273: Point Blank #5: What if you were the sister of the gunman?
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Today's episode is part five, the finale of our limited series, Point Blank, featuring stories of people impacted by the spree killing of Rancho Tehama, California, in 2017. In last week's episode, we heard from Jesse Sanders, a victim of the shooter Kevin Jansen Neal, and also a hero who made himself a target.

drawing the gunfire to himself and away from the elementary school. Since Jesse's episode aired last week, a groundswell of our wonderful listeners on both the Facebook group and Instagram page inspired the creation of a GoFundMe to help Jesse and his family. The link to the GoFundMe is published in the show notes. It's on our Facebook group and on our Instagram page, or you can look it up on the GoFundMe site.

under Help Jesse Sanders Recover. 100% of the proceeds will be gifted to Jesse, so please donate if you can, and even if you can't, you're welcome to send him a message of support and we'll deliver those to him as well with the funds collected. A special thanks to all of you for reaching out to help Jesse, and to Ellen Westberg for organizing the effort on behalf of listeners.

Today, for our final episode of the Point Blank series, we'll hear from Sheridan Orr. Sheridan is the sister of Kevin Jansen Neal, the shooter who committed the atrocities at Rancho Tehama. Although she's been previously quoted and interviewed in the media, this is her most in-depth recounting of her own experience growing up with her brother, the changes she and her family witnessed and tried to manage, and her attempts to make sense of the devastating and sustained impacts of this massacre.

In today's episode, what if you were the sister of the gunman? And then you are left with your own thoughts. How could somebody who had the same upbringing, the same DNA as you, could wreak so much havoc? You're left with a lot of questions about who you are. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You're listening to This Is Actually Happening with our special limited series, Point Blank.

Episode 273 Point Blank Part 5 What if you were the sister of the gunman?

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My family has been in North Carolina for quite some time, and we kind of won the geographic lottery to grow up in the town that we did.

IBM had moved their headquarters to Cary, North Carolina. They created Research Triangle Park, which, you know, now is home to some of the largest companies in the world and groundbreaking research. So a lot of those resources just kind of flowed into the town that we lived in. And our schools were one of the first with computers.

We were just a normal suburban family. I mean, we had the same little brick front house that everybody had. And we got to go to programs at Duke and Chapel Hill and NC State. I couldn't have thought of a better place to grow up.

My mom is just a really intelligent woman, and I was so grateful to have learned from her. She was a chemistry teacher at the local high school, and my father was also a chemist. So every single time, like, we would sit down to the table, we would have to tell him, like, hey, what's the chemical compound for salt? And there were a lot of H2O jokes around our house.

My mom, in the summers, would always do these experiments with us. Neighborhood kids would come over and we would build volcanoes. And we had a lot of great memories like that. And, you know, learning and education were always super important to us.

My mom stayed home with me and she would dress me in like my Sunday dresses to just go out and do the most basic things. I was like her little doll and we had so much fun. And my grandparents had a big farm and they raised puppies. So they raised hunting beagles, which is why I always have had just a deep love for dogs and especially beagles.

Those were just such a wonderful time. And we would go out onto the farm and we would pick our vegetables. And it was really a bucolic way of life. Our parents are both really intelligent and hardworking. My mom was very, very hands-on.

My father was a Green Beret and an Army Ranger, and so he was very business. He was very matter-of-fact, and it was a nice balance, actually. My dad had a job that he traveled a lot, so he wasn't around as much, but some of the things that really shaped me the most came from my father.

One of the things that he told me is always invest in your education and be learning because that's the one thing that no one can ever take away from you. He also told me like a really balanced life has five things. You need a spiritual element. You need a physical element. You need something to keep you intellectually curious. You need something that you're passionate about and your purpose. You have to define that and you have to make time for fun.

You have to enjoy your life because you only get one shot. When I was four, Kevin was born. I thought he was just the cutest thing I had ever seen. He was my real-life doll, the same way my mom dressed me up. And then two years later, my little sister was born. So it was the three of us. Growing up, I think I was always curious, and I wanted to learn everything that I could possibly learn.

My nose was in a book every single chance I could get. I mean, I just always wanted to be learning. And it became a lifelong passion for me to read. I liked to swim and we were at the pool from the minute it opened to the minute it closed. And I was so excited when Kevin became old enough to do that with me. So he was on the swim team like when he was four years old and he was the cutest little thing.

