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Steve Righini, Another Dude At The Intersection Of Radicalization And Mental Health
The basic story on Steve Righini seems to be that he lived in a small northern Maine town called Portage Lake, which had about 400 people in it. (We previously had a pretty bad mass shooter in Maine, too.) From what I can infer, Righini was 29, and had either a four-week-old or a four-month-old. His wife/girlfriend/baby mama was 18. If you do that math, it’s quite possible the relationship was illegal, but we can gloss that over for one second.
Sometime in January, he pushed his wife/baby mama into a wall, and she called the cops, and when the cops came, he got into standoff with them — which involved the four-week-old (OK, I just saw it in the screenshot). This guy killed a canine dog and wounded an officer, but he was also eventually killed. A couple of people on Reddit have come forward (and you never know how true those posts are) saying they grew up with him and he was always a little bit crazy. He frequently ranted about transgender rights, abortion, and has a Facebook post where he asks Elon Musk and Kanye West for “leadership roles” in “shaping the world.”
Here is a video that covers some of it:
Uh, so, yea. This is a bad situation. The easiest parallel is probably Matthew Coleman, who was a surf instructor and got really into QAnon and other theories and eventually killed his kids with a speargun because he thought they had “alien DNA.” Coleman is still working his way through the federal court system, but apparently it keeps getting stalled because he’s essentially incoherently crazy and thus they don’t know what next steps to take. Again, just do a Google Images search for him and you will find any number of completely normal family photos. And yet, those two kids are now deceased.
Obviously a big theme we are currently discussing is radicalization, and/or how dudes get radicalized so quickly. (PS women can also be radicalized…
