A father took the life of his 9-year-old son before shooting himself in their apartment amid a custody battle with the boy’s mother.
49-year-old Stephen O’Loughlin and his son Pierce died from gunshot wounds inside their apartment in San Francisco on Wednesday.
The boy’s grieving mother, 41-year-old Lesley Hu, reportedly called the police after the school called and said her son did not show up for class.
Hu’s attorney, Lorie Nachlis, claimed that the father suffered from untreated mental illness which made him obsessed with his child’s health and paranoid about vaccinations.
It was in 2016 when the couple divorced and Hu was seeking sole custody of their child so she could make medical decisions.
One day before the tragic incident, O’Loughlin had given his approval to have Pierce vaccinated.
Court records showed that O’Loughlin joined a “new-age, self-help group” in 2012 and he became convinced that the government uses mind-control on people.
When they divorced in 2016, the father had already paid the group thousands of dollars.
He had also refused to let his son get vaccinations and claimed that Pierce had suffered negative side effects after he received shots when he was a baby, including weight loss and vomiting.
O’Loughlin’s attorneys wrote in a filing: “This is not an “anti-vax” parent seeking to prevent his child from being vaccinated.
“For the average child, the risk-to-benefit ratio for vaccines is in favor of vaccinations. For a certain subset of society, however, that is not the case. Pierce is one of those people.”
But Hu denied O’Loughlin’s claims and argued that their son’s doctors strongly recommended that he get vaccinated.
“(O’Loughlin’s) stance on vaccinations has taken on a cult-like tone,” she alleged.
Hu also claimed that her ex-husband would videotape their son’s breathing numerous times a day “to document a stuffy nose” as he had become obsessed with Pierce’s health.
“Yes, the parents disagreed about vaccinations, but they disagreed about other issues affecting the child’s well-being,” attorney Nachlis said.
“In fact, they disagreed about whether Pierce was a healthy child or a sick child. Was his stuffy nose a product of allergies or something bigger? Pierce wasn’t killed because of a disagreement over a stuffy nose and he wasn’t killed because of a disagreement regarding vaccinations. He was killed for much more complex reasons.”
Hu’s attorney also argued that the father carried out the murder-suicide as he felt he was already losing control.
Nachlis told KRON4: “He punished Leslie with the ultimate act of violence, killing her child, and she will suffer as I believe was intended for the rest of her life.”
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