Son killes abusive father and gets 20 years in jail

Ok so I've watched this story about a millionaire father who was murdered by his own son also available on youtube.

"- What were Charlie's passions in life?

- Women. Money, sports and women."

A true loss for the world, right?!

"He seemed to find a certain bliss in taking the kids back to the bedroom and beating them with a belt." - says his ex-wife adding later that she too had harboured thoughts of killing her husband.

Charlie and his wife had 5 children, one girl got ran over by a car and later died.

Out of the remaining 4 one son committed suicide and another one went to live like a hermit barricading himself away from the world and putting several warnings around his broken down shack that nobody is welcomed. These two people - one who ended his life and one who practically withdrawn himself from the world add more weight to the testimony that the family was disfuncational. It was not just Darin (the one who killed the father) who was messed up.

In the comments on the CBS site we find one in support of the murdered father reading:

"I regreat that you did not put any of the good things about Charlie White in your report. There are those of of us who have experienced another side of Charlie than the one depicted in your story. True, he was wild and a womanizer, which women made it easy for him to be, but he could also be generous with his time, incredibly fun to be around, would play board games for hours and loved to have sing-a-longs around that white piano after an evening of partying with his friends in HSB. It is also true, he could be crude at times and obnoxious at other times but he had a magnanimous personality that made you just like to be around him. It is very sad that he is gone. More sad that it was at the hands of his son, Darin."

And here is where you can see some of his friends speaking positively about him.

So he was 'fun to be around' and party with, was he?
I couldn't care less that he was a womanizer. Consenting adults can do what they please with their own bodies. Only the fact that 'money, sports and women' were the three things that were said to be descriptive of his passions in life kind of isn't impressing. So he loved to have fun - I don't think that counts as a positive charachteristic. Who doesn't? That's the most primitive, basic drive humans and animals both have - the drive towards pleasurable experiences.

And that should make up for the way he was treating his children - those dependent on him, those who couldn't fight back when they were young, those he brought into this world who never asked to be born in the first place? I don't care how much fun he was to be around for his friends - those, who were with him of their own free will, who could fight back and leave any minute - I care first and foremost for his hostages - his children, who had to grow up with him and endure the verbal and physical abuse having no choice to up and leave when they were little.

And to be honest, an image of a millionaire getting his d*** sucked on his private golf field is kind of repulsive. I mean if people told us about his regular charities, his intelligence or ... I don't know... love for his dog at least - I mean, anything, just anything from the realm of the higher human emotions and intellect! Nothing... He loved to have fun. What a loss for the world. His friends are missing someone who threw parties for them. Prostitutes lost a source of income. Darn shame.

I love how George Carlin spoke of rich golfers btw.)))

Some commenters say the son could've just walked away once he was an adult instead of coming back to live with his father and endure more humiliation and abuse. Sometimes children of abusive parents manage to do that. But oftentimes you see them coming back again and again to their tormentors. Darin is not the first to exibit this behavior. Stockholm syndrome is illogical on the surface, too.

We seem to protect parents at the expense of their children, we probably even think that murdering your own parent is so much worse than murdering a stranger. Just look at the host interviewing the guy and saying 'Can you imagine what he went through as he watched his own son end his life'?

Yeah, he probably thought 'damn, I am dying at the hands of this piece of shit and my threesome planned for tomorrow is off'.

I mean, 'what the father went through'? Maybe for a few brief moments he got a taste of what his children were going through for years while living with him? Maybe he reaped what he saw?

Lastly, of course, one is left to wonder what caused Charlie White, the father, to turn out the way he did. Was he also a victim of abuse or just a sociopath who was born this way. And if he too was a victim of his parents and this is how he managed to survive and adjust then how much is he to blame?

These are difficult questions, but what I'm talking about here is consistency. Why should we only punish the child who became a murderer because of the treatment he got from his parents? When will abusive parents too start getting 20 years for messing up their kids for the rest of their lives? When will they at least be forced to pay for their psychotherapy? No, we just stop the psychological abuse when we come across it and let the parents go as if no harm was done. This lack of accountability and restraint is abhorrent. You call your child a 'useless piece of shit' - you should get fined, if repeated - a more severe punishment etc. This would maybe at least create some deterrent and if children suing their parents for maltreatment and psychological abuse was a common practice in our day and age it would probably prevent a lot of them from taking justice into their own hands.