How Family Tried to Keep Suspected Neo-Nazi From Their Daughter — Then He Allegedly Killed Them
Hours before Buckley Kuhn-Fricker was allegedly murdered by her 16-year-old daughter’s boyfriend, she posted a brief quote to Facebook, her mother tells PEOPLE.
The Thursday night post, an aphorism by philosopher Edmund Burke, read: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
It’s a line that is more chilling by the day, as details continue to be revealed about a conflict in the family that may have motivated the double homicide of Kuhn-Fricker, 43, and her husband, 48-year-old Scott Fricker, in their home in Reston, Virginia, early Friday.
The suspected shooter, a 17-year-old boy from nearby Lorton, Virginia, then turned the gun on himself, county authorities tell PEOPLE.
He remains in critical condition at an area hospital and will be charged as a juvenile with murder, pending his medical recovery, according to a police spokeswoman. Officers responded to the Fricker home around 5 a.m. Friday and found both bodies as well as the injured teen, who remains under guard.
Police have declined to identify the boy, citing his age, or to comment further about a possible motive or other details about the shooting.
However, according to Kuhn-Fricker’s mom, Janet Kuhn, as well as friends interviewed by local media, Kuhn-Fricker had become concerned that her daughter was actually dating an “outspoken Neo Nazi,” and she pushed for the pair to break up — recently staging an intervention, which the family thought had been successful, Kuhn says.
(The suspect’s relatives have reportedly declined to comment to other reporters and PEOPLE could not immediately reach them. A police spokeswoman declined to discuss Kuhn’s version of what happened.)
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On Thursday, a day before the slayings, Kuhn-Fricker texted a friend to say her daughter was no longer dating the boy, according to the Washington Post. The breaking point appears to have come after Kuhn-Fricker found out that her daughter’s boyfriend was allegedly posting and reposting racist and inflammatory messages on Twitter, including pro-Hitler, pro-Nazi and anti-semitic and anti-gay content.
“I just want to talk about the Nazi hatred and the evil that it prompts,” Kuhn tells PEOPLE. “This kid is 17 years old and obviously he got all this hate from somebody.”
“My daughter and her husband found out about a lot of the Nazi stuff just this past week, and they forbid their daughter to see him again,” Kuhn told local TV station WRC.
A History of Troubling Behavior?
On the Sunday before the shooting, Kuhn-Fricker sent screenshots of the Twitter account to the principal of her daughter’s private school, which the boy also attended, the Post reports.
“I would feel a little bad reporting him if his online access was to basically be a normal teen, but he is a monster, and I have no pity for people like that,” Kuhn-Fricker wrote to the principal in an email shared with the Post by one of her friends.
“He made these choices,” Kuhn-Fricker wrote. “He is spreading hate.”
PEOPLE has been unable to independently review evidence of this Twitter account or to verify if the suspect is connected to it. Kuhn-Fricker reportedly discovered the account after looking at her daughter’s phone.
She feared her daughter’s boyfriend was trying to proselytize her with his beliefs, Kuhn told the Post.
Kuhn-Fricker wrote that her daughter — who reportedly began dating the boy in June — had asked her at one point, “Did you know that Jews are partly to blame for WWII?”
A friend who spoke to the Post remembered Kuhn-Fricker as saying, “We can’t allow her to see someone associated with Nazis. We don’t associate with hate groups in our house.”
In a message she sent to the boyfriend’s mother, Kuhn-Fricker reportedly wrote that the boy “was sneaking into our house at night … and is an outspoken Neo Nazi. These things render any legal redemption void.”
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According to another report in the Post, the boy’s behavior had already raised red flags in his own neighborhood, in Lorton: Residents there say he had apparently mowed a large swastika — about 40 feet wide and 40 feet tall — into a community field about two months before the shooting.
A group of neighbors got together and one of them went over to the boy’s family, where his parents said he had been the one to make the symbol and that he was receiving treatment, one local resident told the Post. (A message to the neighborhood association was not immediately returned on Wednesday.)
“They were going to take care of it,” neighbor Penny Potter told the Post of the boy’s parents. “They were aware of it.”
The neighbors did not call the police.
On Friday morning, according to Kuhn’s account of the shooting, her daughter and her son-in-law went to check on the girl in her bedroom when they found the teenage boy. Police say he was confronted by the parents and then allegedly shot them both.
Kuhn, citing a detective, told the Post that Fricker told the boy to leave and then the teen allegedly pulled a gun.
Afterward, he shot himself in the head, Kuhn said.
‘Wonderful, Wonderful, Wonderful People’
Four other family members were at the Fricker home at the time of the shooting, according to police. Among them were Fricker’s parents, Kuhn says, who were in town for Christmas.
Kuhn, a retired attorney, remembers her daughter, who owned an elder-care company, as “beautiful inside and out.” Kuhn-Fricker’s work involved helping older local residents without support — who didn’t have a child like her, her mother says.
Fricker worked as a senior research psychologist at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, according to the New York Times.
“They were wonderful, wonderful, wonderful people and beautiful in every way outside and inside,” Kuhn says.
The children — including Kuhn-Fricker’s teenage daughter, who is her child from a previous marriage, and the couple’s younger son, 10 — are now with relatives, Kuhn says. Kuhn-Fricker is also survived by an adult son, who like her daughter is from her first marriage, according to the Post.
The site of the shooting, meanwhile, has become something of a memorial to the family it shattered. Outside their home sit candles, bouquets of flowers and a sign: “Hate has no home here.”
