The Soul Grows Weary

Delusional man who threatened to kill strangers no longer barred from owning guns by Oregon Courts

via The Oregonian

By Aimee Green | The Oregonian/OregonLive agreen@oregonian.com
The Oregonian/OregonLive

The Oregon Court of Appeals on Wednesday reversed a southern Oregon judge’s decision to commit a man to the state psychiatric hospital and revoke his gun ownership rights after he’d threatened to kill strangers who he believed were watching him through power lines and robotic birds.

The man’s case illustrates Oregon’s high legal bar for forcing people with mental illness into receiving treatment and forbidding them from having guns.

The case also highlights battling ideologies: One argues that people who have been diagnosed with mental illness and have threatened to kill others should be sent to the state hospital for involuntary treatment for up to 180 days. The other argues that forcing vulnerable people to receive treatment without significant evidence they’re truly a danger violates their civil liberties and can have devastating effects on them.

The man in this case was identified in court papers only as 43-year-old “J.P.”

Alexander Cambier, a Portland public defender who represented J.P.’s interests before the Appeals Court, said committing someone for up to six months represents a significant “deprivation of liberty” that must be backed up by evidence of the person’s future dangerousness.

“In a case like this the state is seeking to put someone in a hospital room — which can look a lot like a jail cell, i.e. locked doors and bars over the windows — not because they have actually hurt someone but because the state is predicting that they will hurt someone in the future,” Cambier told The Oregonian/OregonLive.

The Appeals Court said prosecutors didn’t legal justify the case against J.P. because he didn’t have the means to actually acquire a gun and probably didn’t have the physical strength to hang people as he had threatened.

J.P. had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and a supervisor at a mental health clinic was worried he’d act on his delusions to “kill” or “hang” strangers who he thought were members of the mafia, according to an Appeals Court summary of the case.

J.P.’s encounter with the mental health system began after his mother became gravely concerned when he sent her photos he took of a man at a bus stop and people in cars because he thought they were monitoring him, according to the summary. He also said he thought the roofers working on the house across the street from his grown daughter’s home were in on it, too.

Within a few weeks, he called his mother and announced he was ready to act, stating: “I’m ready to get these people. Whatever means necessary, I need to do this today,” according to the summary.

He added: “I don’t care how I have to do it. I’ll kill them. I’ll hang them. I’ll do whatever I have to. I need to deal with this.”

During a hearing, Douglas County Circuit Judge William Marshall said he considered J.P. a “real danger … to other people,” in part because he’d at one point successfully convinced his daughter to briefly loan him an unloaded shotgun.

“This illness is long-term,” Marshall said. “It’s not disappearing. It’s continuing to invade him.”

But in reversing Marshall’s ruling, the Appeals Court noted there was no evidence that J.P. followed his “verbal threats” with an “overt act” that indicated he was “highly likely” to end someone’s life.

“There was no evidence in the record … that the threat was anything more than the result of his delusions and agitation,” the Appeals Court wrote.

The court noted several other cases in which other people didn’t meet that bar, including a woman who had made threats to kill her neighbor’s children and put their heads on her fence and a man who threatened to kill a police officer by telling him he was a “dead man walking.”

It also noted the case of a woman who it determined had been lawfully committed: She fired a bullet into the wall dividing her apartment from her neighbor’s. That proved she was highly likely to be dangerous in the future, the Appeals Court said.

J.P., the man at the center of Wednesday’s ruling, was civilly committed in October 2017. He has long since left the state hospital. But the ruling has the effect of restoring his right to possess or own guns. Such a prohibition would have lasted indefinitely unless he successfully convinced the state’s Psychiatric Security Review Board to restore those rights.

The opinion was made by a three-judge panel of the Appeals Court: Rex Armstrong, Douglas Tookey and Scott Shorr. Read the opinion here.

— Aimee Green

agreen@oregonian.com

Two Police Officers Are Charged in Assault of Mentally Ill Man

“After Mr. Bear-heels’s death, the Omaha police chief, Todd Schmaderer, said that the department had “failed” and that officers would receive additional training. A police spokesman said on Wednesday that the chief was not available to comment.”–The New York Times

Or as Bob Dylan put it in the last line of “Oxford Town”: “Somebody better ‘vestigate soon.”

