I do not believe my son is evil at all.
I do believe that there are evil spirits in the world.
There's this constant war going on between Satan
and his devils and the Holy Spirit
who lives inside of every Christian.
If you give yourself to God,
you're largely protected from the really bad things of life.
If you do not give yourself to God,
that little evil voice whispering in your ear can
easily set traps for you.
Tyler had fallen into Satan's trap.
♪♪
Satan is always plotting spiritual warfare against us.
His goal is to create as much harm as he can
to each of us as he can get away with.
And if you don't have a good connection with God,
you're vulnerable.
My son has done a very terrible thing.
He now is going to deal with
some very terrible consequences.
[The Paper Chase's "What's So Amazing About Grace?" plays]
[strings continue playing sinister tune]
[static crackling]
[knock at door] [creaking]
[banging on door]
[creaking]
[water dripping]
[banging on door] [creaking]
[sinister chord strikes]
This picture makes me smile.
This is part of my son's creative, mischievous nature.
He'd gone into my daughter's bedroom,
and got out her dark pink lipstick,
and proceeded to just smear it all over himself.
We saw a lot of this kind of behavior
over the years, just doing crazy things.
I was proud of my son for the odd little things
he would do, because it meant that
his creative side was working pretty well.
But this willingness to disrupt and to
get into trouble always seemed to be there.
We typically believe that both the evil angel
and the good angel are whispering in your head
trying to get you to do different things,
choose good or choose evil.
And he was a little more willing to do the --
the bad things.
I referred to my son as "The living torpedo."
He was always getting in trouble.
There was an instance with my son when he was very young.
My first wife had gone out to some church event that night,
so I was left to babysit.
And so, while I was on my computer,
I could hear all this commotion of things being
knocked off tables.
[loud thumping noise]
I thought, well, you know what, I better investigate.
He'd gone over to the table
where the clean laundry was sitting...
and he'd just throw it all on the floor,
and he scribbled all over the table.
He took baking soda, and he just dumped it
in the kitchen floor.
Then he took salad dressing,
and he dumped the salad dressing on his toys.
I think it was just normal kid stuff,
but there was one thing for sure
that was very distressing to me.
We had a big 55-gallon aquarium.
And I noticed that my aquarium was all milky white.
One of the two fish was floating dead
on top of the water.
So, then I asked my very young son what he had done...
Tyler!
...and he told me he poured milk in the aquarium.
I told my son not to do that again, that it killed the fish.
And I showed him one of the dead fish.
You know that killing is wrong?
Yes.
Go clean up your mess.
I'll take care of this.
A couple days later, I noticed that
the second fish
was floating dead on top of the water.
When I lifted the lid off the tank to get that dead fish,
the water felt very hot.
It was all the way up 120 degrees,
and it was pretty easy to deduce,
that while I was at work,
my son fried that last fish.
So I was a little concerned about that.
Tyler!
I don't remember what he said as to why he chose to do that.
Did you do this?
Did you kill this other fish?
My son just was leaning more towards the darker side.
If my son was willing to kill those two fish,
he probably would do it again.
Go up to your room.
From that point forward, I drained my fish tank
and never had an aquarium again.
But I just considered my son to be a strong-willed,
highly independent, uh, kid
who's exploring his world with great zeal and gusto.
In 1989, uh,
I had a very bizarre encounter
with the demonic realm with my son.
I walked out the front door and Tyler was standing
on the grass beside the little cement walkway there.
Tyler?
He looks up at me, and he's got this white froth
all over his mouth and chin...
...which I've never seen before on my son.
And he says "I hate Jesus",
I want my cat to pee on Jesus."
This was a very disturbing voice.
It was not my son's normal voice.
A very deep, guttural kind of a voice.
[indistinct deep voice]
My son tells me that, um...
...that there are two bad kings in the backyard.
That they hate me, his father, and hate his mother,
but that they love Tyler, and they gave Tyler kisses.
In the Adventist belief system, there's always this huge
spiritual war going on around you.
