which the pancreas releases too much insulin, forcing numerous surgeries and hospital stays,” and they were forced to revert to GoFundMe to pay their medical bills. I’m not mentioning  this to incur sympathy for the killer, but to remind people that somewhere there is a sickly grade-schooler and his newly single mother whose father and husband is all over the news, but who are just as innocent as the members killed in the meetinghouse, and we should remember them in our prayers as victims in all of this as well.