Thanks to Dj Jaffe for originally posting this.

via The New York Times

Photo

Ryan McClarty, left, and Scotty Payne, former Omaha police officers, were charged. CreditOmaha Police Department

Two former police officers in Nebraska were charged with assault after beating and using a Taser on a mentally ill man as they tried to take him into custody for “erratic behavior” in Omaha last month, an official said on Wednesday. The man later died.

The Douglas County attorney, Donald W. Kleine, said in a televised news conference that Scotty Payne, a five-year veteran, faces charges of felony second-degree assault for repeatedly shocking the man, Zachary Bear-heels, 29, with a Taser on June 5.

Ryan McClarty, who has been on the force for two years, was charged with misdemeanor assault for punching Mr. Bear-heels, Mr. Kleine said.

“Zachary Bear-heels had committed no crime,” Mr. Kleine said. “He was simply a human being suffering from severe mental illness that was quite obvious to anyone who was in contact with him.”

Asked why the former officers had not been charged with murder or manslaughter, he said, “There is no evidence whatsoever that these officers intentionally killed Mr. Bear-heels.” He said the coroner’s office ruled that Mr. Bear-heels’s death was caused by “excited delirium.”

Attorney Don Kleine to files assault charges against 2 officers Video by KETV NewsWatch 7

“That is something we had a question about,” Mr. Kleine said, referring to possible tougher charges. But he said his office could find no “approximate cause” linking the officers’ actions to the cause of death — such as the use of the Taser, or the blows, which did not result in “brain bleed” or contusions to the brain, he said.

Photo

The funeral of Zachary Bear-heels in Apache, Oklahoma, in June.

The officers were fired Friday, after the Omaha Police Department investigated the episode.

Mr. Payne, 38, is due to turn himself in on Friday for a bail hearing, and Mr. McClarty, 27, will be cited on suspicion of third-degree assault, Mr. Kleine said.

Matthew D. Burns, a lawyer for Mr. Payne, said his client was “devastated” and “feels terrible because a person lost his life.”

Mr. McClarty’s lawyer could not immediately be reached.

Mr. Kleine said he was filing the charges before a grand jury being called to look into the case, which has attracted concern from Mr. Bear-heels’s Native American community. The felony assault charge carries up to 20 years in prison — the same as manslaughter — and the other charge can carry up to one year in prison, a $1,000 fine or both.

According to a police statement, the episode started on June 3, when Mr. Bear-heels was taking a bus from Murdo, S.D., to Oklahoma City. He was dropped off at a station in Omaha and was not allowed to re-board because a passenger had complained about his behavior.

On June 4, Mr. Bear-heels’s mother, Renita Chalepah, called the Omaha Police Department to report that her son was missing and that he was bipolar and had schizophrenia. On June 5, officers were called to a gas station because of a disturbance and found a man, later identified as Mr. Bear-heels, dancing in front of the convenience store and refusing to leave, according to the police.

Officers on the scene spoke to his mother about where to take him. But after he was placed into a cruiser in handcuffs for “erratic behavior,” he tried to leave the vehicle, and four officers, including Officer Payne and Officer McClarty, tried to restrain him and force him back into the car.

Photo

Zachary Bear-heels, who died after an encounter with Omaha police officers. CreditKETV NewsWatch 7, via YouTube 

After a struggle, Officer Payne shouted, “Taser, Taser,” and warned Mr. Bear-heels three more times that the Taser would be used, the statement said.

Photo

Mr. Bear-heels’s grave in Apache, Okla. CreditKent Sievers/The World-Herald

Officer Payne then discharged the device, which struck Mr. Bear-heels in the abdomen and right thigh. The officer continued to activate the device as it clung to Mr. Bear-heels, who resisted being dragged into the vehicle. As Mr. Bear-heels was propped up in a sitting position against the car, he stopped resisting, the police statement said, but Officer Payne kept using the Taser on him over the next one minute 45 seconds.

“You’re gonna get it again,” the police statement quoted the officer as saying.

“These are egregious violations of the Omaha Police Department’s policy, procedures and training on use of force and the use of a Taser,” the statement said.

After Mr. Bear-heels managed to slip a hand out of the cuffs, swung his arms and kicked out with his legs, Officer McClarty punched him in the head and neck area multiple times while Officer Payne used the Taser again — making it about 12 times that he used the device on Mr. Bear-heels, the police statement said.

Part of the encounter was caught on a dashboard camera of a police vehicle and shown during the news conference.

