Metallica are perhaps best known as the thrash metal-turned-arena rock icons that sing about proverbial sandmen, the atrocities of war and, occasionally, love. But they also named an album Kill 'Em All, and roughly 20 percent of their songs had the word "die" somewhere in the title. So it's not unfathomable that a mentally disturbed person might use Metallica's music as a springboard to do something awful. In 2002, a New Jersey man did just that when he killed his mother, whom he lived with, and proceeded to rampage through the neighborhood, fatally stabbing an 11-year-old who rode by on his bike. 29-year-old Ronald Pituch was a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic who did not take his medication the day he murdered two people. This made him delusional and, obviously, extremely violent. Pituch believed that the Metallica song "Ronnie," which is allegedly about a school shooting that occurred in Washington, was actually written about and directed at himself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WB-vwdj5NYA In court, Pituch's attorney pointed to a specific set of lyrics that Ronald believed, in his unmedicated state, were not-so-coded instructions from James Hetfield, including bits that describe the song's subject as a boy who "never laughed, never smiled, talked alone for miles and miles and miles" and the supposed endorsement that the children in his quiet town "all fall down, down, down."
