Brief Treatment and Crisis Intervention Advance Access originally published online on April 4, 2007
Brief Treatment and Crisis Intervention 2007 7(2):127-150; doi:10.1093/brief-treatment/mhm005
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Capitol Hill Mass Murder Case
From Northeastern University (Fox, Levin), Boston College (Burgess), LAUSD Crisis Counseling and Intervention Services and LAUSD/RAND/UCLA Trauma Services Adaptation Center for Schools (Wong), Data Integrity, Inc., West Newton, MA (Burgess)
Contact author: Ann W. Burgess, Professor of Psychiatric Nursing, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts 02467. E-mail: burges{at}bc.edu.
In the early morning of March 25, 2006, 28-year-old Kyle Huff shot eight young men and women, six of them fatally, at a rave after-party on East Republican Street in the Capitol Hill section of Seattle. The gunman, a transplant from Montana, then committed suicide just as the police arrived on the scene. Because of the perpetrator's suicide, there was no need for a detailed investigation leading to prosecution. Though closed in a legal sense, the bewildering case was not solved or fully understood. And yet, many members of the Seattle community desired answers to the many perplexing questions that lingered regarding the gunman's motives, method, and state of mind. This article reports the findings of a special panel convened by the Seattle police chief to try to answer some of the questions. We discuss the community response to the crisis and trauma experienced by the survivors and family members; precipitants and warning signs of mass murder; influence of raves, ravers, and Ecstasy; posttraumatic stress disorder; and the Harborview Medical Center Child Traumatic Stress Program.
KEY WORDS: mass murder, Capitol Hill murder case, shooting, raves, crisis