"If authorities know what might have driven Mr. Lubitz, they have not made it public." - The Mind of Those Who Kill, and Kill Themselves - NYT
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"If authorities know what might have driven Mr. Lubitz, they have not made it public."
He was described, in the immediate aftermath of the Germanwings crash, as a cheerful and careful pilot, a young man who had dreamed of flying since boyhood.
But in the days since, it has seemed increasingly clear that Andreas Lubitz, 27, the plane’s co-pilot, was something far more sinister: the perpetrator of one of the worst mass murder-suicides in history.
If what researchers have learned about such crimes is any indication, this notoriety may have been just what Mr. Lubitz wanted.
The actions now attributed to Mr. Lubitz — taking 149 unsuspecting people with him to a horrifying death — seem in some ways unfathomable, and his full motives may never be fully understood. But studies over the last decades have begun to piece together characteristics that many who carry out such violence seem to share, among them a towering narcissism, a strong sense of grievance and a desire for infamy.
Adam Lankford, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Alabama, said that in his research on mass killers who also took their own lives, he has found “a significant number of cases where they mention a desire for fame, glory or attention as a motive.”
Before Adam Lanza, 20, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter, killed 20 children, six adults and himself in 2012, he wrote in an online forum, “Just look at how many fans you can find for all different types of mass murderers.”
Robert Hawkins, 19, who committed suicide after killing eight people at a shopping mall in Omaha in 2007, left a note saying “I’m gonna be famous,” punctuating the sentence with an expletive.
And Dylan Klebold, 17, of Columbine High School fame, bragged that the goal was to cause “the most deaths in U.S. history…we’re hoping. We’re hoping.”
“Directors will be fighting over this story,” Mr. Klebold said in a video made before the massacre.
If authorities know what might have driven Mr. Lubitz, they have not made it public. Prosecutors said last week that it was now clear that he planned the crash, researching ways to commit suicide and how to operate the cockpit door on his iPad.
Lufthansa, Germanwings’s parent airline, has said that Mr. Lubitz had reported suffering in the past from severe depression, and prosecutors have said he had talked to a counselor about suicide.
Yet mental health experts who study mass murder-suicides said that depression and thoughts of suicide, which are commonplace, fall far short of explaining such drastic and statistically rare acts.
“People want an easily graspable handle to help understand this, to blame something or scapegoat,” said Dr. James L. Knoll, the director of forensic psychiatry at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University.
But to zero in on depression is “a low-yield dead end,” he said, adding, “There’s something fundamentally different here, aside and apart from the depression, and that’s where we need to look.”
Serious mental illness, studies of mass killers suggest, is a prime driver in a minority of cases — about 20 percent, according to estimates by several experts. Far more common are distortions of personality — excesses of rage, paranoia, grandiosity, thirst for vengeance or pathological narcissism and callousness.
“The typical personality attribute in mass murderers is one of paranoid traits plus massive disgruntlement,” said Dr. Michael Stone, a forensic psychiatrist in New York who recently completed a study of 228 mass killers, many of whom also killed themselves.
“They want to die, but to bring many others down with them, whether co-workers, bosses, family members or just plain folk who are in the vicinity.”
Mr. Lubitz, Dr. Stone noted, now ranks among the deadliest of mass killers, in a league with Adilson Marcelino Alves, who in 1961 killed as many as 500 people in a circus fire in Brazil, or Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, who killed 168 people and injured more than 680 others.
Dr. J. Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist who consults on threat assessment for universities and corporations, said perhaps the most salient feature of mass killers was their belief that they had been wronged.
“What’s become clear over the past 30 years of research is that there’s virtually always a personal grievance that will start a person on a pathway to mass murder,” Dr. Meloy said.
The target of the grievance, he said, could be a person, a company, an institution or a government, “but it is felt personally and typically involves a major loss or anticipated loss.”
In Mr. Lubitz’s case, whether he knew or cared who would die as result of his actions remains unclear.
“For some people, the targets are very much the purpose of the attack,” Dr. Meloy said, referring to mass killers. “I think for other cases, where the purpose of the attack is, for example, primarily to gain notoriety, then the targets in a sense become the means to that end. One could think of them as being collateral damage.”
Murder-suicides make up only a small percentage of homicides in the United States, accounting for about 1,000 to 1,500 deaths a year, according to a 1992 epidemiological study. The vast majority are committed by men and most are domestic violence cases: an estranged husband, for example, who kills his wife, girlfriend or lover.