And then he started skating with me. I think he could skate by the time he was three or four, and he was far better at it than I was. But he was just playful and fun, and we had that really close bond, you know, that had started when he was a baby. I thought he was my baby. Kevin was just always so eager to do and learn, and we just had a lot of imaginative play.

One time I was actually skating outside and my parents had one of those 80s Volvos that was built like a tank. I was skating around the car and the door was cracked just enough.

I was dragging my hand along the car and my hand got stuck in the door and then I fell. So like my hand stayed in the door, but my body was on the ground. So it did quite a bit of damage to that hand. And I mean, it was very, very mangled looking. And Kevin held that hand while they took me to the emergency room. And I don't know how I would have done it without him.

We went to the beach one summer and it was down on Hilton Head and they have this little place on the water and they had this like entertainment for children. And they were like, who has a special skill in this group? And Kevin raised his hand and he burst out into opera and started singing Figaro. And it was quite good. I mean, people were stunned. Our parents were stunned.

Kevin was kind of the darling of the family as a child. He was just a delightful kid. We spent so much time on skates and in the water that the natural thing was for Kevin to take up skateboarding because that was all the rage. There was a lot of building going on in our area, and so they started building half-pikes when he was like six or seven, and he was skateboarding on those.

So by the time he was nine or 10, he was an amazing skateboarder. And I mean, he would skateboard on anything and it was a delight to watch him. And then he also got into motorcycles. My guy friends would be like, he is absolutely fearless. He would take the bike on anything, literally anything. He was fearless.

But skateboarding was his really great passion, that and music. And he was a supremely talented guitarist and drummer.

And so he played all the time and he was absolutely passionate about his guitars. And, you know, the rest of my family is incredibly musically talented. My mom is a great pianist and I am not even allowed to sing Christmas carols because I'm so bad. But I get to be the professional audience and I'm grateful for that.

Things were very idyllic. I mean, I couldn't have asked for a better childhood. And then when I went to middle school is kind of when just everything changed. Like it was almost like we were a completely different family.

Kevin was, he was a fearless skateboarder and there were no helmets or wrist guards or anything. And he had just a series of head injuries on the half pipe. He was skating on rails and he would hit his head on those or the cement when he was practicing new tricks. And he would skateboard behind cars, you know, being towing him and crash and

That fearless nature of his, just, I probably count 12 head injuries that he had just in daily skating. He would come back and he would be kind of beaten up, but he could do stunts and tricks that nobody in our town could do. After Kevin started having these head injuries and skateboarding, his behavior changed. He became more aggressive and

But I thought maybe that was just kind of the culture of skateboarding. I mean, I didn't understand that maybe his personality was changing because he was getting into puberty and definitely was much more with an edgier crowd. But I didn't notice the just massive change until after the last injury happened.

When I first could drive, they had called me from the half pipe. Somebody had to come get Kevin and take him to the doctor because he had hit his head quite badly. I drove him to the doctor's office and Kevin was having memory issues at that point and he was 12.

The pediatrician said, you're going to need to get him to the hospital right now. And he was quite sick all over my car and unfocused eyes. I just I was terrified. I've never been so terrified in my whole life. And I just remember him holding my hand when I had had the my skating accident. And I was like, I'm going to do this. I'm going to get him there.

So we got to the hospital and they didn't really have a whole lot that they could do at that time. They just x-rayed his head multiple times and they were like, well, we don't know. You know, it looks like a concussion. Just take him home. But he was just never the same. Kevin had started to have outbursts.

I think the first one that I remember, our dog passed away and Kevin was still in elementary school and the whole town was looking for him. He had run away from school in the middle of the day because he was just so distraught over that dog. Kevin just was more sensitive at that point.

He just couldn't really regulate his emotions in a way that seemed normal. After that, he never could stand light and noise very well. The noise changed. The noise changed in our house. His room was on the downstairs, and my room was on the upstairs with my younger sister, and he just could not stand the noise. And he would just scream at us for walking around,

One time I had a boyfriend over and we were washing his clothes because he was at college and Kevin couldn't stand the noise of the washing machine. And he just poured bleach on that guy's clothes. And then he got a little nocturnal because I think the light bothered him so much. So he would be playing the guitar and the drums late into the night, but then angry with us for walking around just doing our daily task.

