What the fuck is wrong with people. Goddam.

I don't think intrinsic human heartlessness is the issue; from the sounds of things, this guy was fried well beyond normal metering.

Rather, what was wrong with this specific human. There are parts of the brain which enable us to experience empathy and other things which make us sociable. Some people lack them, others, such as a kid my dad treated (after he burned down an apartment complex) have them damaged by violence, tumors, etc. It's actually kind of chilling that there are mechanical answers to ramix's question.

When I was a divorce lawyer I had a client who had four children. She'd had a violent arranged marriage and it took a lot for her to break out of it, due to social and cultural pressure. She stayed in the marital home with the children, and her husband had access (visitation).

One Saturday he came to collect them, put them all in the car outside her house, got in, locked the doors, then threw petrol over himself and the children and lit a match. In front of her.

The thing was, she and I (and his own lawyer) knew he would do something one day, we didn't know what and she thought it would be violence towards her, but he decided to do something that would hurt her far more than that.

But the law is reactive, not proactive, so you can't get an injunction against someone unless they've actually done something first to stop them from doing it again. There's usually nothing that can be done to predict or prevent this sort of thing.

It's a lot more common than you might think, men killing their children to spite the ex-wife.

In Toronto a few years ago there was a case of a man dropping his five-year-old daughter off an overpass and onto the 401, and then jumping himself. He called his ex on his cellphone to tell her what he was doing before he did it.

He died. The little girl survived, though she was seriously injured. But way to screw up any relationship she will ever have with a man.

Wow. What a nutcase. I can't imagine doing that. Killing a spider is my limit. Or a mosquito maybe.

It's got a murky trail of biology behind it, as do infanticide and abuse. Obviously, we are usually better than our base animal instincts, but it's some relief to my mind to know that human are not possessed of some special evil in these areas.

"Luong had a crack cocaine problem..." There's your answer.

Oh those poor babies. How awful. I can't even think about this. I can't.

My first thought was, the short answer to your question is "mental illness."

Crack is a hell of a drug.

Yep, it's one hell of a drug. That woman who ran over 50 people with her car at a church festival was also on crack.

Crack is whack!

I still shudder when thinking about the last moments of Susan Smith's two boys, as the car they were in sunk to the bottom of the lake with 'Mommy' outisde and just a few feet from shore, or little Noah Yates, the last of five children to by drowned in a bath tub, trying to flee from the murderous grasp of his mother.

There's been a case on here since Fathers' day before last, where an aggrieved ex-husband drove his car, containing three young kids, into a dam and drowned them all. He's been claiming it was an accident, but his story seems dubious at best.

The pressworthy part of it all being that the incident occurred on Fathers' day, and for the month or so afterwards, the papers were full of sympathetic stories about this poor man who had accidentally drowned his own kids on Fathers' day.

As it happened, the first driver along after the bloke had put his car in the dam was all ready to dive in to save the kids, and the father was spending the time saying "Oh no, they're all gone, let's not bother about any rescue attempts...." (and I'm pretty sure there's no crack in Winchelsea)

So, yeah, I guess what I'm saying is: Absolutely. People are, by and large, a pack of arseholes.

Why did he do it? To destroy his ex-wife's life, forever. It's not just the crack, though that would have contributed to delusional thinking and aggression, and it's not necessarily that he's a simple sociopath either. He is one of those people who sees his family as extensions of his ego, to be used or destroyed as he saw fit.

The pity of it all, as somebody once said.

or little Noah Yates, the last of five children to by drowned in a bath tub, trying to flee from the murderous grasp of his mother.

Though Andrea Yates was suffering from post-partum psychosis, so not quite the same thing as the man who kills his children to punish his wife.