Some Christians believe that a person can be demon possessed.
Other Christians say no, you can't be demon possessed,
but they can put thoughts in your head.
And that's what I immediately thought.
No, that's not true, that's not you talking.
So I knew I was dealing with an evil entity
that's using my son to communicate some very
disturbing thoughts.
So, I said a prayer of, "In the name of Jesus,
I command you evil spirit to leave my son."
And then, I -- I took my son in the house...
Come inside, quickly.
...and washed the foam off of his face.
I prayed, and I asked God,
what is giving those evil spirits permission
to be in my backyard?
And the image that came to my mind was
some porn magazines and some porn video tapes.
I suffered from a severe porn addiction for many years.
Because I'm watching porn, I'm now giving demons
permission to come into my house.
I didn't want the demons in my house.
So I trashed all the porn that I had,
and I buried them in the backyard.
So, when Tyler told me that he saw evil kings in the backyard,
uh, that immediately told me that porn that I had buried
gave them permission to be there in my backyard.
So again, I dug up the porn,
and I put it in the trash.
So later that night, when we're sitting at the dinner table,
my son just suddenly says, "Jesus is the prince of peace."
To me, that was a wonderful thing to hear.
I breathed a big sigh of relief,
and I don't think my son talked about evil kings after that.
When my son was around 10,
we had a very disturbing instance with him.
My daughter was six years older
than Tyler, and my daughter had a young man,
and my son did not like him.
He just felt he gave off a very bad vibration.
Tyler was protective of his sister.
So my son took a knife and chased that young boy
down the street to get out of our house.
And he didn't come back after that.
Fortunately, nobody got hurt.
I wasn't there when it happened.
What's going on out here?
And I talked with Tyler to stop,
don't do that, that's dangerous.
You could hurt yourself or that other boy.
Do you even understand that?
But -- but I just kind of dismissed that.
I didn't think much of it except
Tyler is being very protective of his sister.
Looking back now, the fact that he had
that kind of violence in him was very troubling.
That's some very serious and very dangerous behavior.
What terrible thing is going to happen next?
Every Thanksgiving, I would do a family photo.
Tyler is about 13 in this picture.
And as I look at him, knowing what I know now,
he's got kind of an arrogant look in his eyes.
This is the beginning of the rebellious teen years.
I'd been warned that all your
kids are gonna go through rebellion.
But I did not expect
the hard level of rebellion that ended up unfolding.
He wanted to not go to school.
He wanted to stop going to church.
Now, he's starting to really push back against my parental
authority and just wreak as much havoc as he could.
It was Sunday, and my son was refusing to go to church.
I said come on, Tyler -- let's get going.
And now that disturbed me, because I'm the adult
in the house -- he's in my house.
He should be following my rules.
The church is important to me as a family.
But he just stubbornly put his foot down and said no.
I'm not going.
So he's sitting on his bed with a pocket knife in his hand
and he's opening it and closing it.
Opening it and closing.
Just kind of looking at the floor.
You know the rule.
I already told you, I don't care about your stupid rule.
EUGENE: He was making it very clear to me
that he was very willing to do violence.
And I was very troubled by that.
And I said, "I just rebuked
the evil spirits in this room in the name of Jesus."
[whispering] In God's name, I command you to leave this place.
In God's name, I command you to leave this place.
EUGENE: He just looked at me in disgust.
I just let him sit there.
My first wife and my daughter and I, we went to church.
And from that point forward,
my son refused to go to church with us.
So I just accepted that's -- that's how it is.
I can't force him.
I just felt Tyler was going to go through
some very difficult times without God,
because in the back of my head is all this demonic spiritual
warfare going on.
So, if you don't have God helping you, you're screwed.
What I have in my hand here is a ledger dated 2001.
At the start of every new year on January first,
I would get myself a blank ledger,
and I would start keeping a diary -- as you can see,
from this first page, it's just filled with stuff.
This is when Tyler was in his teen rebellion years.
By this time, Tyler has missed a lot of school,
which is very upsetting.
