Patricide

Also called paternal homicide, the act of killing one's own father, a term formed from the Latin pater, meaning father, and a suffix denoting a killer, making it a specific subcategory of parricide, the killing of a close relative more broadly. Ancient Rome treated patricide with exceptional severity, and historical sources describe it as the one crime that could bring a Roman civilian the death penalty, reflecting its treatment across many cultures and legal traditions as one of the gravest possible offenses. In the United States between 1980 and 2010, fathers were killed by their children more often than mothers were, and Bureau of Justice Statistics data identify teenage sons between sixteen and nineteen years old as the most common perpetrators of parental killings generally. Documented cases of patricide span from ancient Mesopotamia through the present, appearing across a wide range of cultures and eras, though contemporary instances tend to involve markedly younger perpetrators than the historical record shows.