Suicides accompanied by the killing of multiple strangers represent an even tinier fraction of homicides over all. But they seem to differ in significant ways from their domestic counterparts, researchers said.
In domestic cases, depression does appear to play a significant role. A recent psychological autopsy study of murder-suicides in Dallas, most of which involved domestic violence, found that 17 of the 18 perpetrators met the diagnostic criteria for major depression or some other form of the illness.
The study, conducted by Dr. Knoll and Dr. Susan Hatters Friedman, a forensic psychiatrist at Case Western, found that a majority of the killers also abused alcohol or drugs. Four had a family history of suicide. The study has been submitted to a scientific journal.
Domestic murder-suicides are almost always impulsive — committed in fits of rage or jealousy, often enabled by the presence of a firearm. In contrast, killers who take groups of strangers as targets plan their crimes carefully, waiting for an opportunity to act.
And while domestic murder-suicides are frequently fueled by alcohol, people who plan ahead to kill themselves and others seem concerned about keeping a clear mind for the task ahead.
George Sodini, 48, who killed three people and injured nine others at an aerobics class in a Pittsburgh suburb in 2009, said as much in a blog he kept, detailing his plans.
“I haven’t had a drink since Friday at about 2:30,” he wrote on Monday, Aug. 3, the day before the massacre. “Total effort needed. Tomorrow is the big day.”
An airplane may seem an unusual vehicle for mass murder or self-destruction. But as a pilot’s method of choice, several psychiatrists said, it is perhaps not that surprising.
In a study of 85 aircraft suicides from 1965 to the present, Dr. Hatters Friedman and Dr. Chris Kenedi, a psychiatrist at Duke, found that 18 of the crashes appeared to be murder-suicides, 15 perpetrated by pilots. The study looked at general aviation and commercial airline crashes, and included the deliberate crashes by pilots of a Mozambique Airlines jet in 2013 and an EgyptAir plane in 1999.
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was not among those studied, although pilot suicide was one theory about the jetliner’s disappearance last year.
“Not all of them had a history of mental illness,” Dr. Hatters Friedman said of the pilots. “What keeps coming up is family stresses, relationship stress, work stresses, financial stresses.”
In several cases, the pilots, all men, seemed to be acting on grievances. One crashed a plane into his former mother-in-law’s house, another into the offices of the pilot’s employer. A third pilot flew a Piper Dakota into a building occupied by the Internal Revenue Service.
Yet few murder-suicides are as chilling as those involving the deliberate crashing of jetliners with hundreds of passengers aboard.
In a mall or in a school, Dr. Knoll noted, people can run and take cover.
“On a plane, your number of victims is set,” he said, “and nobody can go anywhere.”
Correction: April 8, 2015
A news analysis article on Tuesday about research into the characteristics of mass killers who also take their own lives misstated the source of a statement about the mental health of Andreas Lubitz, the pilot of a Germanwings jet who killed himself and 149 others in the French Alps last month. Prosecutors — not Lufthansa, Germanwings’s parent airline — said he had talked to a counselor about suicide.
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WASHINGTON — F.B.I. agents are on the front lines of the fight to protect the United States from Islamic terrorists, Russian hackers and Chinese spies.
Now they have something far more personal to worry about: their waists.
For the first time in 16 years, the F.B.I. is requiring that its agents pass a fitness test.
“The lives of your colleagues and those you protect may well depend upon your ability to run, fight and shoot, no matter what job you hold,” James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, said in October in an internal memo to agents that was obtained by The New York Times.
The agents, Mr. Comey said, are symbols to Americans of what is “right and good” about the country. “I want you to look like the squared-away object of that reverence. I want the American people to be able to take one glance at you and think, ‘THERE is a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.’ ”
The fitness tests, which started at the end of last year, are a return to a tradition begun by the F.B.I.’s first director, J. Edgar Hoover, who obsessed about his agents’ weight, as well his own considerable girth. More significantly, the tests are a response to concerns throughout the bureau about how its transformation after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, has put more stress on the agents and given them less time for fitness.
After the attacks, many agents who were accustomed to working normal hours and had spent their entire careers investigating crimes like gang violence or drugs — work that took them into the field to make arrests — began working 20-hour days as the F.B.I. changed its primary mission to fighting terrorism. Many agents were sent to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Around the same time, the bureau drastically expanded its efforts in two areas that emphasized long desk hours: cybersecurity and intelligence.
The increased demands manifested themselves in different ways. Some agents put on weight, while some suffered from anxiety and depression. “You could see that health and fitness was not the priority it used to be,” said Zachary Lowe Jr., the chief of instruction at the F.B.I.’s academy in Quantico, Va., which created the test.