After more police officers arrived to help, Mr. Bear-heels was handcuffed to a gurney. Medics then said he had stopped breathing and had no pulse. Mr. Bear-heels was pronounced dead in the hospital, the police said.

After Mr. Bear-heels’s death, the Omaha police chief, Todd Schmaderer, said that the department had “failed” and that officers would receive additional training. A police spokesman said on Wednesday that the chief was not available to comment.

One woman, a member of the Native American community who attended the news conference, tearfully spoke up about her fears for her own mentally ill son. “We are people, too,” she said.

And the Beat(ing) Goes on

The national scandal of criminal-justice brutality against the mentally ill continues:

via Reno Gazette-Journal

Released video depicts fatal struggle at Washoe jail

JUSTIN THOMPSON, 35, DIED IN AUGUST AFTER A VIOLENT STRUGGLE WITH DEPUTIES THAT LASTED MORE THAN A HALF HOUR.

Read the full story here: http://www.rgj.com/story/news/2017/05/03/released-video-depicts-fatal-struggle-washoe-jail/309046001/

Another Solitary Confinement Atrocity

This horrific story, originally reported by the excellent Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and picked up by Slate a couple days ago, is yet another demonstration of my assertion in NO ONE CARES ABOUT CRAZY PEOPLE that “too many of the mentally ill in our country live under conditions of atrocity.” Terrill Thomas’s death by slow, deliberate, guard-induced dehydration while in solitary confinement at a Milwaukee County jail is an abomination, and a part of a larger national abomination. Our society must demand an end to solitary confinement!

Via Slate.com

Guards Who Left a Prisoner to Die of Dehydration, After Water Was Cut for Seven Days, Could Face Charges

Read the full story here: http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/04/24/guards_who_left_milwaukee_prisoner_to_die_of_dehydration_in_cell_could_face.html

Voices From the Sub-Universe

Today I introduce a new, occasional feature to my blog. Please see below:

Ron Powers

Voices from the Mental Illness Sub-Nation

Near the beginning of my recently published book about mental illness, “No One Cares About Crazy People,” I write: Too many of the mentally ill in our country live under conditions of atrocity.

I grew convinced of this over the three years of my research into schizophrenia and its related brain afflictions that include schizoaffective disorder and extreme bipolarity. My examples in the book cover the spectrum of atrocity: mis-diagnoses (often “drug overdose”) by doctors; judges who order young victims into jail instead of treatment centers; beatings, deprivation of medications, and the torture of solitary confinement behind bars; death on the streets from bullets fired by untrained police; the daily fog and helplessness of the untreated insane.

These and some other areas—arenas—pretty much covered it, I was convinced. The spectrum of atrocity suffered by the mentally ill in America.

I was wrong.

I had limited my investigations to the barbarities visited on the “crazy people” themselves. Only after the book’s publication in March did a companion realm swim into focus for me: the realm of ordinary people whose lot is to care for the afflicted. These include mothers, fathers, siblings and friends of the helplessly impaired thousands whom our social bureaucracies have neglected and rejected and crushed. In many ways, these family members are damaged and abject as the loved ones they seek in vain to rescue.

No one cares, to coin a phrase, about those who care about crazy people.

This realm rushed at me in emails to my Facebook page and to the blog I created that related to the book. It swelled up within certain websites that I, as a writer about mental illness, was invited to join. These sites are closed off to anyone but relatives of madpeople; an enforced set of agreements keeps their conversations private unless they grant specific permission.

The writers on these sites are almost exclusively mothers—a fact that in itself merits contemplation. Mostly middle-class, they span several income, educational and racial categories. They are seldom “natural” writers, yet no one could mistake what they have to say. They write with the rare pitch of truth-telling passion that James Agee memorably described as “the cruel radiance of what is.”

What they have in common is a collective story more urgent, more morally devastating, more viscerally real, than be expressed by the modes by which outsiders receive information about mental healthcare: statistics and news items and policy statements and political press releases, delivered in detached, passionless prose.

Today, this blog commences an occasional compilation of these mothers’ voices (and those of other relatives as they are available). I have obtained permission from each source quoted, and have withheld identities, although some gave permission for that as well.

My hope here is twofold. One is that the reader will feel the same emotions as I have: shock and indignation that such chaos and neglect exist in America’s mental health-care systems, causing such a vast archipelago of misery and terror. The other is that these voices will encourage others to throw off fears of stigma and shame and begin hurling their own voices, their own testimonies, into the world. Only by putting human faces and voices upon the statistical morass of this ongoing atrocity can we hope to begin decisive, lasting reform.