Here on January 24 is a diary entry about Tyler.
Yesterday, Nellie took Tyler in for a physical
about his constantly being sick and missing school.
The doctor said to Tyler,
"Until you are 18, your mother owns you."
He said next time he slept in,
the mom should pour ice-cold water on him
to force my son to go to school.
So my wife told me this story.
Um, and then, of course, I told my boss at work,
and they both said,
absolutely, you should pour ice-cold water on him
if he's not going to get up and go to school.
And so that's what I did.
February 14.
I went into his room to see if he'd gotten ready for school.
He was still laying in bed, and I asked him
if he was going to go to school.
He said no.
You're not skipping any more classes.
And I said, look, you better get up and get dressed and go
to school or I'm going to go into the kitchen,
I'm gonna get a glass of ice water,
and I'm gonna throw it on you
if you refuse to go to school.
He just laid there.
AS EUGENE: You think I'm bluffing.
Fine.
EUGENE: So he could hear me, walking out of
his bedroom, a couple steps to the kitchen.
[water pouring]
He could hear me getting a cup,
hear me getting the ice water, and I came back.
He's still laying in bed.
And he had stashed a pocket knife by his pillow.
I threw the ice water on him.
He threw that open pocket knife at me.
Are you crazy?
And fortunately for me,
it hit the wall, it missed me.
But he absolutely wanted to hurt me.
There's no doubt in my mind he was very angry with me,
and he just wanted that knife to hit me.
And that's why I called the police,
because this could get a lot worse.
What are you doing?
I'm calling the police!
And the police came, but by this time...
Where you going?
...he was smart enough to leave the house,
'cause he and his friends knew that if you're not home
when the police come,
they're not going to go looking for you.
No, he's not here! He just ran out the door.
Tyler!
He came back home later that night,
and I didn't do anything about it,
because the police didn't do anything about it.
I was very concerned about what Tyler might do.
I was always hoping that the next
bad consequence would bring him to his senses,
and to stop doing these terrible things,
but it didn't.
Tyler was probably around 15...
and I came home from work...
and he was -- he was walking around
with a short-sleeve shirt.
Tyler.
What's that on your arm?
And I noticed on the lower part of his left arm,
he had carved some -- looked like eyes.
That was alarming, because that
obviously would have caused pain.
He used an exacto blade to do it.
I said, "What are those?"
And he -- and he said, "They're -- they're demon eyes.
You know, they help me see things,"
which was very disturbing to me.
Why would you do something like that to yourself?
But it was another indication that Tyler preferred
the path of darkness rather than the path of light.
He was very cocky.
He didn't give a rat's ass what I thought about it.
In fact, he wanted me to be disturbed by things he did.
I could tell from his expression that he liked
my discomfort.
I didn't know what I could do about that.
We put him on the 72-hour hold.
So the behavioral center had their experts
trying to deal with him.
I went into his room while he was
at the behavioral center,
and I gathered up his heavy metal CDs.
The covers on some of these bands looked very demonic,
very evil looking.
And so I began thinking that my son's heavy metal music
has allowed stronger demons to be influencing him.
I broke them in half and threw them in the trash.
And so when he came out of the hospital,
he was -- he was very angry about that.
What are you doing?
EUGENE: So I was very concerned about what Tyler might do.
It seemed like he had chosen
to embrace evil rather than good.
EUGENE: My wife is an occupational therapist,
and she's very big on counseling.
So she would take my son Tyler
and I to different counseling sessions.
The counselor didn't have any
beneficial effect on my son's behavior.
And it was very disappointing to me how
the police couldn't help.
How the behavioral center people couldn't help.
Counseling couldn't help.
I felt I did everything I could possibly do,
and nothing seems to be working with my son.
But I get impressions from the Holy Spirit,
help me kind of understand the situation
and what I should do.
I saw this picture in my mind that Tyler was like
the Wizard of Oz.
My son is manifesting all this hateful,
belligerent, rebellious, angry behavior.
But inside, he's just a scared, young teenager.