It started to create a lot of friction and it was really, really tough to live in that environment. Like there were sometimes we just called him the troll under the bridge, like don't wake him. And so I started to spend a lot of time out of the house. My parents started to really change too because they didn't know what to do with Kevin and

You know, my dad's approach was very military, like, get your act together, straighten up and fly right. And my mom's was much more nurturing. So that created a huge schism between them of how to address it. Kevin started to struggle to read, and they were like, well, you know, it must be dyslexia. I mean, nobody knew anything about concussions or head injuries at that time. So, you know, they tried to treat him for dyslexia.

They took him to Duke, which we're so fortunate to have great hospitals and great programs around us to support us. They really did everything scientifically that they knew to do, and they didn't know what else to do.

He started to have more and more problems in school. He was completely a truant because I can't even imagine what it must have been like for him if he did have a head injury to try to sit in a class, try to read, try to be quiet. There would be times my mom was like, I got to leave school because I got to go get Kevin. He's on the roof of the school. It became even more problematic because he just became defiant.

Like, he would throw rocks at police cars and, like, not in a just delinquent way, just for something to do, I guess. And so he became quite destructive.

Again, my parents didn't know what to do. They had the local police chief come over and talk to him and try to do, you know, at the time in the 80s, scared straight was a big approach. And so they tried that and it didn't work. And, you know, soon he just couldn't go to school. So Kevin kind of didn't go to school anymore after the ninth grade. He got his driver's license and he was always mechanically inclined.

And so they sent him to learn to be an auto mechanic. And he was actually quite good. He worked on import cars, especially German cars. Kevin was excellent with them. He would buy these rundown cars and fix them up. But the downside to that is he drove like a maniac everywhere.

My mom, I would say 95% of her energy after that went to try to find some way to bring back the old Kevin. My mom was always trying to find those fixes to bring him back and make him happy and make him a successful part of society. And it really was her life's work.

As a teenager, I just could not get my head around the unfair expectations in our house. When you grow up with a sibling who has a mental illness, the expectations for me were far harder to

It became difficult for me to do something that I thought was great and to have that not really matter. And then, you know, obviously Kevin was struggling so much and just basic things like putting the dishes in the dishwasher were something my mom was praising him for.

But, you know, now I can look back and go, you know, if you have a child that's struggling, like any little sign that they're trying is something worth celebrating. She was doing the absolute best that she could do and it wasn't good enough. And by trying to help one child, she was losing another.

He was the king of our house. And I just didn't think it was fair for him to be that person. And I was very outspoken about that. And he did not appreciate it at all. I didn't like that he was controlling our lives. I wanted our old life back. And I say that Kevin was like a tyrant, but there were moments where he wasn't.

The thing that we always kind of bonded on was music. Like, oh, ACDC has a new album. I can't wait to go get it. Or like, that's what we would give each other for gifts. And we would talk about music or we would talk about our friends. But it was becoming more and more intermittent. And I got scared of him. As that happened, my parents started to go very, very different ways.

Obviously, they had different issues and other issues that I didn't know about, but they divorced. And I think that was a big part of it, is they just could not agree on what the right approach was for our family. My parents got divorced my freshman year in college. Kevin would have been ninth grade school.

When my parents divorced, it was pretty devastating on quite a few levels. And how to respond to Kevin certainly was at the heart. My dad had remarried, and my mom, I think, resented some of that. Just felt like she was doing it alone. And then she remarried, and that was a disaster for me.

So then it was three women kind of living with Kevin, who was the troll underneath our bridge in our house. We were just in no position to control Kevin at all. I actually missed a lot of the outbursts because I was in college. But I would hear about them. You know, he would just tear up and down our street.

I would go home for the holidays and, you know, it was don't walk around, don't make any noise. I can hear you. Then I would start inventing reasons that I couldn't come home in the summers. You know, I actually didn't want people to know that that's what our house had become.

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I spent a lot of time with my friends, and I was very, very social when I was with them. But also, I guess I'm what you call an extrovert introvert. On the introvert side, I go into what I call the cave. And the cave is where I have my nose in the book. And I didn't learn until later that an obsessive reading actually is a trauma response. I didn't know that. I've always thought it was just because of my curiosity. ♪

One of the things that happened to me pretty early on, I still struggle with it pretty mightily, is I don't sleep well. And then I've just had terrible stomach issues, which, you know, at that time I didn't really realize it was anxiety because I had lived my life at such a highly attuned state that I

it was like just the physical stress of constantly being on high alert. So that started to take its toll on me and it's something I still struggle with today. But I also had a gift for

When I look back on it, it's probably what makes me good at my job today because I had learned to try to read the tea leaves of the emotions in our house. Like I could literally start to feel when the molecules were off.