 

We will begin with an example of the commonplace indifference and buck-passing at the community level that makes a mockery of the very phrase “mental healthcare system.”

 

“I have only enough strength this morning for a few lines. [My daughter] was discharged in 2011 with no psychiatric follow up appt. We scrambled to find someone, but before we could, she was readmitted to a second hospitalization. She had to drop out of school for a second time. She was too far behind. The [caregiver] had put her on a drug that literally made her bang her head on the wall. Then she was hospitalized another two weeks, and upon discharge the social worker made no referrals or linkages for her in the community, and would not respond to my inquiry about her diagnosis. I asked and her response was, ‘What does that matter?’

“She came home with us, and for the next two months, it was awful. In February, she was psychotic again, and ran out of the emergency room when I tried to get an evaluation. She was noncompliant with meds, and thought she was pregnant. She spent two weeks in one hospital and I threw a fit about her being sent home to us again because I had a 14-year-old at home to protect. She had become physically aggressive as well. They sent her to a state hospital after my totally pissing them off, and she stayed there for two months.

“My biggest frustration is no linkages, no follow-up, no support, etc. We were treated like nosy people wanting to meddle in our child’s life but, she was sent home to me to deal with every time. And, each and every time, I felt more inadequate to help her and to protect my other child. [Her sister] was terrorized and slept with her bedroom door locked. She also became angry with me, her mom, for not being able to protect her from her sister.”

 

 

Sometimes the afflicted family member is not a child, but a parent. Whether or not that parent has consented to treatment—and often they have not—the strain suffered by the spouse and children can be overwhelming. This eloquently written post offers an example:

 

“I must say that helping my kids to navigate their life in relation to their Daddy’s serious mental illness is serious emotional work. Tonight I held my 10 year old ‘Baby’ girl as she opened up and told me that sometimes she just starts feeling sad and then ALL of her sadness comes over her at once. I held her as she sobbed and sobbed. ‘Why can’t we have a normal family?’ ‘Why can’t we live in our own house where I could have my own room?’ ‘Why did my Daddy have to get sick?’ ‘Will it ever be okay?’ ‘Why can’t the doctors just fix this?”

“I want to know too.

“She voiced the little girl version of the questions that claw at my own heart and mind. The grief and loss come at us in waves. Tonight we sat and cried together. Her tears streaming down my chest and mine in her hair. . .”

 

 

 

The mother below and her son are casualties of grotesque, yet pervasive laws that place the “civil rights” interests of a person in psychosis above the right of a doctor or psychiatrist to order antipsychotic medication and/or involuntary commitment to a center for treatment. In most states, such a patient may be treated against his will only if he “demonstrates a danger to himself or others.” Given that virtually the only way to “demonstrate” such a danger is to enact it, this misbegotten law often has the effect of pushing psychotic young people into criminality.

 

“When my grandson was 11, we begged for help to keep him safe and out of trouble. Several psychiatrists later and many tears and meds for him, we were told: wait till he gets in trouble with the law. Then he will get help. His school told us the same thing. No one understood that what they were telling us was our fear!! We didn’t want this sweet soul of a kid getting into trouble with the police! We were not that kind of family, he was not that kind of kid! We were not going to let that happen! We would fight, pray, restrict him, take him to every doctor we could find. . .

“When mental illness takes hold of our kids we have no control. Mental illness wins over and over again. He is now 20 and hanging with some more worldly friends, friends whose families must have said and fought for the very same things. We must fight and tell the world how our kids didn’t have a chance. They did not pray for mental illness any more than one would pray for cancer. We need to fight for hospital beds in which to keep our kids safe. Our kids need to be able to have safe places to live, affordable meds, support and understanding of their illness. God hear my prayer!!!”

 

 

 

From this message, and others, it is clear that not even psychiatric doctors can be automatically trusted to have the competence and temperament necessary to help their patients.

 

“A bad day at the doctors. Our city had to basically shut down [its psychiatric care center] because of diverted funds, but after waiting a year, my loved one got an appointment, which was today. In the past year, we had seen a private psychiatrist who didn’t [ participate in my state’s Medicaid program], but would prescribe anti-anxiety meds to help [forestall involuntary confinement]. But she would no longer see him.

