Because no one intervened with Mr. Hyde, Elias Abuelazam will not become known as a “gentle giant,” but rather more likely as a “Jack the Ripper.”
Serial Murderer Elias Abuelazam: Alcoholic? (but of course)
Serial murderers are often charming and almost always alcoholic: the case of Elias Abuelazam, a classic Jekyll and Hyde alcoholic.
Elias Abuelazam, 34, was considered God-fearing by his mother, who told reporters he would always assist those needing help. A neighbor commented Abuelazam was “really quiet and real nice. You wouldn’t even know he was there.” The manager of a store next to a market he worked at said, “He was very nice to the ladies and walked them to their cars at night.” A former class-mate called him a “nice guy” and an ex-mother-in-law said he was “such a nice person as far as we knew.” A co-worker at a behavioral health center that dealt with unruly and sometimes violent teens called him a “gentle giant” who was patient, restrained and not too quick to react. At another job, he helped to care for special needs patients at a hospital; there are no reported complaints of his work. He sure sounds like a nice guy, doesn’t he?
Well, as this “nice guy” was ready to board a flight bound for Tel Aviv out of Atlanta on August 11, he was arrested and charged with one count of assault with intent to commit murder. Abuelazam is now a suspect in five murders and at least 15 additional stabbings across Michigan, Ohio and Virginia. Other than his victims, no one saw the horror of which he was capable, even if a few saw a somewhat darker side. An ex-father-in-law said he had gotten “rough” with his daughter and there was “a bit of abuse.” A neighbor said he abused his dogs when they didn’t follow his orders and, in a hint of how terrifying Abuelazam’s behaviors might become, commented that when he was mad his face would show a crazy and frightening rage.
Jekyll and Hyde characters, as Abuelazam appears to be, are almost always alcoholics. On a recent visit to his family in Israel, while “intoxicated” during a verbal altercation he stabbed a friend in the face with a screwdriver. Acquaintances said he could be a “frightening character, someone you don’t want to mess with,” and that he sometimes used drugs and got into fights. The former classmate told reporters, “He experienced something that changed him entirely. He started using drugs, so his family sent him abroad.” Cause and effect isn’t clear in the statement, which many if not most might interpret as something changed in him that caused him to use drugs. Those who have read “Alcoholism Myths and Realities: Removing the Stigma of Society’s Most Destructive Disease” know the reverse is true: the “something” he experienced “that changed him entirely” was addiction to psychotropic substances, which causes distorted perceptions, including euphoric recall, which made him view everything he said or did through self-favoring lenses. This in turn caused egomania—an inordinately large sense of self-importance, the behavioral indications of which include a sense of invincibility and a Supreme Being complex—which sometimes makes one play God in the ultimate sense.
Unfortunately, as is too often true in the lives of addicts, there were dozens if not hundreds of incidents for which close people or the law could have intervened but didn’t before multiple tragedies are alleged to have occurred. When Abuelazam began using drugs, the family arranged for him to pull what recovering alcoholics call “a geographic.” If they had kept him in Israel and tried instead an intervention and done all they could to force him into a program of recovery, Abuelazam the “nice guy” would perhaps have continued to walk ladies to their cars and he might have been described as “gentle giant” on his tombstone, rather than yet one more “Jack the Ripper.”