As a father, there are things I simply cannot fathom. I don’t get how people can neglect their own children or hurt them intentionally. We all make mistakes and our efforts to be good parents can fall short, but most of us try to minimize the trauma we inflict on our kids. We accomplish it with varying degrees of success.

But those who do intentionally hurt their kids are among the lowest of the low.

Yet even those who abuse have a line they don’t think they’ll cross. One Ohio man now stands accused of crossing it.

Three young brothers are dead after a shooting in Ohio on Thursday night and their father has been charged for their murders, according to officials.

Chad Doerman, 32, is under arrest and charged with three counts of aggravated murder in the deaths of his sons ages 3, 4 and 7. Doerman is being held without bond at the Clermont County Jail and will be arraigned in court Friday morning.

The shooting was first reported about 4:15 p.m. Thursday at a home in a rural, wooded area in Monroe Township, about 25 miles southeast of Cincinnati. An unknown woman called 911 screaming that “her babies had been shot,” officials with the sheriff’s office said in a news release. Three minutes later, a separate caller who had driven by the scene told the 911 call taker that they’d seen an underage girl running down the road saying “her father was killing everyone.”

Responding sheriff’s deputies found Doerman sitting on a step outside.

The deputies also found the three boys unresponsive in the yard with gunshot wounds. They tried life-saving measures until Monroe Fire/EMS arrived, but the boys died at the scene.

The mother was also outside the home. She was transported to a nearby hospital where she was told her sons were dead.

If you ever doubted there was evil in this world–I don’t see how, mind you, but I’ve known people who believed that–then just look at this.

What kind of monster kills his own children? Especially like this?

These are small children, for crying out loud. They couldn’t have done anything to warrant this. There’s no justification for a horror like this.

Some will try and use this to justify their calls for gun control. They’ll argue that if the father hadn’t been armed, this wouldn’t have happened.

There are problems with that line of thinking though.

The first is that we simply don’t know anything. We don’t know if this guy was a serial abuser and couldn’t lawfully own guns or if he was someone completely unknown to law enforcement who would have been permitted to get a gun under any set of rules remotely likely to pass in Ohio.

Further, this is a grown man. Do you really think he couldn’t have found a way to kill three children, the oldest of which was just seven years old?

No, the gun wasn’t the problem.

The problem is that something was broken inside of this…person. I can’t call him a man because a man doesn’t do that to children. A man doesn’t hurt the innocent. A man protects them.

Unfortunately, it’s clear there was no man there.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to wake my daughter up and hold her tight for a good, long while.