Musings from a mother

Dr. Amy Bishop, accused of killing three professors at the University of Alabama and wounding two others, was never charged when she accidentally killed her 17 year old brother in 1986. It appears that her act was just swept under the carpet, no doubt by her family. The question I would like to see answered is whether her parents insisted on psychiatric intervention for her at the time. I suspect not, because Dr. Bishop went on to rack up a number of years of further academic study in a relatively short time. Getting her head in order would have come at the expense of academic achievement. Therapy would also have revealed a possible motivation in her brother's death, therefore ruling out therapy as an option for parents anxious to put it behind them.

Redeeming herself by being academically and profesionallly successful at her brother's expense, as her unpublished but seemingly autobiographical novel is reputed to imply, is misguided altruism in the extreme.