I almost at times felt I was psychic because I could just see what was getting ready to happen. And so I became so hyper observant of everything around me so I would know when I needed to escape.

Kevin ended up going to a great local music college. He got in, even though he just had a GED, just sheerly on the talent of his guitar playing. But he had a terrible time. Despite the talent that he had, there was some incident with one of the professors there. I don't know the whole story of that. All I know is mom said that he could not go back

So that's where he went and got a certification to be a mechanic. And then he started having some shaking with his hands where he couldn't do that.

Because of that shaking, he couldn't really play the guitar the way he wanted to. So it just became a series of unfortunate events with Kevin. And he couldn't get along with the neighbors at the first house that my mom helped him rent. And it was always came back to the senses. Like his senses had gotten so heightened.

He could smell things that I could not smell, and they would make him physically nauseous. He could hear sounds that most people would just ignore. They were just ear-splitting to him, I guess. Kevin started, I guess, self-medicating really early on. I know he was smoking pot by the time he was in the sixth grade, and my friends were doing that too, so it just seemed kind of harmless to

But he really started to smoke a lot of pot. And I think that's one of the main reasons he wanted to move to California. Several times he had gotten caught with that and had to do community service. And he was like, well, I actually really want to move to California. It's a place he always wanted to move. And it was his dream to move there.

After I got out of college, I was able to get a job in technology. And it was like I found my home and my people. And I just loved my work. I got married and I had my own son who's just a wonderful kid. And my life changed because all of a sudden I could see things through my mom's lens that I had never really understood. Fortunately, I had a great husband.

And we had so much fun. Like, I never knew what fun was until you watch your kid walk. And you get to teach him to swim and read. And it was just such a delight. Kevin actually really took to my son. And he really liked him.

So I spent really the next period of my life raising my son and trying to build a career. And Kevin had a job working on cars. He had gotten a small house in kind of a rural area. And so he was able to play his guitar as loud as he wanted. My mom was able to give some more energy to her grandson, her first grandson. And she's a wonderful grandmother.

I had thought we were on just an upward trend. Kevin was in North Carolina at that time. He'd gotten a little house. Had a very small issue with the neighbors. He started to have kind of weird stories. Like, they just seemed very, very far-fetched. Just the stories would get wilder and wilder.

You know, Kevin knew a local politician and now he was in a fight with this local celebrity and he didn't like Kevin and so Kevin needed to leave. Or this guy who had no idea who we were would come and get Kevin.

So like the paranoia started at this point. And I thought maybe at that time he had just changed drugs. Like he had moved beyond just smoking pot to something more sinister. And it started to sound like meth. His mental health had deteriorated to the point where he just had really crazy stories.

Kevin got a girlfriend when he was living out in the North Carolina country, and that was Barb. And she's from a very nice family here. And they had a weird relationship, I always thought. It was more friendly, but they seemed to enjoy a lot of the same outdoor activities. They both really loved dogs and animals.

I don't know how she put up with Kevin's kind of antics, but she was very quiet. And I didn't know at that time that maybe I should be worried about, like, maybe her life had kind of become that you have to be quiet when I need you to be quiet. I just didn't know. I thought that was kind of how she was.

My mother talked to Barb on the phone quite a bit. And like, especially when Kevin would be especially wound up, you know, Barb was really supporting them. I mean, she was working at a pizza place. And I think my mom felt an obligation to try to help Barb. But Barb was just a very quiet, stoic person that just kind of seemed to easily go with the flow.

Kevin told my mom that he needed to leave because this local celebrity was just making it horrible for him and he couldn't have his job anymore. And then they decided they were moving to California together. And when they packed up the U-Haul and did it and Kevin was driving behind them, I really was hopeful. I was hopeful that they would find their place in the world.

My mom had helped him sell his other house, get a little house there. They moved to a town that I think is adjacent to Rancho Tehama. And I think Kevin was the happiest he had been for a long time. He ran in the mountains every day and he was very active and he liked the more relaxed lifestyle. He felt, I think, at home. He really loved it there.

But the stories were getting wilder. Like there was one where he couldn't work. He just said he couldn't work. His nerves were shot. So my mom needed to send him money because Tom Hanks' horses had escaped. And Tom Hanks had a ranch that abutted to that house. And because Tom Hanks was filming something, he needed money to feed the horses. So my mom was going to need to help him feed Tom Hanks' horses.

