Journal of Threat Assessment and Management, Vol 11(3), Sep 2024, 149-185; doi:10.1037/tam0000201
This case study is a detailed assessment of the paranoid schizophrenia and right-wing extremist beliefs of Tobias Rathjen, who amalgamated three low-base rate events: mass homicide, matricide, and suicide. The offender killed nine individuals during a terrorist attack in Hanau, Germany, on February 19, 2020, before murdering his mother and taking his own life. A comprehensive qualitative analysis of primary and secondary sources was conducted, with raw materials consisting of three written documents and three recorded videos, all authored and disseminated by the perpetrator prior to his attack. Open-source data were predominantly composed of the postmortem forensic psychiatric evaluation of the assailant, as well as minor interpellations between the German government and parliamentary groups, and to a lesser extent printed and online articles. We structured the analysis with the Terrorist Radicalization Assessment Protocol (TRAP-18) and found that Rathjen was positive for 94% of the TRAP-18 indicators. The motivations for his acts of violence were multifaceted, but his major psychiatric illness, paranoid schizophrenia with chronic delusions, was central in his progression to become a lone-actor terrorist. In addition to this internally formed psychotic-driven ideology, the perpetrator was influenced and inspired by external (i.e., online and offline) xenophobic and conspiratorial elements that gradually provided a secondary framework for his violent attack. The complex interplay of his delusions, obsessions, and extreme overvalued beliefs—which drove his fixation—reveal the difficulty of clinically understanding such a case, and also the necessity of doing so, to attempt to risk mitigate these types of subjects by threat assessment teams. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)