The parents of Santa Barbara shooter Elliot Rodger are said to be completely devastated at the loss of innocent lives at the hands of their son, so much so, that a family friend says “their speech is stuttered.”
In the wake of the shooting rampage that left six dead and 13 others injured at the University of Santa Barbara campus this past Friday, Chin and Peter Rodger — a movie director who worked on movies such as The Hunger Games — are in mourning, not only for their son, but for the innocent lives he took and changed forever.
Family friend Simon Astaire — who has known the Santa Barbara shooter since he was a young boy — has been in contact with the Rodgers since the deadly attack; he told ABC News the couple is “unable to control their grief.”
“Literally, their speech is now stuttered,” Astaire said. “They’re unable to really articulate things in a full sentence.”
This latest mass shooting has left pain and loss, not only for the families of those killed and injured, but with the parents of the Santa Barbara shooter.
In a written statement released to ABC News , the parents of the Santa Barbara shooter expressed their thoughts:
“We are crying in pain for the victims and their families. It breaks our heart on a level we didn’t think possible. The feeling of knowing that it was our son’s actions that caused the tragedy can only be described as Hell on earth.”
According to Astaire, Chin Rodger was in Los Angeles — about 100-miles from Santa Barbara — when news of a shooter on campus at UCSB first broke and after reading the first lines of her son’s 137-page manifesto, My Twisted World , knew something was terribly wrong.
After watching a few seconds of the shooter’s Youtube video, she called her ex-husband Peter Rodger and they drove to Santa Barbara, while listening to the news reports about the massacre on the radio.
Astaire says that the Rodgers were in constant fear over their son and they believed he would take his life, but never imagined he would take others’ as well.
Elliot Rodger had been through years of therapy during his younger years, attempting to address his inability to make friends, which resulted in uncontrolled rage.
“I thought he was the loneliest person I’ve ever seen in my entire life,” Astaire said of the Santa Barbara shooter , who killed himself in the end. “He was an odd child, didn’t quite fit into his skin. He was quite shaky when you met him. He was a tragic figure. And now when I talk about him, knowing what he did, he is in many ways a monster.”
[Image via The Inquisitr ]