He had started having stories about that he had joined a group of drag queens out in the mountains and they were just wonderful people. And he enjoyed their company, which I think is very great and open minded. But the stories just didn't make sense. I was like, well, where do they live? Oh, they don't live. They just live out in the desert.

And so the stories just got wilder and wilder. And so I was convinced that he was doing some sort of drugs. There was a moment where Kevin lost that house. I don't know if they didn't pay taxes on it or what the whole story was. The next thing I know, they bought that small trailer that they ended up moving into. And that was actually in the Rancho Tehama area.

When Kevin and Barb moved to the trailer from the other house, it started to go sideways very, very quickly.

Kevin's story, this is what we heard. And I have no, I don't know what is true or what is not because we were hearing stories about like Tom Hanks. But Kevin, with his hypersensitivity, said he could smell meth being cooked in the trailers next to him.

Danny was there and it started to erupt very, very quickly because these fumes were making it very difficult for them both to breathe. My mom was literally sending Kevin and Barb gas masks because they were saying our eyes are burning, you know, the dogs are getting sicker and whatever's there is poisoning the dogs.

So he was pretty outraged. But the obsessive side of Kevin that I had seen growing up, I knew that it was going to go badly. He just couldn't let things go. And it did start to escalate. In the spring of 2017, I was on a train from Boston to New York when my mom called me. She said, you need to call me right back. Call me right back. It's emergency.

And I knew in my bones it was something bad with Kevin. I knew it. I ended up getting off at the next stop so I could call her back. And she said, Kevin has been arrested. He had a fight with a neighbor, and I think he stabbed the neighbor. Then I actually pulled up on my phone what he had been charged with.

There was a stabbing, a second-degree assault, but the ones that were particularly chilling was elder abuse, kidnapping, because he had, I guess, held them against their will, and abuse of a disabled individual.

The thing about Kevin is he always had a hypersympathy for people who may be struggling. And there's a kid with disabilities in the neighborhood that Kevin had become like best friends with this young teen and was teaching him how to work on cars. And they were spending a lot of time together. Now there's this charge of endangering somebody with a disability, you know,

It was shocking to actually read because despite all my problems with Kevin, I just didn't, I couldn't imagine that. When she talked to Barb, Barb had said, yeah, they baited him, Kevin, into doing this to get him arrested. And the police have a vendetta against Kevin. And if you don't get him out of jail right now, they'll kill him in jail.

He was so afraid of what was going to happen to him. And he was screaming at us on the phone, like, you have to get me out of here. And we're like, you have a trial and a court case coming up. You need to stay there. You have a great attorney here.

But as Kevin continued to scream and yell at us on the phone and saying things that were just kind of terrifying at the time, I actually didn't want him to come home because I was scared he was going to take out all of this anger on us. Kevin was never a reliable narrator about what things were going on.

But my mom is just desperate. You know, she doesn't want her child to be killed in jail. And she believed that the police were part of this conspiracy to do something to Kevin. And my mom talked to Kevin every day. And so she's emotionally invested in this thing and really believes that if we don't get Kevin out of jail immediately, something catastrophic is going to happen.

So she takes the house and puts it up for bail to post the bond to get him out quickly and hires a bails bondsman, gets an attorney there. Like, you must get him out really quickly. And then my mom said, well, I'm going to pay for them to go to a hotel just so that everybody can cool off. So she got them checked into a hotel for a couple of days in hopes that everything would change. But he was unraveling.

I begged my mom. I said, you know, the safest place for somebody who is unraveling right there is actually in an institution. I really believed that maybe jail might be a safe place for him or a chance to rehabilitate or get medical care, which he had violently refused in the past. Revoke the bond and let him go to jail.

My mom thought while I was advocating for Kevin to be in jail that he was best at home with Barb and his dogs, who always kind of calmed him. And she really believed that there was some conspiracy with the police to harm him.

I was Googling what the court documents were saying. And I was like, Mom, this doesn't make any sense. And she said, well, I am a mom and I have to do what I have to do to make sure he's safe. So then he was getting ready for his trial. We were getting close to the trial and he asked me to help him write a statement.

And I started to try to write the statement, but I had no facts on what actually happened. And the more I would ask, the just more agitated he would get. And our last conversation was chilling. He told me that I was the worst person he could imagine and that he did not want me to be part of his life going forward and that I was turning my mom against him.

