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I was babysitting my 4-year-old brother Tommy when I found the box under his bed.
Inside were dozens of dead insects arranged in perfect rows.
Some were missing wings.
Others had pins stuck through them.
But it was the notebook that made my blood run cold.
Page after page of crayon drawings showing stick figures being hurt.
One had X's for eyes with red scribbles labeled "Daddy."
Until I found the video on Mom's iPad.
A clip of Tommy holding our hamster Mr. Peanuts.
The hamster was squeaking, trying to escape.
Tommy was smiling as he slowly squeezed tighter.
The video ended when Mr. Peanuts stopped moving.
We'd told our parents that Mr. Peanuts had "died in his sleep" last month.
Tommy had even cried at the funeral.
But those weren't even the worst videos.
Christmas morning footage showed him using his new microscope kit to cut open a living cricket.
He was narrating like a nature documentary.
"Now I'm going to see what's inside."
Another video timestamped 3 AM showed him in the garage with a trapped mouse.
Instead of letting it die quickly, he was keeping it alive.
Feeding it cheese while it suffered.
The timestamps went back eight months.
He'd been doing this since he was three.
I started connecting dots I'd ignored.
Our neighbor's missing puppy last summer.
Tommy suggesting we search in weird places.
Like he was leading us away from something.
The smell from his toy chest Mom blamed on old food.
How he volunteered to take trash out despite hating chores.
I found more videos on the iPad.
Tommy talking to himself at night.
But he wasn't alone.
Small cages hidden under his bed.
Movement inside them.
Squeaking and chirping.
He'd been keeping live animals as prisoners.
The most disturbing part was how methodical it was.
Charts in crayon showing different "experiments."
Feeding schedules.
Notes about which animals lasted longest.
One video showed him explaining to his stuffed elephant:
"First you make friends with them.
Then you see what happens when you change things.
Like if they can't move their back legs."
That night at dinner, I watched him cutting his chicken.
The precise way he separated each piece.
He wasn't eating.
He was studying.
Then I noticed Tommy watching me watch him.
No emotion on his face.
Just curiosity.
Like I was his next experiment.
When Mom asked about his day, he smiled.
"I learned interesting things about how bodies work."
The day I came home early from school changed everything.
Tommy was giggling in the basement.
I found our neighbor's rabbit, Cocoa.
Mrs. Henderson had been searching for days.
Tommy had created his "learning room."
Cardboard boxes connected like a maze.
Each box had tests written in crayon:
"Can it find food with one eye covered?"
"What happens if I paint its fur?"
Other animals too.
A cat I didn't recognize.
More rabbits.
Birds in tiny cages.
Some barely alive.
I grabbed Cocoa and ran upstairs.
When I confronted Tommy, he just tilted his head.
"Why are you mad? I was being very scientific."
That's when I realized the truth that still haunts me.
Tommy wasn't acting out or going through a phase.
He genuinely didn't understand why hurting things was wrong.
To him, living creatures were just objects to experiment on.
The scariest part wasn't his actions.
It was how normal he seemed afterward.
Playing with toys, watching cartoons, hugging Mom goodnight.
Like nothing had happened.
Like empathy was just missing from his brain entirely.
I told my parents everything that night.
Showed them the videos, the drawings, the dead insects.
Dad went white as he watched the hamster video.
Mom started crying before it even finished.
Tommy is getting help now, but I still lock my bedroom door at night.
Because when they asked him why he did those things, his answer chilled me to the bone:
"I wanted to see what would happen if I was in charge of when something stopped being alive."
He was four years old.