“The appointment started off badly as this new doctor called for security before my son even went into the office—possibly because of [troubling] paperwork he had filled out or because of his unusual look. In any case, the security thing set him off more than usual and the doctor made him leave and he is not allowed to return. I listened to the usual four-letter tirade all the way home, my son saying he would never go to another doctor again and don’t ever ask him to. He got out of the car before I came to a full stop at the house. I am so not looking forward to what will happen tonight. De-escalation armor on.”

 

 

 

And then there is the judicial system. As with psychiatrists and doctors, judges are commonly assumed (by outsiders and families of the afflicted alike) to be specifically educated in the neuroscience of chronic mental illness. They are assumed to recognize their moral duty to proceed with exceptional care and knowledge in adjudicating the fate of the most helpless people on earth. Doctors and jailers, of course, are bound by the same expectations.

 

A special test of that duty is their understanding—or lack of it—of the fact that the single most destructive action against a mentally ill inmate (in fact, against any inmate) solitary confinement, which quickly trigger and/or deepen psychosis.

 

Judging by the content of this mother’s message, her schizophrenic son has been failed by everyone in this chain. Both he and his mother have paid the price.

 

“My son’s court case is tomorrow. What’s tragic is the fact I begged for help since November 1. I faxed over a Do Not Release letter stating he was a serious harm to himself and me. Now, my son has spent three months in jail and has been allowed to deny all medications. My son suffers from anosognosia [a clinical term meaning “lack of insight into one’s mental illness”]. So, tomorrow, he learns the painful truth that his competency evaluation came back not competent to proceed.

“My son believes he aced [his mental competency test] and is coming home to me. But the doctor found him incompetent. No shocker there! If they had only listened to me back on November 1, he wouldn’t have had to spend three months and counting in jail! Plus, I wouldn’t have been severely beaten and cornered in my own bathroom [by him] for a second time. Now, my severely delusional child has been off all medication for a month. Talk about starting from ground zero!

“What he will experience tomorrow will be criminal. He will learn he’s incompetent, while wearing shackles and handcuffs. I fucking hate our system!!! He doesn’t understand his illness. His rights will be taken away. He will suffer from the phases of grief even though it is he who is lost to us. He will be left in a jail cell awaiting placement in the state hospital, which could take one to three months because the waiting list is so long.

“I begged with my son to call Disability Rights to represent him but he said he didn’t have a disability even though he’s received Disability for 5 years! What’s even more fucked up is that Disability Rights said they could only talk to my seriously delusional child. That is why he had to call! What a joke! I know so many parents who have lost their children with a serious mental illness in jail. So, please pray and send out positive messages into the universe that he makes it through, and finally receives the help he deserves!

 

This mother’s son was a small and thin 17-year-old, when local police arrested him for trespassing. The mother writes that, in a psychotic state, he had wandered into a neighbor’s house and fell asleep on a couch. The neighbors called police, and who, instead of taking him to a care facility, put him in jail. The mother has repeatedly called for compassion and treatment for him; so far, her calls have been ignored.

 

“Today is another day. It’s so hard to move forward with my life. We are stuck in this insane limbo. My son called today [from jail], and says mommy, ‘the inmates that hand out the trays they took most of the food off my tray. The guards were standing there. They said I have to pay a debt. They say I have to pay them if I want to eat. Put money in [X]’s commissary Account so I can eat.’ Over the past month, our son was in solitary confinement for almost two weeks. They stopped his antipsychotics cold for four days. He has psychosis, and is hearing voices. After the assault [by inmates] two weeks ago, he has a concussion.

“He’s been denied an MRI, or an emergency-room visit, despite my pleas. His vision is blurry, headaches, and nausea. He is emotional from the head injury. They will not wake him for his morning antidepressants. Now tonight he has informed us they are trying to extort money by starving him. So he was crying again tonight. We hope next month he sees the forensic psychiatrist.

“[The jailers] extort money for visits, commissary, basic necessities, phone calls, fees, per-day jail incarceration fees, fines, restitution, medicines, doctor fees, etc. Our son was charged as an adult at 17. The boy who dances like Michael Jackson, and plays 5 instruments. He hears voices. He has auditory hallucinations, and Asperger’s. Fifteen times, I tried to hospitalize him. Instead He went to jail where he spent weeks at a time in solitary confinement. He was beat up, his vision is still affected. He still had not had an mri.,. Tonight he sits in jail at just 18. He is not a hardened criminal. He’s a good, sweet kid, he wouldn’t hurt a fly. Every day I pray he will come out of this alive. My heart is shattered!

