Grandfather to 3 murdered children says his son 'just snapped'

The "Just Snapped" defense is a vague defense for the behavior by people who do horrible things to others. 

Back in 2020, in Mississippi, a man indicted for killing eight people was afraid of the breakup of his family and "just snapped" his lawyer argued.

In the same year in Knoxville, a murder defendant claimed that in an attempt to find out where her estranged husband was living she followed another woman with whom he was living. She discovered he was living in a house that they both had previously shared. She admitted that she put on latex gloves, got out of her car, and went to confront her estranged husband. But they had a physical struggle and she 'just snapped' and stabbed him through the heart.

R. Douglas Fields, a neuroscientist and senior investigator at the National Institutes of Health, sought out an explanation in his book, Why We Snap: Understanding the Rage Circuit in Your Brain.

“I think that the word [snapped] is kind of in common usage, and we understand it maybe from a psychology perspective — that is, it’s a break with reality — but I wanted to know what‘s going on inside the brain.”

He says that there exist nine major triggers that invoke the rage response, or snapping, as it were, and uses the acronym LIFEMORTS: Life and Limb,  as in physical safety, Insult, meaning a verbal threat. Then the nine remaining are easy to understand: family environment, mate, order in society, resources and tribe. These you'd fight for, he says, if you believed they were in danger. The "S" stands for 'Stopped.' That's the notion that if any animal, including humans, feel trapped or restrained it will ready itself to fight.

In the case in Monroe Township, Ohio, where a 32-year-old father of 3 boys, ages 3, 4, and 7 executed them last Thursday afternoon, the father of the murderer says his son "just snapped." 

His children weren't a threat, did not insult him, and no other psychological or neurological explanation fits this crime. "Just snapped" is a lazy explanation as to why this triple murder described by the 59-year-old grandfather of the children, as "just terrible," doesn't fly with me.

"(He) just snapped. I could tell in his eyes he's hollow inside," Keith Doerman said. "That wasn't Chad standing at the arraignment, that was not him."

But it was him and his son is not hollow inside. That is just another lazy explanation.

In court Friday morning, Chad Doerman confessed to what the Clermont County prosecution called "the most heinous, monstrous crime."

This is a guy who lined up his kids and had to chase one down who ran, caught him and lined him up along with his two brothers and Doerman executed them.

Sorry, but I don't see that as snapping. He had time to unsnap as he chased his child down and ask himself 'what am I doing?'  

In fact, court documents said he "confessed to planning and carrying out the deaths of victims involved for several months." That is by no understanding of the layman's term "just snapped" consistent with grandfather's claim. However, it probably does make the grandfather feel somewhat better because it magically takes the blame off his son, and thus off his progeny. 

Prosecutors said all three of the children were shot execution-style with a rifle. All three boys were discovered by first responders, lying in the yard of a home. They were all pronounced dead at the scene; the Clermont County Sheriff's Office said all life-saving measures were "unsuccessful."

If any crime calls for the death penalty, this one is it. 

Doerman is currently being held in the Clermont County Jail on a $20 million cash bond and is set to reappear in court on June 26 for a preliminary hearing.

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