He's just the little guy behind the curtain. Uh...
He was weak and vulnerable,
and I should approach him that way.
And that's what I did.
I softened my approach towards him.
I would take away his Nintendo.
At one point, I said, "You can't see your girlfriend
until you go to school or stop doing marijuana."
So we tried a variety of those things.
In 2001, my wife handed me a letter
that Tyler had written to her the night before.
What's this?
Tyler wrote that.
EUGENE: He said three different things.
He said, one, our threats to him like
taking away his Nintendo, only pissed him off,
and he said that he wanted both me
and his mother to die.
If she was gonna drive him to school,
that he would grab the wheel and jerk it
to make the car crash and kill them both.
And he said if we didn't let him see his new girlfriend,
someone was going to get hurt.
He's not getting better, Eugene.
I took Tyler's threats very serious.
So once I read that letter, I called the police,
because I can't do anything to
make him stop his violent behavior.
They were the experts.
They're the ones that are supposed to know what to do.
The police did come and pick up Tyler
and took him to a behavioral medical center.
I think he was there for a week, and then,
when he came back,
he just came out as belligerent to me as before.
Didn't seem to do him any good at all.
He just hated me.
I'm the parent.
I'm supposed to get him to go to school.
I'm supposed to make him stop smoking marijuana.
I'm supposed to make him stop threatening people
with a knife.
But I felt like my hands were tied,
and there wasn't much I could do about it.
All I can do is write it down in my journal
and start the next day with a blank sheet of paper
and see what the hell happens next.
When he came out of the hospital,
I did let him start seeing his girlfriend again,
but then after about a month or two,
she decided she didn't want to be his girlfriend anymore.
So she broke up with him.
When this girl broke up with him, I didn't notice any
unusual angry behavior on his part in the house,
but I guess he felt the need to express his anger,
his frustration, his stress.
Both my first wife and I, we were at work when
this happened.
So we didn't find out about the voicemail
until we got home and checked the answering machine.
YOUNG MAN: Tyler, what the hell is the matter with you?
You think this is funny?
EUGENE: The girlfriend's older brother called my house
and left a message on our voicemail
that if Tyler came anywhere near his sister,
he was going to come over and kill him.
YOUNG MAN: I promise you'll regret it.
EUGENE: I thought, what the hell is this?
Why is this guy having death threats against my son?
So we called the police.
So the police went out, talked to the brother.
Tyler had written a very violent poem called Eviscerate .
They brought it back to our house
to show us what Tyler had written.
Here's what the poem says.
"Kill the bitch, the snitch, the witch,
"just to watch her lifeless body twitch,
"just to scratch my murderous itch.
"Her dying breath is my every last wish.
"Eviscerate, stab, gouge, and slice.
It would be so nice as to end your life."
They should have never let me out of my cage,
skilled with blades, filled with rage.
I hope you fear the words I say.
Someday, you'll pay for your cold ways.
This poem got Tyler in a lot of trouble.
The poem was not as troubling to me as it was to his mother.
His mother was very distraught over this.
She couldn't comprehend this level of anger
that was coming out on this paper.
But I didn't expect my son to actually act on it.
He likes to do shocking things.
I'd done something similar
when I was in the 12th grade in boarding school.
I wrote poems like this.
I wrote out my pain in very dark language.
So I saw this from
the perspective that this is just emotional pain.
The last couple sentences, it says,
"I may get carried away with the words I say.
It's just the way I cope with this heartbroken pain."
So from my perspective, these are just big scary words.
This is not meant to be a real death threat.
He's not really going on some kind of a hacking rampage.
Tyler should not have done this.
This was a very bad idea.
But this did not mean Tyler was
actually gonna kill the ex-girlfriend.
My son, Tyler, there were periods of time
when he was very troublesome to deal with.
One day, I found some marijuana plants in the closet,
his closet,
and I told him I'm gonna have to get rid of these.
And he said, "If you do that,
that will be a huge mistake."
