Psychopath

There is only one person I've met in my life that I'm absolutely positive was a psychopath, and it was a 10 year old little girl.

The summer after I graduated college, I was living in a house in Berkeley with a few PhD students. It wasn't the best neighborhood, but it wasn't the worst either... there were a few families living in the neighborhood, including the people in the house next to us. It seemed like a reasonably nice two story house, but on several occasions there were police cars and/or ambulances outside of the house. We never really questioned why, as police cars weren't a rare sight in the area, and we had only ever seen a young girl and her mom at the house so there was nothing overtly abnormal or concerning.

One afternoon, my roommates and I had just finished smoking a joint in our backyard when we hear a knock at the door. I open it, and it's the mother from next door. I was a bit taken aback, and even more so when she says "Hi, I wanted to ask you guys something, I really don't want to have to call the police..."

At this point I'm thinking she must have seen/ smelled us smoking weed, and while it was Berkeley, it technically hadn't been legalized yet, so I'm thinking we need to apologize and talk our way out of trouble. But then I notice this woman is visibly shaking. She was clearly terrified, and said, "I just don't know what to do, I'm having a situation with my daughter and I really just need another adult to be there." My roommate Sean and I immediately agreed to go with her while my other roommates look on, incredibly confused by whatever the hell is going on. This mother is asking some stoned students to be adults, she must be truly desperate for help.

Sean and I walk over there with her and she explains that her daughter has some... issues, which are currently manifesting as her standing on the roof of their house threatening to drop her mom's work computer off the edge or jump herself. Wow. Shit just got super real. Sure enough, we walk up the driveway to the house and there is this kid standing on the roof of their 2 story house dangling a MacBook Pro over the side. She's saying in this disturbing, sing-songy voice: "Look mommy, no hands! No hands mommy, no hands!"

Sean and I immediately make eye contact, we are both creeped the fuck out. This is not a normal kid. The way she is speaking reminds me of the twins from the Shining. She is not crying and doesn't seem remotely distressed, on the contrary... it appears she is enjoying this torment of her mother, like it's some kind of sick game to her. The mom starts explaining to us that her daughter has had issues like this for many years. She has a psychiatrist and a therapist, and the mother has called both. They recommended calling the police, but the mother has been through this quite a few times before and doesn't want the child to go through the ordeal of being restrained and taken to the hospital yet again. She is frightened and exhausted and doesn't know what to do. So I just start talking to the kid. I tell her about how I used to love climbing on the roof of my house, and now I'm into rock climbing, and I bet she would love that too, besides it's much safer than climbing around the edge of a roof if you make sure to use the proper gear and safety precautions, and the fact that she's so unsafe right now is really scaring her mom. I told her if she comes down, I'm happy to talk to her more about climbing, as well as show her the pet geckos we have that literally climb up the walls. I am just pulling things out of my ass at this point, I have no idea what to say or how to mediate a situation like this, I am just trying to diffuse the tension and get her to come down.

She is flat out ignoring me at first, continuing to taunt her mother, but eventually she seems to get bored/ irritated with my attempts to engage her, turns around and climbs back towards the window where she got out onto the roof. She runs down the stairs and out to meet us, then says in the same weirdly singsongy, fake, come-play-with-us-Danny voice, "I dropped your computer on the roof and now it's broken. I'm sorry mommy, do you forgive me?" There was zero remorse whatsoever in her voice, it sounded so disturbing and manipulative I was blown away that it was coming from a ten year old girl and not some demon child from a horror movie. The mother is still shaking and just looks overwhelmed, so I offer to go up and get her computer from the roof. She agrees and escorts me through the house up the stairs with her daughter trailing behind (it appears to be a perfectly normal, well maintained middle class home). The girl is clearly irritated with me spoiling her game and repeatedly orders me to leave. I ignore her, climb out the window onto the roof, and the laptop is sitting by a gutter seemingly unscathed.

I climb back through and hand it to the mother. At this point the girl realized her bluff was called and skipped off to her room. Mom proceeds to explain to me that this whole thing was triggered by her changing the password to her laptop after the girl logged into it, stole her mother's credit card and ordered over $2000 worth of stuff. This girl is freaking ten years old!!! She has been pulling shit like this her entire life and no one understands why. They had to move the girl's younger sibling into a separate apartment with her father because they were afraid she would hurt him. The mom was crying at this point, saying they really tried their best to get her the help she needs and they are just at their wits' end. I did my best to reassure her, gave her my phone number and told her to contact me if she needs help in the future. Sean and I noped the fuck out of there after that and went back to our house. She never contacted me and we moved out a few months later.

TL; DR Ten year old girl with a history of disturbing behavior necessitating repeated police intervention steals her mom's credit card, orders thousands of dollars of stuff online, and when the mom locks her out of the laptop the girl climbs onto the roof and threatens to drop it off or jump while taunting her mother in a sing-songy voice like a kid from a horror movie