So there was just this dark, looming dread. I said, Mom, does Kevin have any weapons? And she goes, no, no, they took them all when he was arrested. He has nothing. And I was like, okay, that is a really good thing for everybody involved.

But she did mention, she goes, yeah, he's doing a lot of woodworking and crafts to keep his mind occupied. And she's like, he's grinding something. I just hear it in the background the whole time. And I was like, oh, that seems odd. What could he be grinding? Later, we find out that he was assembling a ghost gun. So he was boring out the barrel.

I worried and worried, and I didn't know what else I could do. I just went back to work and, you know, taking my son to soccer and just living my life. And I had this moment, like, maybe our family will be okay. Maybe we will be okay. You can host the best backyard barbecue when you find a professional on Angie to make your backyard the best around.

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Stop wasting money on things you don't use. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions by going to rocketmoney.com slash wondery. That's rocketmoney.com slash wondery. rocketmoney.com slash wondery. My sister and I had actually gone and we had this deal that we were going to run a half marathon together. And so we had actually gone to Savannah to run in the rock and roll half marathon. So we had just this lovely weekend together and,

So I had come back from that and I was pretty tired. I had gone to bed at seven o'clock and my husband came in and sat on the edge of the bed and he shook me awake and I could feel him shaking. He was like, hey, you need to call your mom. And I was like, oh, I'll call her later. He goes, no, Kevin died.

I just felt the normal grief in that moment. I had lost my brother. My mom had no details at all. And the way she had found out is a reporter called her and said Kevin had been shot. And we thought he was the victim of some shooting that had happened. No details at all other than the reporter asked my mom for a comment.

My whole body was shaking. I didn't know what was going on, but I knew I had to get to my mom as quickly as I could. So I'm getting in the car, and so I called my uncle, and I said, I think Kevin has died, and he's been a victim of a shooting. And he's like, there's been a mass shooting in Rancho Dehama. I think Kevin may have actually been the shooter. It was like everything was sucked out of my body just to imagine that.

It was on the heels of the Las Vegas shooting. And then to think that, oh my God, now we're on the other side of this. I've never shaken so hard in my life. It hurt to breathe. And then when I got to my mom's house, she was sitting on the floor crying and the phone was ringing off the hook. And I had to sit her down and tell her. I was like, Mom, I don't know. I don't know, but I think Kevin may have been the shooter.

And she couldn't believe it. She just couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe it. I've never been so sick, just so sick, hard sick in my life. I'm sick just thinking about it. My mom, I don't even know how she stood that moment in time.

So she had to go into her room and I started answering the phone. And I was like, we have no details. We have no comment. We don't know anything. And then finally, there was a reporter from the AP and she seemed actually sick to be calling us. So kind. And I said, we have no details. What do you know?

That was the first time we actually really had any information. It was that Kevin had been the shooter and that he had killed Barb before. And then he went next door and went on a rampage and then made his way to the school. And when I heard that he had gotten to the school, I just, a huge dread, just dread of the next sentence that was going to come out of her mouth.

And she said, fortunately, the school had responded so well that no kids at the school had been victims. At that time, they believed the police had killed Kevin in a shootout. And so I had to go take those details to my mom, which is the single hardest conversation I've ever had in my life and probably ever will have ever.

especially for her as a teacher. She had spent so much of her life loving teaching children. It was surreal. It really did feel like I left my body and all I could do was just watch us. Just as soon as I hung up with the AP reporter, I know he had struggled at the end, but I could still see some of the mosaic of memories of him positively. I could still see those.

And then when I found out it was the perpetrator, it was just a white, hot, blinding flash that just transformed that grief of losing my brother into rage.

I had gone from that shaking, which is kind of the fear response and the sad response, to just every muscle in my body had just like clenched and I couldn't unclench. I didn't know what to do. It was about midnight that I finally sat down on the sofa and tried to actually process it. And I couldn't. I just couldn't.

I was so angry at Kevin. All I could feel was just anger at him. The only thing I could do in this situation was to try to protect my mom. And my mom is not a media savvy person. I just knew if she talked to a reporter, they would misconstrue a mother's grief.

I mean, she had been hearing about this conflict with the neighbors for months and months and months, and she had the Kevin side. And the reality is, you know, those people were dead in their own homes. And there is no story anymore about who's right or who's wrong. The story is that there were people who lost their lives at the hand of somebody in our family. There is no other side.

