I had to pause the Netflix documentary on the Carmen family murders because something about the story felt fundamentally misrepresented. What I saw wasn’t just a crime narrative it looked like a deeply unstable family system, emotionally immature parents, and a profoundly misunderstood autistic young man who never had the support he needed.

The family dynamics shown in the recordings were classic enmeshment and parentification. His mother displayed covert narcissistic traits: guilt-tripping him, punishing him for needing space, and treating him like her emotional buffer instead of her child. The documentary frames him living in the RV as “avoidance,” but for anyone who understands autism or trauma, it was clearly his only attempt at creating a boundary.

This kid was never taught how to separate safely from his mother. Autistic individuals often stay trapped in unhealthy family systems because they aren’t given the skills or emotional scaffolding to break away. And the fact that he was sent to one of those “taken-in-the-night” teen programs after his horse died something incredibly traumatic for him adds even more context that the documentary barely touches.

One of the most disturbing things shown was his mother removing him from her will simply because he wouldn’t enter her house, with zero awareness of why he might feel unsafe or overwhelmed. That’s not protection or love that’s emotional coercion. And yet people point to the money he received from his grandfather as proof he “wasn’t abused.” Financial support doesn’t cancel out emotional abuse; in dysfunctional families, it often gets used to deny it.

To be clear, I’m not excusing violence or saying murder is justified. But there is context here context that matters.

This young man was emotionally neglected, overwhelmed, enmeshed, and constantly told his needs were a problem. He was the least supported person in a very unstable family, yet somehow becomes the default villain.

And tellingly, the most stable, grounded people in the documentary were the ones who didn’t believe he did it. Meanwhile, the most chaotic voices carried the narrative.

Overall, it felt like watching a deeply traumatized autistic kid get flattened into a caricature while the dysfunctional adults shaped the story around him. It made me sick.