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This is one of the most sickening stories I have ever seen, and unfortunately what happened is partially the result of bad care in the foster care system years ago.
John Lafleche killed his estranged wife after he heard her having a phone conversation with another man. He beat her to death with a baseball bat. He is blaming the murder on alcohol. The report says he drank twenty-four beers in twenty-four hours before killing his wife.
The story gets even more disgusting from there. Mr. Lafleche then took the same baseball bat and killed his children. He even checked their pulses to make sure they were dead before calling 9-1-1 and reporting what he did. He said he did not want the kids to go into foster care.
It turns out that Mr. Lafleche was in foster care himself from the ages of nine until sixteen, and he didn’t want his children in there. Mr. Lafleche did not have a good experience in foster care and says he was beaten by several different foster parents, and he wanted to spare his children from that.
OK, I get that you don’t want your kids in foster care, but to kill them? I have to wonder what kind of mental illness this man has besides alcoholism. These are not the thoughts of a mentally healthy person.
He has been convicted of three counts of second degree murder and has been sentenced to at least nineteen years behind bars before he is eligible for parole in 2025. That doesn’t even seem close to fair. Nineteen years for killing three people, two of them innocent children?
The foster care system failed at least three people. Mr. Lafleche was failed when he was beaten by his foster parents. Whether he had a mental illness before he entered foster care, or the beatings caused him to have a “breakdown” and kill his children to avoid the same fate, there is failure. My best unprofessional guess is that there was some kind of un-diagnosed mental illness and he was self medicating with alcohol.
Whatever the reason or progression of events, these children suffered a horrible fate.