 

 

Here is another example of solitary confinement used as a blunt instrument—to effectively punish the victim of a jail beating.

 

“I just got off the phone with my son. He was beaten up two weeks ago [by inmates], and the jail’s answer was to put him in lockdown [solitary confinement] for 23 hours a day by himself. I had him agreeing to meds but they gave him the wrong meds and now he won’t trust them. He has been in the county jail for six months, and finally saw a judge for the first time last week. Now they need six weeks’ revaluation. Meanwhile, they keep him alone in lock up. He can call me on his hour out. He just called screaming and crying to get him out. I can only tell him he needs to hang in there and we are doing the best we can. But he’s slipping more. And nobody in the courts seems to care. My heart is breaking. His birthday is Wednesday. I am a single parent, and he’s my youngest.” 

 

And here is another example of the foolish inadequacy of “danger to himself or others.” Given that virtually the only way to “demonstrate” such a danger is to enact it, the law generally does more harm than good.

 

“The doctor told me, “‘Wait, N—, he’s not bad enough yet, he hasn’t committed a crime!’ [And then he said], ‘Your son is an adult. He has the right to be crazy if he chooses.’ 

My son has slipped through the cracks in every instance. There’s no consideration for families living with an untreated psychotic person except when it’s too late. We live in fear of our own son.”

THE JAILHOUSE CRUELTY NEVER ENDS

Thanks to my friend Teresa Pasquini for alerting me to this. Not until you read fairly deeply into the story will you discover that Andrew Chaylon Holland, the helpless victim of this savagery, “began to manifest schizophrenia in his 20s,” that he had faced nine criminal cases between 2014 and 2016 for assaults “directly related to his mental illness,” that he had difficulty staying on the medications that stabilized his behavior, that in rational moments he declared his wish to continue psychiatric treatment and rehabilitation, and that even though a superior court judge had recommended treatment for him a the county’s mental health inpatient unit, he died after suffering through 46 hours in a restraint chair inside the county jail. Case closed.

The Dark Ages live on in contemporary America’s treatment of its seriously mentally ill. They will not end until American society faces up to this ongoing pageant of atrocity. Faces up and demands that, like disembowelment, drawing and quartering, keelhauling, slavery, child labor, forced sterilization, and burning at the stake, jail and prison abuse of the mentally ill (and every other prisoner) cease!

http://www.sanluisobispo.com/news/local/article144057364.html

GUNS FOR THE MENTALLY ILL–PRACTICE VS. THEORY

In my previous post, I speculated on the dangers of the GOP congress’s rollback of President Obama’s strictures on permitting the sale of firearms to serious mentally ill people. Here is an example of what can go wrong: A warning, a gun sale and tragic consequences

FLORIDA ON MY MIND

The news started coming out of Ft. Lauderdale around mid-afternoon on Friday, as I was preparing a different blog entirely:

I imagine that all of us who happened to see the first news-breaks instantly pared the possibilities to two: Terrorist shooter. Or psychotic shooter. Those of us who weren’t tied up in actual useful work stopped what we were doing and started clicking around the news sites on the Internet. At least five dead, several more wounded. The shooting occurred in the airport baggage claim area.

The airport baggage claim area?!

The updates trickled in. We learned that the shooter had been “taken into custody.” (A rare outcome: normally—as it were—the shooter “ends the spree by taking his own life,” or else is “brought down by a policeman’s bullet.” These industrialized phrases have become as familiar to us as our own names.) Yet in this case, a twist: not so much “taken into custody” as gone limp on the terminal floor, face down, waiting to be hauled upright and carted away.

Probably not a terrorist, then. Yet we waited for further facts and factoids to appear and be confirmed, as we have been trained to do. As many of have been trained to do. Some of us.

Waited, until we decided it was safe to—what?

On the TV screen behind the computer, the factoids crept in their steady pace: “’He just started shooting people.’” “Suspect clad in Star Wars T-shirt.” “Mass chaos.” The regulation sheriff, his regulation civilized dark necktie knotted in place, stepped to the regulation microphone and spoke of “this cowardly, heinous act.”

 

Somewhat later we learned that “officials” had identified the “suspect” as “26-year-old Esteban Santiago.” And that 26-year-old Esteban Santiago was a “troubled Army veteran.” He had served a tour in Iraq.