In some ways, I did my mom a great disservice because she didn't get to grieve like a mom because I had no room in my heart for empathy for Kevin at that point. I had none. Our hearts are just with the victims in the community and we don't have a story in this. The media was incessant and the fact is they actually knew more than we did at that point.

With my career in marketing, I happened to know some great PR people and I called them and I was like, what do I do? And they gave me great advice. They said, you get a lawyer and you write a statement and you don't talk to them and you don't say anything.

And I felt too cold and too heartless. It just, I didn't want to hide behind the legal language and, you know, say something trite because we'd just gone through Las Vegas and it was like thoughts and prayers were everywhere. And I just didn't want to write that. I just could not. I was advised, like, you can't go out and talk about it. And I said, if I can't, then who can? Like, who can? Right?

I wanted them to know we were devastated too. Not for our own loss, but for their loss. And I didn't care what the risks were. That night seemed to last forever. When the sun came up, it still felt dark. Like everything around me just felt dark and ominous and just horrible. But the family started to convene. And what do we do next? So we decided that we would have him cremated.

We certainly didn't want to put him there for that community to have a constant reminder. And so in California, there are kind of two options. One, you have a traditional burial, or two, you get buried at sea. And so he loved nature, and so that's what we decided to do.

But in retrospect, I denied my mother of all the things that a mom would want. We had no service for Kevin. We absolutely did not want the traditional trappings of being a mourning family.

And I think our neighbors and friends also didn't know how to respond to us either. Like, do you stay away from them? Do you, like, how do you comfort them? And it went from the phone ringing incessantly to nothing. It was absolutely quiet. So we were all left with our emotions. And one was grief, and I just still was angry. And I felt shame. I felt shame.

And then you are left with your own thoughts. How could somebody who had the same upbringing, the same DNA as you, could wreak so much havoc? You're left with a lot of questions about who you are. I'm a joyous and playful person by nature. And I felt guilty having any joy, any fun, any... Like, I just...

felt like I didn't deserve it. And so I kind of self-punished for a long time. I also went into hibernation because I just felt like people could look at us and see the shame. And so I stayed home a lot, but I couldn't read because everything I saw somehow triggered these emotions. I couldn't watch TV. I didn't know what to do with myself.

And so all I could do was think. And then I went down a research rabbit hole and I'm like, help me understand what makes people hurt others. The Hernandez case actually wasn't long after that. So that brought a lot of the concussion stuff to the forefront.

And my mom had always thought that he was never the same after the head injury, the incident where I had to drive him to the hospital. And as I did more research, I could see all of the signs. In my mind, the story I had told myself about Kevin is that he had gotten into meth. And the whole story about the neighbors having meth was kind of a red herring.

And I was as surprised as anyone when the toxicology came back negative for that. He only had THC in his system. So what had been the easy answer evaporated. I had to deal with the harder, which is he definitely had brain injury. And he had all the signs and symptoms of it. Chronic injury. And we just didn't know what to do.

I kept seeing people say, well, why don't the families know? Why don't they know? And you can't know. I think something about your love for an individual keeps you from knowing. And it even is, I think, clear-eyed as I felt like I was about it. I never could have imagined that it would have happened the way it did. I never could have. Or maybe I just didn't want to. In the aftermath, you're left a lot with your thoughts and feelings.

You ask, like, what more could I have done? What could I have seen that I didn't see? As his behavior continued to become more erratic and escalate, we would call the police on him and tell him he was in danger and he'd be back out in 48 hours and, you know, angrier. And they would say, yeah, all we can do is put him on a 24 or 48-hour hold.

We tried to make him go to see someone. I mean, my parents had taken him to a facility here, which is called Holly Hill at one point. They let him out in two weeks and said he's going to have to change his friend group and stop smoking pot.

Because my parents are scientifically oriented, I mean, they were very open to therapy and psychiatry and really wanted him to get help, and he just refused. And when a person becomes an adult, your options are really limited to manage their health care. You can't make a grown person seek medical help or psychiatric help.

It was even more difficult when he was in California and had moved to Rancho Tehama because we tried to find a psychiatrist. I think there was one in the area. Kevin wouldn't go. He wouldn't have done anything they told him to do anyway because he actually said he was violently against medicine and pharmaceuticals. And the problem is you can see it.

