While Michael Jackson was slowly dying these past six years or more in a kind of slow suicide—swallowing a cocktail of prescription pills in America, suffering from anorexia, insomnia, completing his metamorphosis from a handsome young man, and the greatest entertainer of all time, to that of a ghoul out of his famous Thriller music video, over 1,500 men were brutally murdering men women and children in Trinidad.

These men had something in common with Michael Jackson. Abusive fathers. Mothers who looked the other way. Or absent fathers. When men self-destruct the way Michael Jackson did, when they become emotionally stunted—frozen into childhood,—when they display bizarre and inappropriate behaviour, their parents should be held responsible, tried and incarcerated.

Emotional abuse

The abuse may have initially propelled Michael forward but in the end it snuffed him and his talent out. “How can I get past the pain?” he reportedly once asked. “I’m so tired of being controlled by fear ...” Childhood abuse is a bullet that is planted by parents. It sticks, it becomes infected and one day, it either destroys others or self-destructs.

Joe Jackson, a ruthless task master, saw very early that his supremely talented son was the one out of his nine children who would be the biggest ticket to wealth and an exit from his suffocating small life as a steel worker in a small town. Joe Jackson told the BBC that he “whipped” his son Michael Jackson from the time he was five, but refused to admit it was “abuse.” Joe once reportedly “pummeled him over and over again, hitting him on his back and buttocks while hanging him upside down on one leg. He emotionally abused him by humiliating him and frightening him.

His biographer Randy Taraborrelli writes: “Michael was five when he wandered into a room—and fell to the floor, bloodied. His father had deliberately tripped him up. ‘That’s for what you did yesterday,’ Joseph told his crying son. ‘And tomorrow, I’m gonna get you for what you’ll do today.’ “To teach his sons not to leave their window open at night, he’d climb into their bedroom screaming, his face hidden by a mask, pretending to be a burglar. For years, Michael and his brother Marlon had nightmares of being kidnapped from their beds.”

The violence reportedly got worse as the Jackson brothers became older and more famous. Jackson first spoke openly about his childhood abuse in a 1993 interview with Oprah Winfrey saying that as a child he often cried because he was lonely and that at times, he would vomit when he saw his father.

This is a nation of abandoned citizens. On the day Jackson self-destructed in the US, Camille Daniel, a loved 39- year-old mother and wife was shot point blank reportedly, by a fresh faced 17-year-old boy in Trinidad. Who are his parents? Commissioner Philbert who led 300 cops to Hell Yard and recovered ammunition and arms and arrested a few dozen men admitted that this is just the “tip of the iceberg”

Breeding terrorists

Our killers are similar to terrorists. They are being bred by the hundreds in similar way to the way terrorists are bred in Madrassas in Afghanistan and Pakistan. There, children are indoctrinated in schools where they are brainwashed to commit Jihad, learn hate and deliberately left illiterate.

Here, they are indoctrinated in homes where fathers beat them, abuse, neglect and humiliate them while touting guns, and mothers turn a blind eye. Our very own killers are indoctrinated in prisons where petty offenders are shoved in with criminals, and in schools where they are shoved out of the system very early due to neglect.

We can ask for a policeman to stand outside every home in this country but there will still be killing, because we are a nation of abusive illiterate fathers breeding abusive sons. A few will die like Michael Jackson, self-destruct. It’s time we hold abusive and neglectful parents accountable. Only then will the killing and the pain of abuse, the kind that Jackson shared with thousands of young men in Trinidad, stop.