Andreatta: 'Honor thy father' haunts Charles Tan case
The story of Oedipus, the mythical Greek king who killed his father, reminds us that taking the life of one's parent is as old as civilization, and among the most deplorable acts imaginable.
Our parents, after all, gave us life, food and shelter. For those reasons the prosecutor of America's most infamous parent killer, Lizzie Borden, called parricide "the most horrible word the English language knows."
Given that context, the outpouring of public support for Charles Tan, the 19-year-old Cornell University student accused of shooting and killing his father in their Pittsford family home, is noteworthy.
Within days of Tan's arrest, more than 590 people had donated over $46,000 to an online defense fund that called Tan "a strong, supportive, friendly member of the Pittsford community."
His attorney, James Nobles, described friends of Tan's and their parents contacting his office "consistently and in large numbers" to attest to Tan's character and to a suspicion that all was not well inside the Tan household.
Monroe County Sheriff's Office deputies responded to multiple calls there in recent years and Tan's mother, Qing Tan, had recently sought an order of protection against his father, Liang Tan.
"We have significant and credible, specific evidence to support that there was a longstanding abusive relationship in that house toward Mrs. Tan as well as both sons for a period of years," Nobles said.
Parricides are relatively rare, numbering between 200 and 300 a year in the United States and accounting for between 1.5 and 2.5 percent of all homicides, according to Federal Bureau of Investigation figures.
Most of the cases, experts say, involve sons killing their fathers after enduring years of abuse.
Charles Ewing, a lawyer and psychologist at the State University of New York at Buffalo who's testified in scores of parricide cases, said a shift in consciousness about the dynamics of domestic abuse has resulted in greater public sympathy and some judicial leniency for defendants.
Yet, he added, the biblical commandment to honor our parents is so ingrained in our culture that convincing a judge or jury a killing was justified remains a hard sell. While juries sometimes acknowledge the suffering of a defendant by convicting him on lesser charges, outright acquittals are scarce.
"It's difficult to get over this hump with a jury that someone could do this to their parent," Ewing said. "Even though juries may sympathize with the defendant, they're still going to say, 'Yeah, but he killed the guy.'"
The defense in parricide cases typically rely on one of three arguments — self-defense, insanity or extreme emotional disturbance. Upholding claims of self-defense generally require proof of imminent harm, whereas extreme emotional disturbance hinges on evidence of a pattern of abuse.
Admitting evidence of prior abuse can be challenging, however, because of long-held mores about what constitutes abuse, said Paul Mones, perhaps the foremost legal authority on parricide cases and author of When A Child Kills: Abused Children Who Kill Their Parents (1991).
"A man under no circumstances can hit his wife," Mones said. "But parents are the only class in society that are exempted from traditional assault and battery laws.
"It's still the situation that kids are expected to obey the dictates of their parents," he said.
Very few people know the extent of the abuse alleged to have occurred over the years in the Tan house. Fewer yet know exactly what happened there the night Liang Tan was fatally shot.
Answers to those questions will come as the case unfolds.
What the case will not likely answer definitively are the questions that have burned since the dawn of civilization: What does it means to honor our parents and how are we to fulfill that obligation when they don't honor us?