Then he taunted me by saying there was a weapon in the house
that was probably going to be used against me,
and that scared me.
It's in here.
So I called the police.
They got a search warrant for his room.
They searched his room,
but they didn't find anything.
The room's clean. There's nothing we can do here.
EUGENE: There was no weapon there.
So after the police left, I thought, you know what?
I bet he put that pistol in my bedroom just to piss me off.
And sure enough, I checked behind the headboards,
and there was a brand-new pistol.
So obviously Tyler was ramping up his willingness
to be violent, and that was very scary.
So I took the pistol, I took it apart into two pieces,
the clip and the body, and I threw them
in the trash can at work over the next two days,
uh, 'cause I didn't know what else to do with it,
and nothing came of it after that.
He didn't say anything about it.
I didn't say anything about it.
So it's kind of a battle of wills.
I thought, well, this is just one other miserable thing
I'm about to write in my diary, and there are a couple of
places in my diary where I wrote,
I hate God,
because God's not doing very much
to stop all this crap,
and I'm very frustrated by it.
But if you're angry with God,
who else you gonna turn to?
So I just pray to God to keep my family safe every day.
Hope for the best.
Tyler went to Kentucky when he was 18 to the military.
I breathed a big sigh of relief
that he'd gone into the Army,
that maybe they're able to knock some
sense into him, as they say.
And indeed, his behavior did get a lot better.
When Tyler came back from the Army,
he really cleaned up his life.
He is a much better person.
He's much easier to live with.
He's much more responsible.
Obviously, the Army has -- has taught him
some self-discipline.
The most violent incident I've experienced with my son Tyler,
it was about 2010.
My ex has already divorced me.
She's left, I'm staying in the house
with Tyler and his sister.
It was on a Saturday night.
He and his friends were drinking, um, out on the patio.
Um, I'd gone to bed.
My daughter had her boyfriend over.
The boyfriend had hit my daughter the year before,
so that made Tyler very angry.
I'm asleep in my bedroom, but I hear all
this very loud yelling and commotion
and slamming things around.
So I got up, opened up my bedroom door,
and I see that two of Tyler's friends
had grabbed the boyfriend, dragged him out
of bed, and they're now pounding on him,
and they're beating on him with their fists.
I see that, and I'm not gonna allow that to happen.
I ran over there and said, "You get off of him right now."
That's enough! All of you, get outside!
You stay the hell out of it!
I started to grab one of the guys to pull him off.
Tyler is standing in the doorway into the hall.
So he's seeing me do this.
He takes a couple steps towards me,
grabs ahold of me, and slams me against the hallway wall,
and he pins my shoulders back to the wall.
He's cussing, yelling, and screaming at me.
What are you gonna do, huh? What?!
EUGENE: And just all of his pent-up hatred
for all these many years,
he's just exploding with rage.
He took his fist, and he slammed it in the wall
near my face once, maybe twice.
I was quite scared.
I didn't know where this was gonna go.
It looked to me like I might
end up with some broken bones or something.
There was very little I could do about it.
My son was stronger than I was.
Come on, old man. Let's see it.
Let's see what you're made of!
And fortunately for me,
one of the bigger guys who'd been beating up
on the boyfriend
turned to Tyler and says, "Tyler, that's your dad.
You can't talk to your dad like that."
So his -- his intervention caused my son to stop.
That was a very scary night.
I had no idea which way that was gonna go.
The police came out, but Tyler and his two friends
involved in the fight had fled the scene,
so there was nothing police could do about it.
He asked my forgiveness the next morning
when he was sober,
which I accepted his -- his forgiveness.
I was always willing to -- to forgive and forget.
But did I think he was gonna hurt somebody?
Yeah. The potential was very, very high.
When Tyler got married to Caroline,
she was the love of his life.
My son was married in July 4, 2015.
About 3 and 1/2 years later go by.
After he got his college degree,
uh, he starts working for a computer company.
So he's doing pretty well.
He's making money.
Things seem to be going great for my son and Caroline,
but they were not going great.
