"The mechanism for monitoring people like him cannot be fixed because it does not exist."
Eli Sanders
''I'm not David Kaczynski. I'm the Unabomber's brother.''
With a single phone call from an ABC reporter, the mother of James Holmes joined the ranks of a small, tragic and exclusive group: the families of accused or convicted mass murders. Like the parents of Jared Lee Loughner and Cho Seung-Hui, Arlene Holmes must now somehow manage to secure legal representation for her son, learn to navigate the court system of a distant state and cope with the horror of what he appears to have done- all in the glare of media kleig lights.
While she struggles, fingers will begin to point. Bad Mother, Bad Morals, Bad Parenting, Bad Guns, Bad Movies, BadBadBad will be the chant, as pundit after pundit (from the safety of their undisturbed lives) joins the chorus of moral outrage.
But what if Arlene Holmes didn't fail her son? What if our disintegrating mental health system failed the entire Holmes family?
Consider the case of Isaiah Kalebu.
In the early morning hours of July 19, 2009, 23-year-old Isaiah Kalebu climbed through an open bathroom window and proceeded to hold Teresa Butz and her partner at knifepoint for over an hour, repeatedly raping them both. When he tired of raping them, he began slashing and stabbing them with the knife. Her heart punctured, Teresa Butz somehow managed to break the bedroom window and jump out. She ran, screaming, until she collapsed and bled to death in the street. The other woman attempted to flee via the front door, but her hands were so slippery with blood she nearly couldn't turn the knob. She would find her way to a neighbor's, survive the attack and testify in court, securing Kalebu's conviction.
Just six days earlier, Kalebu had been released on his own recognizance by a Superior Court Judge, despite repeated warnings from mental health professionals that Kalebu posed "an elevated risk for future danger to others and for committing future criminal acts."
That assessment was the culmination of 16 months of increasingly violent and erratic behavior. In his coverage of the case, Eli Sanders wrote:
"Viewed chronologically, the records make it clear that Kalebu gave plenty of people cause for concern over those 16 months leading up to the murder of Teresa Butz—and that, in the process, he racked up an alarming list of reports and criminal allegations. He threatened to kill his own mother. He verbally harassed a female staff member at Western State Hospital, where his mental competency was being evaluated. He got into a standoff with Pierce County police officers and had to be forcibly subdued. He frightened his 61-year-old aunt so much that she kicked him out of her apartment and filed for a restraining order against him. Shortly thereafter, the aunt's apartment went up in flames, killing her. Kalebu remains a "person of interest" in the arson investigation."
The one thing he did not do during those 16 months was receive a conviction for a violent crime. Such a conviction would have placed Kalebu under the supervision of mental health and law enforcement officials. But, as Sanders points out:
"... [Washington State] has no organized program for keeping tabs on unstable people like Kalebu—people with no prior criminal convictions who have recently been diagnosed with serious psychological problems and charged with violent offenses but have been set free while they await trial."
Like Kalebu, Jared Lee Loughner had no history of violent offenses. He'd had some minor run-ins with the police- small-time drug offenses, one incident in which he vandalized a road sign- but nothing that might have placed him under official supervision.
That does not mean that he went unnoticed. Loughner dropped out of high school before his senior year and friends noticed that he began to drink heavily and use drugs (Kalebu also drank and used drugs; self-medication is a common feature of serious mental disturbance.) He became impossible to talk to, spewing random collections of words and laughing for no reason. Shortly after he enrolled in Pima Community College, his fellow students began to complain. He scared them.
According to at least one attorney interviewed by Time Magazine, Arizona law required that Pima Community College officials to refer Loughner to authorities for evaluation and possible commitment.
Instead, they asked him to leave. Don't come back, they said, until you get mental health treatment.
Fine, but where? How? As with Kalebu, officials were asking a young man too mentally disorganized to hold a coherent conversation to seek out, arrange and pay for serious treatment. Loughner's parents would be faced with the burden of managing his behavior, holding down jobs and finding professional help for a son sliding further and further out of control.
In an era when everyone is arguing about medical coverage the ugly reality is that an indigent with a head cold has more options for treatment than a middle-class kid suffering from delusions and hearing voices.
Some experts say this is the unpleasant outcome of good intentions. Back the 1950s and 60s:
"If you thought someone was crazy, and you could get a doctor to go along, they were in," said Dr. Lovell, the University of Washington professor who served on the Harps panel. "And if you got angry and desperate to prove that you were not crazy, that was further proof of your diagnosis. It was a catch-22 and no one wants to go back there."
