A 78-year-old woman in Michigan has narrowly escaped a death plot, allegedly at the hands of her 45-year-old son. Police say Adam Lutz handcuffed his 78-year-old mother, Gloria, to the car in a garage and then remotely started it. She managed to escape four hours later, though how she survived that long is unclear. She then barricaded herself in her bedroom before calling police hours later.
There are so many things wrong with this story, it's hard to know where to begin. Authorities say this poor mother had been psychologically abused for years by her son who was trying to collect her money. It's unclear how he hoped to get away with his mother's death, though I suppose he may have planned to uncuff her and make it look like suicide.
But still, her own son? Never mind that it was a terribly cruel thing to do. Cops say he was willing to let his own mother suffer for hours and slowly suffocate on fumes. How could anyone be this cruel?
Obviously, we don't know all the details or why Lutz could have hated his mother this much. Could he have just been greedy, despite having a perfectly adequate mother who worked hard to raise him? For sure. On the other hand, is it possible that she wasn't good to him growing up? Sure, that's possible, too. We simply don't know.
What we do know is that a 45-year-old man who clearly knows better is accused of being willing to let his own mother suffer a slow and agonizing death.
How did she escape? How did she survive four hours in the garage?
Like so many of these stories that pop up when they are hot, we will likely never know these answers. This one family's horrible tragedy is high news today, but it will go back to local soon after and then maybe not even that.
These people have to live with their family's pain for their rest of their lives. Who knows what causes these kinds of tragedies (and it's a tragedy, despite the "happy" ending), but maybe it's nothing we could understand anyway.
The twisted dealings inside a family are often not clear to outsiders. We can't really ever understand what went so very wrong, but regardless, my heart goes out to this mom. I am sure she loved her son and that this causes her more pain than we can imagine.