And you can know it, that Kevin's issues were going to end up in a violent place. I always thought, frankly, it would be more violence to himself than to others. That's why I actually thought for some relief, if they put him in jail, at least at that point, he could get all those things that he refused to do. But we never got that chance to see if that would work, if only. Yeah.

I mean, what would it, would we be having a different story if it were a month later? The other thing I hear a lot is why didn't the parents do anything or why didn't they know? And I'm drawn to the Sandy Hook case where the mom knew she was afraid of him, but her love for him was greater than her fear of him.

And I think in some ways that was my mom, her love and need to protect her son. That evolutionary coding was just so hardwired that I think the love of a mom, you just keep being hopeful and that you're going to try something that is going to work and make your child that was this wonderful kid and baby a successful adult. It's just heartbreaking.

I thought I knew what love was until I had a son, and I had no idea how deeply it goes. You know, I look at my son, and there's some similarities with Kevin in all of the great ways. Like, the good stuff about Kevin...

I do have a funny, witty, kind, dog-loving child. And so I get to see that part of him without what he became. And I'm grateful for that. In the aftermath, I wanted to take my own advice. Actually, I needed to. I did get in-depth psychiatric care.

I did go into a facility for a week, which was actually wonderful. It did help me process it and move from that frozen rage to being okay. That I could have sad emotions and mourn my brother. And I could go to a birthday party and not feel guilty for doing that.

and I could have a normal life again. Five years later, still have all of the emotion and all of the heartache, and it stays with you. My dad is not well. He had a brain aneurysm and lost a lot of his memory, and I think he does continue to reclaim it, and I'm really proud of the progress he's made.

My mom is not well physically. Her health was not great when it happened and it's been a pretty stark decline. I know that so much of that is just the mental anguish and not just the physical. She feels the loss of her son and she also feels the shame that I spoke about.

Grief does horrible things to the body and the mind if you can't find a way to just move forward and have some hope. And I think the saddest thing is I don't see that she has a lot of hope anymore anymore.

That's so sad because she's such a joyous person and I love her deeply. And I'm so sorry she had to go through what she had to go through. We're not the same. None of us is the same, but how could we be? What I've tried to learn too is you can care, but you don't have to have the shame.

Shame is a very terrible, debilitating emotion. But once your worst fear comes true, I mean, you don't really have anything else to fear. All you can do is move forward and know that you may not be the same, but humans are remarkably resilient. I do want to care, and I do care greatly.

I don't want the families of Rancho Tehama, especially Gage, to think that we don't care and don't feel just deep remorse for how he and his grandmother had to pick up the pieces.

I'm in awe of some of the stories of the heroic things that they did while this was transpiring. And I didn't want to take anything away from the victim's story and just the horror that they've had to go through and the challenges that they still have.

There are more and more of these shootings, and I'm hoping that there's some lesson that we can all learn. And I do hope that we as a society can figure out how to make things like this stop.

Today's episode featured Sheridan Orr. This episode was part five, the final episode of our limited series, Point Blank, co-produced by me, Witt Nisseldein, in collaboration with Connor Sheets, investigative journalist with the Los Angeles Times, with special thanks to Jason Blaylock, Andrew Waits, and Gabby Quintana. I also want to thank all of you for listening to this special limited series. These were some of the most heartbreaking, powerful stories I've ever done for the show.

It's been so meaningful creating this limited series, and we're already in the process of ideas for the next. In the meantime, we'll return next week with our regular weekly episodes of the show. From Wondery, you're listening to This Is Actually Happening.

If you love what we do, please rate and review the show. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on the Wondery app to listen ad-free and get access to the entire back catalog. In the episode notes, you'll find some links and offers from our sponsors. By supporting them, you help us bring you our show for free. I'm your host, Witt Misseldein. Today's episode was co-produced by me, with special thanks to the This Is Actually Happening team, including Ellen Westberg. The intro music features the song Illabi by Tipper.

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Hey, I'm Mike Corey, the host of Wondery's podcast, Against the Odds. In each episode, we share thrilling true stories of survival, putting you in the shoes of the people who live to tell the tale. In our next season, it's July 6th, 1988, and workers are settling into the night shift aboard Piper Alpha, the world's largest offshore oil rig.

Home to 226 men, the rig is stationed in the stormy North Sea off the coast of Scotland. At around 10 p.m., workers accidentally trigger a gas leak that leads to an explosion and a fire. As they wait to be rescued, the workers soon realize that Piper Alpha has transformed into a death trap. Follow Against the Odds wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app.