The F.B.I.’s 13,500 agents worldwide have until October to take it and the results will be included on their annual performance reviews. The test is primarily designed to ensure that agents can move quickly during a mass shooting, chase suspects and restrain them if they resist arrest. There are no weight limits, but agents have to achieve certain requirements in four different exercises depending on their age and gender. The threshold to pass is not nearly as high as it is for military commandos or hostage rescue-team members.
For instance, male agents ages 30 to 39 must perform 24 push-ups without stopping and 35 situps in a minute. They have to sprint 300 meters in less than a minute and run a mile and a half in 12 minutes and 53 seconds.
The most challenging part of the test, agents said, is that they get only a five-minute break between exercises. Men are typically better at the push-ups than situps, but it is the reverse for women. Everyone struggles with the sprint.
So far, there has not been a stampede to take the test, including at the Washington office, where only 75 of 800 agents have subjected themselves to it (all passed). Although the F.B.I. has never had the kind of fitness culture of, say, the Marines, the agents are competitive, and many who have put off the test are working for higher scores.
“It’s really not that hard,” said Jennifer Schick, a public corruption agent at the F.B.I.’s Washington field office who also oversees fitness training and tests. “Most agents wouldn’t be satisfied in just coming out and making the minimum. They would be embarrassed by that, and that is why they’re waiting.”
For the first time in 16 years, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is requiring that its agents pass a fitness test, consisting of four exercises separated by a five-minute break.
Minimum fitness requirements for F.B.I. agents
Minimum fitness requirements for F.B.I. agents
To help them prepare, the F.B.I. is offering training sessions like one on the National Mall at sunrise on Friday, when Ms. Schick stood over a dozen agents who did push-ups until their bodies collapsed to the ground in exhaustion. They did lunges to build leg strength and ran wind sprints. “Unfortunately, some people told me they are embarrassed to come and show other people how out of shape they are, and that’s a shame because they are the ones who really need it,” Ms. Schick said.
Agents faced mandatory tests in the 1980s and 1990s, amid concerns that law enforcement officers faced additional health issues because of the stresses of their jobs. The bureau stopped making the test mandatory in 1999, as it begun a study of its effectiveness. In the years after the 2001 attacks, it was pretty hard to get anyone at headquarters to give much attention to fitness.
Mr. Comey got the idea for it when he visited all of the F.B.I.’s field offices after becoming the director in 2013. Morale was low, and Mr. Comey began asking his deputies about the types of fitness requirements the agents had to meet. They said that fitness standards were strictly enforced for new agents, but that the same was not done for current agents. Mr. Comey believed that reinstituting the test would send the message about the importance of fitness, stress management and work-life balance. He does not have to take the test because he is not an agent.
The bureau began formally training its agents in the 1920s, but it is not clear how much of that included physical fitness, according to John Fox, the F.B.I.’s chief historian.
But by the 1950s, Hoover began agitating about his weight and the weight of his agents. According to “Hoover’s F.B.I.: The Inside Story by Hoover’s Trusted Lieutenant,” by Cartha D. DeLoach, Hoover was getting dressed for a dinner at the White House when he noticed his tuxedo pants were tight. The next day, he began a diet, eliminating starches and desserts but continuing to drink Jack Daniel’s.
The same day he started his diet — apparently believing that his own weight problems were a sign that his agents needed to get in shape — he sent out a dispatch to agents across the country, telling them that they would face surprise weigh-ins.
“Most agents were in excellent physical condition and well within the prescribed limits,” wrote Mr. DeLoach, the Hoover lieutenant. “But many agents — particularly former college or professional athletes who had not stayed in condition — found it tough going.”
At headquarters, Hoover took it upon himself to weigh in the bureau’s top executives, including on at least one occasion Mr. DeLoach. “All of us were overweight,” Mr. DeLoach said. “Hoover watched the weigh-in, glowering at us in disgust.” But Hoover, he said, “never got on a scale for anyone, and we noticed that he didn’t seem to get any smaller around the waist either.”
Even in his final years as director, Hoover would not let the issue go, according to “The Real J. Edgar Hoover: For the Record,” by another one of his longtime deputies, Ray Wannall. At a banquet for retired agents in 1971, Hoover was honored and he gave some remarks. “Taking note somewhat obliquely of his weight program,” Mr. Wannall wrote, “he looked over the audience of ex-agents no longer burdened by the program and said, ‘I recognize the faces but the bodies are not familiar.’ ”
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