THE TICKING TIME BOMB NEXT DOOR

 

 

“The deranged walk among us – they always have.”  

 

I wrote that after the inexplicable shooting at the University of Illinois last week in which six innocent people were killed and 23 wounded.  No one seemed to see it coming when 27 year old Steve Kazmierczak, a “personable and friendly” award winning student, walked in to a lecture hall and started shooting.  Now we learn he had been institutionalized by his parents for violent behavior.

 

I’ve been thinking.  How many Kazmierczaks are out there?

 

In New York, a 39 year old mentally ill man has just been arrested after reportedly confessing to a gruesome murder-by-cleaver death of a beloved psychologist in Manhattan.  This behemoth of a man was angry at another doctor in Kathryn Faughey’s office who 17 years ago had him committed to an institution.  Former mental patient David Tarloff’s motive, police said, was robbery but something snapped.  Police had Tarloff in custody just two weeks prior because he'd attacked a security guard at his mother's nursing home.  He was released by a judge at that time (even though this was his third run in with the law since last June) but not before he submitted to fingerprints which, thankfully, helped police re-arrest him after the Faughey murder.

 

In the Bronx, a father of three with a history of violent mental illness still had visitation rights with his children!  Miguel Matias once poured gasoline over a car in which he, his daughter and two sons were sitting.  He was arrested – but not institutionalized – for that act.  A few days ago that same daughter committed the sin of text messaging a boy so her father killed her and dumped her body in his apartment building’s boiler.  Not just in the boiler room - in the boiler.  Matias called police to tell them what he'd done and then taunted them when they arrived asking where the body was. "That's your job. Go find out," he's reported to have said.  A relative said Matias' explaination for the murder was "the devil got into him."

 

Across the country there are countless other instances of former mental patients who have murdered, somehow driven by their madness to snuff out innocent lives.

 

In California – a 20 year old San Fernando Valley man with a violent juvenile record recently killed his father and two brothers.  When the elite LAPD swat team moved in they lost their first comrade killed in the line of duty. 

Officer Randal Simmons

Officer Randal Simmons was buried last week. Now we learn Edwin Rivera had a long history of “significant mental illness” dating back to his mother’s death more than a decade ago.  She died when he was nine or 10 and apparently the boy had been struggling to find his mental balance ever since.

 

And of course we all heard about the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history last spring.  Seung-Hui Cho, a student at Virginia Tech murdered 32 people and wounded at least 15 others in a cold, calculating shooting spree that defied imagination.  Cho, we learned too late, had been in and out of the mental health system starting with treatment he had received in middle school for his extreme anxiety disorder.

 

I guess what I’m getting at is – can’t we do better in this country?  I mean all of us. 

 

Can’t we pass laws to give cops and the courts more leeway when it comes to repeat mentally ill and violent offenders - especially in cases where children may be at risk?

 

Can’t mental health care professionals come up with long term monitoring protocols that provide a real safety net for the rest of us? 

 

Can’t we come up with support systems – both legal and social – for families who come to the awful realization that their loved one must be institutionalized? 

 

And can’t state governments and insurance companies see that paying for hospitalization now keeps countless citizens safe and might erase the need for liability payouts later?

 

Please don’t tell me it’s all about gun control.  Even if we could round up and melt down every single firearm in America (which is like saying we should just get rid of all the illegal drugs in the U.S.)  I’m convinced illicit underground suppliers would make sure more guns (or illegal drugs) would quickly fill the vacuum.  And it wouldn’t be law abiding citizens getting them, either. 

 

Tim Rutten wrote in the Los Angeles Times recently calling for presidential candidates to address the issue of rising gun crimes in America.  He opined that, “The truth is that guns make the malicious, the malcontent and the mad powerful.  They confer the power of life and death on the demented and deranged.”

 

Yes, but so does a can of gasoline and a match.  So does a meat cleaver, or in the case of Miguel Matias, his own bare hands – the weapon he reportedly used to take his teenaged daughter’s life.  Absent guns – the truly sick, those who are so mentally unbalanced that mass murder appeals to them, will arm themselves with whatever is handy.  Finding a way to more effectively dealing with these ticking time bombs would seem an effective first step toward trying to diminish these deadly sprees.

 

While real and effective gun control would be a complicated venture - it is way too simplistic an answer to the mayhem that roils around us.

 

How many more Tarloff’s or Matias’ are there?  Is there a Kazmierczak or Rivera or Cho type living near you?  How can you find out – how can you keep your loved ones safe?   

 

I’m at a loss.  You?

 

 

POST YOUR COMMENT HERE

 

 

BB, a media finance exec in New Jersey writes: 

 

We need a MADD type movement.  SSDM  Student Self Defense Movement.

 

All of the secondary schools have a no tolerance policy for fighting,  admirable but kids are being taught not to defend themselves.  Boys play video games, they don't know how to fight without a computer game control.  We used to organize our own baseall games, no adults and unmpires, we learned how to stick up for ourselves.  No more.

 

This has to change, kids have to learn to defend themselves.  A two week course in self defense would do a lot to combat date rape and a host of problems.  We are turning out wimps.

 

Colleges campuses are easy prey as the boys and girls have become indoctrinated wimps.  I graduated from High School in 1970.  We all knew how to defend ourselves.  Three molotov coctails were once thrown in our high school cafeteria.  This could have been as bad as Columbine as it was a crowded cafeteria.  One caught on fire the other two were duds.  The students reacted and beat the hell out of the kid who threw them before the teachers arrived. Two students put out the gasoline fire with fire extinquishers. They put his face in the paper which was pretty ugly and swollen.  He was pounded pretty hard.  Blacks and whites were unified that day.  My guess is that if it was a gun he might have gotten off two to three shots no more. 

 

Peter, a PR exec in Albuquerque, NM writes:

     Perhaps these deranged gunman would feel a little less powerful if they knew we were all armed.  Allowing students their 2^nd Amendment Rights to carry a gun could go a far way in scaring off those “mentally” ill people who get their “power” knowing we are all unarmed.  

For law-abiding citizens it’s always important to have 360 degree of awareness in today’s environment.  Most people don’t like to have their backs to the door in public settings.  Be aware.  Maybe like sex offender registries we should put once-“institutionalized”  violent patients on a similar public registry so we can BE AWARE.

Adrianne, a pharmacy manager in Santa Maria, Ca writes:

     YOU WONT HEAR ME SAY GUN CONTROL.  ITS NOT THE GUNS FAULT ITS THE TRIGGER HAPPY HUMANS FAULT.  IF ITS NOT A GUN,  AS YOU SAID, IT WILL BE SOMETHING ELSE. THE PROBLEM IS THERE ARE LOTS OF NUTTY HUMANS WALKING THE STREETS AND BELIEVE ME I SEE THEM EVERY DAY.  I CANT BELIEVE THEY ARE NOT PUT IN A HOME BEING TO BE TAKEN CARE  OF!  THEN YOU HAVE PEOPLE WHO ARE BIPOLAR, NOT TAKING THEIR MEDS. ... I DON'T BELIEVE  IN  BANNING GUNS CAUSE IF SOMEONE COMES TO MY DOOR I WANT TO BE ABLE TO PROTECT MY SELF . WHAT CAN YOU DO WHEN THEY COME FOR YOU??  A MAN CAME TO MY JOB - HE WAS WAITED ON THEN LATER YOU SEE HIM ON THE NEWS FOR ROBBING 3 BANKS!!  NOW THAT MAKES YOU THINK ITS EVERYWHERE ALL THE TIME.