People often forget their own safety and rush to help when a loved one is in danger. Parents shield their children. Children try to protect their parents. Spouses and siblings put themselves in harm’s way for one another. This instinct goes beyond social conditioning or moral education. It grows from emotional attachment, empathy and a deep sense of responsibility for those we love. Yet when such efforts to protect a loved one end in murder, the cruelty extends far beyond the loss of life.
Those who witness the killing of someone they love may carry the trauma for years. Some lose not only a loved one but also their sense of safety and their trust in the world around them.
In a 1986 study, psychiatrist Carl P. Malmquist examined the psychological impact on 16 children aged five to 10 who witnessed the murder of a parent. His research highlighted the profound trauma such an experience can cause. A killing does not end with the victim’s death. Its consequences can persist in the minds of those left behind, long after the violence has ceased. For a child, a parent often embodies love, shelter and security. To witness the violent destruction of that source of safety can shatter a child’s understanding of the world. The trauma may also affect emotional and cognitive development, with consequences that extend far beyond the moment of violence.
Yet a deeper question remains: how does a person reach a point where another human being’s desperate plea for mercy, or a loved one’s attempt to intervene, no longer matters?
In a 2026 systematic review, psychologists Gerry C. Karantzas and Jeffry A. Simpson examined 96 studies on dehumanisation, a process through which people deny others the qualities that make them fully human. Their review explored how perceptions of others, empathy and relationship quality relate to this tendency. The research offers a framework for understanding how people can come to disregard another person’s humanity.
This perspective adds another dimension to the horror of killing someone in front of their loved ones. The attacker sees not only the intended victim but also the anguish of someone desperately trying to save them. A mother may place herself between an attacker and her child. A wife may rush to shield her husband. A brother may risk his life to protect his sibling. Such moments reveal the extraordinary force of human attachment. When a killer witnesses this desperate act of protection and still refuses to stop, the violence does more than destroy a life. It rejects the love, empathy and sense of responsibility that move one person to risk everything for another.
The instinct to protect loved ones is not unique to humans. Many animals defend their offspring or mates, sometimes confronting opponents far stronger than themselves. In humans, however, this instinct draws not only on biological impulses but also on memory, affection, empathy, responsibility and the accumulated history of relationships. Risking one’s life for a loved one is therefore more than a momentary emotional reaction. It reflects a deep-rooted dimension of our social and emotional nature.
When an attacker kills family members in front of one another, the violence amounts to more than a series of individual murders. Consider the person who could have sought safety but instead stepped forward to protect someone they loved. That final act reveals something fundamental about our humanity: even in the face of death, the urge to save another can overcome the instinct to survive.
Perhaps this is what makes such killings so profoundly cruel. Their full horror lies not in the death toll alone, but also in the fate of someone who, at the moment of greatest danger, wanted their loved one to live.
To extinguish that hope is to strike at one of humanity’s deepest expressions of love.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author
The writer is an Assistant News Editor, Channel 24
