Murder, suicide and the family left behind

Shooter couldn't put war behind him, girlfriend says
Wounded vet who committed murder-suicide had a difficult time dealing with trauma.
The Morning Call
By Pamela Lehman
November 9, 2013

Amanda Snyder fell in love with him five years after he came back from Afghanistan.

A soldier with the 82nd Airborne Division, he had enlisted while still in Northampton Area High School because he wanted to fight in the war on terror. The wounds from that battle injured his brain, cost him the lower half of his right leg and left him without the use of his right hand and wrist.

When she met Robert Kislow at a car show in Macungie, he broke the ice by introducing himself and taking off his prosthetic leg.

That didn't matter to Snyder.

"It made him who he was," she said.

She gave him two children and looked forward to marrying him and living in a new house in Moore Township built by the nonprofit group Homes for Our Troops, which honors veterans by building their dream homes.

For Kislow, that was a house in the woods of northwestern Northampton County that he loved. It was there, just before midnight July 29, that Kislow erupted. He got into an argument with Snyder's mother, shot her to death and then turned the gun on himself.

The murder and suicide seemed the opposite of the positive attitude Kislow had shown in one newspaper story after another. While lying in a bed at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in 2005 — knowing that his right foot and lower leg would likely be amputated — he told a Morning Call reporter, "This isn't going to slow me down one bit."

In early 2011, he eagerly awaited moving into his new home and reveled in his job as a technician at PSI Motorsports in Lowhill Township: "I've healed. My head's in a good place."

Snyder, a slight 21-year-old who nervously pulled on her long hair while she talked recently about Kislow and the shootings, said her fiancé's struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder revealed itself in bouts of silence, not violence.

But she has no doubts the shootings were the result of Kislow's battle with PTSD and the traumatic brain injury he suffered in the firefight that cost him his leg eight years ago.

"I don't think of him as a murderer," she said. "I think it built up and he just snapped."

Looking back, she said she now sees warning signs that Kislow was struggling. Instead of worrying his family, she said Kislow would sometimes grow silent.

She said he was frustrated by therapists who seemed to offer only pills to deal with his issues.

"I thought I knew what PTSD is, but I really had no idea," Snyder said.
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