Words can't relay how sorry Christine and Michael Ressa are for what their son, Stephen, is accused of doing in Las Vegas last month.
"We just can't believe it, our hearts are so broken," Christine Ressa said, sobbing.
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But the Ressas said in an interview last week that the Stephen Ressa who drove his mother's stolen Buick onto the sidewalk on the Strip, killing three, is not the son they know.
That person, they said, is a young man who spiraled into the depths of mental illness within just a couple of years' time.
"We tried to understand his fear and paranoia, his fear of other people, and we tried to work with him," Michael Ressa said. "We just didn't blow it off. We took it as real. As limited as our knowledge is with psychiatric problems, we tried talking to him and reasoning with him. It was to no avail."
Stephen Ressa's parents said the 27-year-old was once a promising and healthy young man who dreamed of a future in baseball growing up in Rialto, Calif., in San Bernardino County.
"A great kid full of energy," Christine Ressa said. "A great sense of humor and real athletic."
Stephen Ressa did well in school and was a talented pitcher, but his mother said there were a couple of episodes in life that scarred her son.
On the last day of the seventh grade, a close friend of his was killed in front of him when the child was punched in the chest during a school game. And when Stephen Ressa was in the 10th grade, another close friend on his baseball team was shot to death in front of him at a party during a drive-by.
"It was horrible," Christine Ressa said. "We went through a lot of grief."
Stephen Ressa graduated high school in Rialto, then went on to play baseball for a year at Southern Colorado University.
When he came back home, his parents said, he seemed disillusioned, changed. Stephen Ressa spent the next few years going to college in California and playing baseball at small colleges, but he never finished his degree.
"He played on a little traveling team in Iowa, and there were tryouts for a minor league team in Michigan and also in Texas, but those fell through," Michael Ressa said. "After he was through with college ball, he did have a couple of offers with a minor league team, but that never made it. He wound up hurting his arm, and he could have rehabbed his arm, but he went off the other way."
The Ressas said they also noticed their son was starting to become paranoid, and he frequently talked about people being out to get him.
"He'd say he didn't like to go to parties, things like that, because he felt everyone was out to get him," Christine Ressa said. "He just thought when he went out that everyone was looking at him, mad dogging him, trying to scare him and get him."
Christine Ressa said she didn't make too much of her son's behavior at first.
"He was functional," she said. "It didn't start getting to the point where we realized he had issues until he stopped playing ball.
"He started working some part-time temporary agency jobs, and that's when we started noticing," she said. "He'd come home from work going, 'Everyone is staring at me, nobody likes me, they all want me to quit.' "
Christine Ressa said her son also talked about suspicions co-workers were planning to kill him.
The Ressas said their son struggled with alcohol and methamphetamine use as well -- he checked into rehabilitation centers twice. He eventually moved to Phoenix.
"That's when he got really paranoid," Christine Ressa said.
Christine Ressa recalled how a small incident like a neighbor pulling up in her son's street and parking his car could spark his paranoia. "They are coming to get me! I've got to get out of here,' " she recalled him saying.
With concerns mounting, the Ressas tried to get their son help, but they found in order to get him into a mental health treatment program in California, Stephen Ressa had to want the treatment.
"I tried to get him into the county hospital here, some behavioral health clinics here, but he's 27," Christine Ressa said. "Even when he was 26 they wouldn't let me do anything, and he had to willingly go.
The situation worsened when Stephen Ressa was arrested on a felony marijuana distribution charge. While in jail, he got in fights and was placed on suicide watch.
He subsequently was released from jail but still had to serve weekends incarcerated, his mother said, and the family was starting to become concerned he might kill himself.
Stephen Ressa, nonetheless, agreed to check into a Salvation Army program where he would live during the week, then go to jail on weekends.
Days before the tragedy in Las Vegas, Christine Ressa said she was scheduled to take her son into court when he went berserk at their Rialto home.
"He came into my bedroom at 7:15 in the morning, we were on our way to the court, and he said, 'Why can't I stay here?' " Christine Ressa said.
" 'Well, you know you can't stay here, we don't want you to drink and do that again, we want you to get help,' " she said she told her son. " 'The Salvation Army would be a good thing, they have people who can help you.'
"He just got this look in his eye, and he looked like the picture in the newspaper we saw from Las Vegas," Christine Ressa said. "This was not the Steve we knew. He looked like a crazy man.
"He had this look in his eye, and he grabbed me by the throat, threw me on the bed, and just started choking me and hitting me," Christine Ressa said.
Christine Ressa said she was choked into unconsciousness twice. When she woke up the second time, her son was standing over her with a large kitchen knife.
"I freaked out," Christine Ressa said. "I said, 'What are you doing! Just go!' I thought for sure he was going to kill me.
"This was a kid who had never laid a finger on me," she said. "Never in a million years would I have ever thought this would happen to me."
Days later, the couple learned their son had been arrested in Las Vegas. They were devastated.
"I just wish we could somehow take it all back and make these people come back to life," Christine Ressa said. "We are so, so sorry."
