Our buddies at Fathers & Families posted a story yesterday about Peter Spitz, an ex-marine who was shot by Teresa, his wife and mother of his child. After walking their child over to a neighbor’s house, Teresa returned, put a pillow over Peter’s head, shot him three times, and shot Peter’s mother, killing her.

Peter called 911 and lived – albeit in a living hell. He is blind and has no sense of smell. To top it off, he’s not allowed to see his son. Teresa, who had once considered drowning that son, and allegedly wrote a letter to a friend while in a psychiatric facility saying she’d “finish the job,” has been granted regular supervised visits. The child was placed with a guardian family during the ordeal – and that family is friends of Teresa, and clearly not friends of Peter.

If you just threw up in your mouth a little, we understand.

Purely speculation: had it been the “other way around,” and the father had shot the mother, you’d better believe all of society would have banded together to make sure the monster could not be anywhere near his child. He would have spent a long time in prison and probably wouldn’t have made it out alive, as prison’s got a great reputation for punishing wife-and-child abusers.

Head over to F&F for the whole story.

Sauce: Fathers & Families

Dr. Peggy Drexler’s got the most recent fatherhood-tagged post on ol’ HuffPo – and she brings up a complicated topic: whether fathers are able to affect daughters just by being around (and then scaling upward the better they are). Her argument is that – yes, fathers shape daughters’ lives, but that just saying it “lacks dimension.”

I think giving things dimensions sometimes cheapens nature’s finer designs.