Två lärare mördade av elev på Latinskolan i Malmö (GM dömd till livstid) 2022-03-21

Marianne Kristiansson, PhD, professor of forensic psychiatry at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, has published one of the few studies looking at the characteristics of a small number of violent offenders who also had autism.

She said when she heard about the Connecticut shooting, her first thought was that the shooter might have had Asperger’s.

“That was just my diagnosis,” Kristiansson says. “This offender behavior that he has presented is quite typical of a subject with ... autistic traits.”

As head of the national board of forensic medicine in Sweden, it’s Kristiansson’s job to try to figure out why people sometimes act in violent ways.

She says most people who commit crimes do it for some kind of concrete reward -- money, for instance, or sex, or drugs. That’s not the case in people with autism spectrum disorders.

“In these cases, it’s very, very different. The motive for the crime is different. The motive of the crime is to communicate that you yourself are very offended. Other people have treated you in a very bad way and you want revenge. You want to communicate that on a very global level to lots of people,” she says.

“This behavior is completely impossible to understand because it’s so horrible. A psychopath would never commit such a crime,” she says “because a psychopath commits crimes that he receives some benefit from, and he would not commit suicide after a crime.”

“In Sweden we have had such offenders who really wanted to communicate to other authorities that they are very offended and very frustrated, but due to their autistic traits, they didn’t have the ability to communicate that verbally, so instead they take some kind of non-verbal communication,” she says, referring to the case of Peter Mangs, a 40-year-old with a diagnosis of Asperger’s who was charged with shooting more than a dozen people, most of them immigrants, from 2009 to 2010.

“Asperger’s subjects may have special interests. He had a special interest in shooting and guns and so on. So he had a license for lots of guns,” she says, referring to Mangs.

When people with Asperger’s become fixated on weapons, it can lead to violence, she says.