Apparently she's having intimate sexual
exchanges on the phone and email,
uh, to another guy,
and Tyler knew about this.
And we did not learn how bad
the situation was until the evening
of December 22, 2018.
My second wife and I, we're watching a movie,
and our doorbell rings, about 10:45 at night.
[doorbell rings]
So I get up and went to the front door,
and my son Tyler is standing there.
I'm quite surprised to see him.
-Tyler. -Hey, dad.
I invite Tyler to come in.
He said no, no.
He just wants to stand there at the door.
Uh, it's very odd behavior.
And I said, "Well -
well, what's the purpose of this visit?"
I, um...
And he said, "I may have killed a man."
♪♪
That's horrifying news.
So, uh, I said, "What -- well, what the heck happened?"
Then he told my wife and I
that his wife is having an affair
with a previous ex-boyfriend.
That just -- just ripped his heart to pieces.
So now he has to decide what to do about it.
So Tyler used Caroline's phone, texted Justin,
the ex-boyfriend
that was having an affair with his wife, Caroline,
that Saturday afternoon,
said, "I'd like to meet you again."
Justin got the text, thought it was Caroline,
agreed to the meet.
Tyler said he went out to meet him...
He brought a bat with him to this meeting,
but he'd also brought his Glock pistol.
He said, well, all you did was shoot at the car,
so surely you must have missed.
You weren't trying to shoot him.
We said,
"Why don't you come in, spend the night with us,
and we'll contact the police in the morning?"
He said no.
He said he wanted to see his sister.
We didn't try to stop him,
so he left, told us that he loved us.
The next day, I received a call
from my daughter early in the morning.
Very emotional, that the police had come to her house
and had arrested Tyler.
That's how we found out about it.
♪♪
My first face-to-face encounter with Tyler
after the murder,
I went down on one of the visiting days to see him.
He was not particularly sorry about having killed him.
He felt the laws needed to be changed,
that if a man has an affair with your wife,
you, as the man, have the right to kill the man.
He doesn't have any emotional impact that he's killed a man.
He just has the logic and the reason.
He's having an affair with my wife, he got what he deserved.
So he felt justified.
But I don't believe my son intended to kill Justin.
I say that for a couple reasons.
One, if the purpose of my son was to kill Justin outright,
he just would have walked up to the car, opened the door,
and shot him in the head.
And he certainly knew he wasn't
gonna get away with killing him.
This is a suburban neighborhood.
A lot of people are going to hear and see.
So it wasn't his purpose to kill him in my opinion.
But I was at the court when he had his court case,
so I got to hear all the evidence,
and one of the things that came out in the --
in the court trial is one of the things that Tyler
said to his wife.
She must have asked him, "Well, what if you end up
killing him?"
And -- and Tyler said to her, "If I kill him, I kill him."
Tyler got a bottle of bleach from the house
and he says to her, "The Clorox is to clean up
the blood from when I shoot him or kill him."
And that was one of the things that led the judge
to, uh, say that Tyler had no remorse,
that this was first-degree murder, premeditated.
And that's why the jury leaned
that direction for a first-degree murder.
As I look back over my life
and ask myself what could I have done different,
I should have been actively involved with Tyler.
The 10 Commandments says, "Thou shalt not kill."
So my son has done a very terrible thing,
not just to Justin and his family,
uh, but he's broken one of God's significant laws.
I'm personally convinced that the demons,
so to speak, had probably whispered in his ear
to confront Justin and probably
whispered in his ear to shoot him.
So that was what I call Satan's trap.
However...
my son has now made a very strong connection with God.
Once Tyler got in jail,
he took his relationship with God very serious,
and I'm encouraged that he's a peaceful inmate.
He is respecting the rules.
He has learned that there are
very bad consequences for bad behavior.
So even though Satan has succeeded in getting my son
put in jail,
God is now winning the battle in my son's life.
So I'm confident my son gets to go to heaven.
God is very willing to forgive all of us for really,
really bad things, but you are not exempt
from the consequences.