The path leading away from "back there" is increasingly littered with closed facilities, according to the Treatment Advocacy Center:
In 1955, there were 558,922 state hospital beds in the United States for acutely ill psychiatric patients, the great majority with serious mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder (known then as “manic depressive illness”) or severe depression and a minority with developmental disabilities, dementia or other chronic brain diseases.
Driven in part by the emergence of medications that made it possible to stabilize many patients, the idea behind deinstitutionalization was fundamentally sound: Most patients could live safely outside a hospital while being treated in community facilities, provided that such treatment facilities existed. The result has been disastrous: 95% of the nation’s public psychiatric hospital beds disappeared, but community psychiatric care exists for fewer than half the patients who do need it.
Some of these patients will wind up on the streets. The "lucky" ones will remain in the custody of their frightened, frustrated families.
After the Columbine massacre, the Federal Government commissioned a study of 37 known school shootings. In over 75% of the cases, at least one person had some knowledge of the shooter's plans. The study did not specify how often that person was a family member. But should the worst happen, those families will have to endure endless sermonizing about their failings as parents, siblings or spouses.
Susan Klebold, mother of Dylan Klebold, knows this well:
"While I perceived myself to be a victim of the tragedy, I didn't have the comfort of being perceived that way by most of the community," she wrote in O magazine in 2009. "I was widely viewed as a perpetrator or at least an accomplice since I was the person who had raised a 'monster.' ... If I turned on the radio, I heard angry voices condemning us for Dylan's actions. Our elected officials stated publicly that bad parenting was the cause of the massacre."
Increasingly, it seems that our best intentions as a society have left the families of the seriously disturbed with an impossible "deal":
1. We demand that the family take full responsibility for the supervision of their mentally ill members;
2. We steadily and systematically reduce the treatment tools available to them;
3. When their seriously ill loved one acts out, we denounce the family as the cause of the problem.
It doesn't have to be that way.
On October 2nd, 2006 a milk truck driver named Charles Roberts walked into the one-room schoolhouse of the Nickel Mines Old Order Amish Community in Lancaster, Pennsylvania armed with a handgun, a shotgun, and numerous items possibly intended for torture.
Since the death of his infant daughter 9 years before, Roberts had become increasingly despondent and detached from reality. Inside the schoolhouse, he announced that he had come to punish God by killing Christian girls. He took 10 hostages, all girls, ranging in age from 6 to 13. After a standoff with police, Roberts shot all the girls and then himself.
Five of the girls died.
Within hours of the shooting, Amish neighbors began appearing on the Roberts' family doorstep, armed only with compassion.
One Amish man wrapped his arms around Charles Roberts' father and sat silently with him as he wept. The grandfather of one of the slain girls was overheard telling some children "We must not think evil of this man."
When Charles Roberts was buried, fully half the people attending the funeral were Amish. Roberts' widow, in turn, was invited to the funeral of one of the victims. When donations began pouring into the Amish community, they insisted on setting up a fund for the Roberts family as well.
The next week, the Amish community quietly dismantled the shoolhouse. They let the land run back to pasture. Then they built a new and different schoolhouse in a new and different place.
It could be argued that even their wholesale rejection of modern society did not protect the Amish from mass murder. Their surviving children were no less traumatized than the survivors of other mass murders. In the days and weeks to come they would turn to their parents, asking "Why? Why?" as so many other survivors have before them.
An article posted online by Religion News Service describes two Amish parents trying to explain the shooting to their young children. Their isolation from the rhetorical babble about guns, culture and parenting served them well. They gave the most truthful explanation of a mass murder I have ever heard:
The shooter "had a little problem in his head," they said, "that made him do mean things."
References
The Mind of Kalebu- Eli Sanders
The Troubled Life of Jared Loughner- John Cloud
Jared Loughner's Parents Get Understanding from Moms of Killers- Russell Goldman
Inside a Mass Murderer's Mind- Barbara Kiviat, Alice Park and Carolyn Sayre
No Room at the Inn- Treatment Advocacy Center
Amish Grace and Forgiveness- LancasterPa.com
Amish Search for Healing, Forgiveness After 'The Amish 9/11'- Daniel Burke
Grace Amid the Losses- Melissa Dribben
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