Prayer Request for Nicholas Browning
When we first heard about this Sunday morning, the story on the news was that a 15-year-old boy came home Saturday afternoon after a sleep over. He found “a dead body” and ran out of the house. The police were called, and discovered three more bodies.
At this point, your first reaction was to feel horrible for the boy, realizing that his whole family has probably been murdered while he was out. (the authorities didn’t release the names of the victims yet) You thought “How horrible, but how fortunate that he was able to miss the murderer.”
Then, a few hours later, a press conference was held, and to the shock of many, the 15-year-old, Nicholas Browning, was charged in the murder of his family. Apparantly he got into an arguement with his father and was upset. He killed his father, his mother, and his 13-year-old and 11- year-old brothers with his dad’s gun.
The rumour is that the teenager spent Friday night at a friend’s house in my neighborhood. The mere idea that this kid killed his family and then went on to spend the night hanging out with his pals is disturbing, to say the least. Nicholas Browning went to Dulaney High School, where all of my neighbor’s kids, and all of our babysitters go. No doubt this boy has lots of friends who are shocked this morning. I was at a Superbowl party last night and discovered that the younger brothers were on the same basketball team as the sons of our friends. How do you explain this to your kids?
I can’t imagine the horror of that family as this was happening. As adults we all know that we’re going to die someday, and we may even try to guess how it’s going to happen. Heart attack? Car accident? Cancer? No one, however, guesses that their teenage son is going to kill them in their forties. No one.
If we felt bad for Nicholas Browning yesterday morning when we didn’t know who the murderer was, we should feel even worse for this kid now. Clearly he’s mentally insane, but imagine the day (if it comes) that he realizes what he’s done. While there was hope for some kind of recovery if he’d just lost his family, I doubt if there is any kind of recovery possible after murdering your family.
And now he’s alone, in a jail cell, at 15.
As a parent a thousand questions go through your head. “How did they not see the signs of mental illness?” “Had there been indications of depression?” “Why on earth do you keep a loaded gun in your house with kids around?”
These folks had been well-off, but not wealthy. He was an attorney, and from what I gather, she was a stay-at-home mom. They lived in an average neighborhood, in an average city suburb. We are not in the boon docks, or some other gun-toting kind of town. Their son looks like the all-American kid in his photo. Quite simply, this could’ve been any of us.
So pray today. For the family that was murdered, that they are with God and at peace. For the extended family and friends of the Brownings, that they can someday make sense of it all and find it in their hearts to forgive this poor boy. And last, but not least, for Nicholas Browning. Pray for him, that God is with him to comfort him, to guide him out of the darkness that he lives in, and that he repents in a way that can still make his life meaningful.
