Sleep is the only hiding place from his nightmare.
Movie director Peter Rodger said he wakes up each morning to the horrifying realization that he is the father of psycho killer Elliot Rodger —the 22-year-old virgin who shot up a California college because he couldn’t get a date.
“It’s a reverse nightmare situation when I go to sleep,” Rodger told ABC’s Barbara Walters. “I might have a nice dream, but now I wake up, and slowly the truth of what happened dawns on me — my son was a mass murderer.”
Roger said that each waking moment since the May 23 slaughter of six young people— including two University of California, Santa Barbara women — is filled with thoughts of the victims’ faces.
“I wake up and think of those young men and women who died, who were injured and terrorized,” Rodger said. “And my son did that.”
Elliot Rodger’s killing spree shocked the country, especially after a disturbing video surfaced in which he declared that his motive was hatred for pretty blond women who wouldn’t give him the time of day.
The elder Rodger told Walters — who came out of retirement for the interview, which will air on “20/20” Friday at 10 p.m. — that he saw no signs of his son’s misogynistic rage.
“There is no way I thought that this boy could hurt a flea,” said Rodger, who worked as an assistant director on the 2012 blockbuster “The Hunger Games.”
“It’s a reverse nightmare situation when I go to sleep,” the dad said.
“I might have a nice dream, but now I wake up and slowly the truth of what happened dawns on me. My son was a mass murderer.”
The young killer was frustrated by his lack of luck with ladies and had planned to kill coeds.
“The most unbelievable thing, what I don’t get, is that we didn’t see this coming at all.”
In a separate interview, the mother of one of the victims said the Rodger family should have seen this coming.
In fact, in April, Rodger’s mom, Chin Rodger, who is divorced from his dad, got so worried about her son’s odd behavior that she called sheriff’s deputies. The lawmen talked to Eliot but didn’t think he needed a psychological evaluation.
“There were several opportunities missed,” Jane Wang, whose son David, 20, was among the victims, told CBS’s “This Morning” on Thursday.
The father of 19-year-old victim George Chen also went on the CBS show to mourn his son and the other victims.
“Their life was so short, so tragically taken,” Johnny Chen said. “They’re like flowers even before the blossom.”
Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s investigators have been tight-lipped about the details of their probe into the killing spree, which began in Rodger’s apartment, where he killed his two roommates, Wang and Chen, and their friend James Hong, 20.
It’s not known exactly how the 5-foot-9, 135-pound Rodger killed the young men. But Cops said that his apartment was a “pretty horrific crime scene” and that the three were “stabbed repeatedly with sharp objects.”
Rodger then went to the Alpha Phi sorority at UCSB, with plans to slaughter the college women he both lusted after and resented.
He named his planned killing spree his “Day of Retribution.”
“I will attack the very girls who represent everything I hate in the female gender: the hottest sorority of UCSB,” the maniac said in his manifesto.
“After doing a lot of extensive research within the last year, I found out that the sorority with the most beautiful girls is Alpha Phi sorority. I know exactly where their house is, and I’ve sat outside it in my car to stalk them many times.
But after getting no answer at the Alpha Phi front door, he turned his rage on the first women he could find and fatally shot students Katherine Cooper, 22, and Veronika Weiss, 19, as they walked by.
Rodger later went into a nearby deli and gunned down Chris Martinez, 20, a random student.
Rodger ended his spree by killing himself when sheriff’s deputies surrounded him. All six victims were UCSB students.
Last weekend, Peter Rodger met Martinez’s dad, Richard, for an emotional chat.
The men declined to reveal details, other than Martinez telling KEYT-TV it was a “private conversation between grieving fathers.”
Johnny Chen said he hasn’t heard yet from Rodger’s parents.
“We want to hear some personal condolence and apologize, and this is the minimum they should do,” Johnny Chen told CBS.
“We have love in our heart, tears in our eyes, responsibility on our shoulder, and we hear the voice from our children from heaven,” Chen’s mom, Kelly Chen, told CBS on Thursday.