Studying Kids Who Kill | The Story of God

Following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in the United States, we were asked by the parents of children who lost their children there to analyze brains of kids that we've studied who've killed other people versus kids in prison who've not. When we did that analysis, I wasn't sure that we would find anything that different, but we really did.

We had, you know, about 25 kids that had killed somebody else, and we compared them to 135 kids who hadn't. We were able to show that their brains are different even at the individual subject level. Like if you were a judge and you wanted to know, "Is this a high-risk kid or a low-risk kid?" we can say, "This up there's a high-risk kid," and that can be kind of scary because we now have a tool that can help us understand or can help predict the worst type of things that we all want to prevent, a homicide or death.

When we understand the systems of the brain that predict these bad things, that are different in people who commit these bad crimes, it gives us an opportunity to try to develop a treatment for that, a way of addressing it. If I injured my arm and this muscle gets atrophied, just like these certain areas of their brain are atrophied, I might be able to develop a treatment program that remediates that atrophy and fixes it.

That's the type of treatments we're trying to develop that help promote growth or development in these areas. The goal is to get them into a program that minimizes the risk, that helps to train those systems and develop those systems. Some sort of treatment that might actually help prevent them from doing that again.

We had no budget, and we may be a Hollywood budget. We had enough money to span thousands and thousands of at-risk kids. We might be able to tell you that these are the highest risk kids, but even that group of kids, all of them aren't going to commit a homicide. But maybe they still need help.

So if you can identify the highest risk kids with whatever science you can, then we should be developing programs to help work with those high-risk kids.