Another update revealed to us that after 26-year-old Esteban Santiago’s flight had landed at Ft. Lauderdale, he had simply withdrawn his weapon, a semiautomatic handgun, from his claimed luggage begun killing and maiming people standing near him. (He had discreetly withdrawn the weapon in the men’s restroom.) We learned—or we were reminded, in the case of those of us who had managed to squeeze it out of our memories for the sake of restful nights—the explanation for the baggage claim area as the site of the shootings: under current aviation security rules, passengers may carry loaded guns in their luggage as long as they declare the fact to “authorities.”

Security” rules!

We learned that 26-year-old Esteban Santiago had dutifully made that declaration, so there should have been no problem.

We did not learn that an armed Good Guy With a Gun stepped up to shoot this Bad Guy With a Gun. Perhaps this did not happen.

We learned that in states that boast “open-carry” and “concealed-carry” permission laws, states such as Florida, people may enter “unsecured” sections of airports with their open or concealed “carries,” fully equipped to draw and shoot.

At about the same time, we learned—this time from a “senior law enforcement official” quoted in the New York Times—that 26-year-old Esteban Santiago had entered an FBI office in Anchorage, Alaska several weeks ago and made “disturbing remarks” that prompted “officials” to “urge him to seek mental health care. One “official” disclosed that “Mr. Santiago, appearing ‘agitated and incoherent,’ said “that his mind was being controlled by a U.S. intelligence agency,”

A brother of the shooter reported that he had hallucinated, and had reported hearing voices. The brother remarked that Santiago had been discharged from the National Guard after being demoted for “unsatisfactory service” and had asked for psychological help, “but received little assistance.” The brother asked, “How is it possible that the federal government knows, they hospitalize him for four days, and then give him his weapon back?”

No one seemed to have an answer.

The updates carried on into the evening; the facts and the factoids crept along, and the “officials” popped up and disgorged their industrialized sound-bites, and disappeared. Some of the “officials” were “senior.” All of them dazzled with their acute inductive reasoning. An FBI agent disclosed to the press, “Indications are that he came here to carry out this horrific attack.”

This same expert continued, presumably with a straight face: “We have not identified any triggers that would have caused this attack.”  

Our topmost elected “officials” and officials-manque were on the case. Florida governor Rick Scott hurried to Ft. Lauderdale—to the executive airport—where he wondered how this thing could have happened in such a state as his Florida. The governor sternly warned that “the citizens of Florida will not tolerate senseless acts of evil.” Someone asked the governor whether this meant perhaps that the citizens would demand, and the government would provide, a rollback on the law permitting guns in airports.

The question affronted Scott’s sensibilities. How inappropriate! How insensitive to sully this moment of grieving with politics!

The New York Times later reported: “The shooting came as Florida lawmakers were preparing to consider legislation that would relax [emphasis mine] prohibitions on firearms. State laws allow for the purchase of rifles, handguns and shotguns without a permit, though a license is required to carry a concealed weapon in the state.”

The governor, perhaps seeking to further quell anxiety, reported that he had been in close touch with custodians of higher authority:

“I have reached out to President-elect Trump, and spoken to him and to Vice President-elect (Mike) Pence multiple times to keep them informed, and they told me whatever resources that we need from the federal government, they would do everything in their power to make that happen.”  

By Saturday afternoon (as I write this) the nonsense had curdled, as it always does by the second or third day of such stories. Curdled into stale righteous partisan argument over where to place “the blame”: Terrorism? Psychosis? Guns? Traumatized veterans?

All potential for redemptive action had dissipated, once again. The usual “official” posturing and the nonspeak of the usual “authorities” laid bare, as they always do, a few precious revelations of unintended truth. We ache to know “the truth” of what touched off the Ft. Lauderdale airport shooting, as we ache for the truth every time something like this happens. Terrorism? Psychosis? Our citizen arsenal of three hundred million guns? Which of these stands out as the first cause, the prime mover, of the ongoing nightmare that rides on our sleep?

I have come to believe that even to ask this question is tantamount to burying the answer. Each component in this triad has its body of impassioned accusers, and each body of accusers tends to dismiss the other two as trivial or false.

I believe that these “discrete” elements of our national humanitarian crisis are not discrete at all; they are mutually reinforcing elements of a diseased whole, and they cry out to be addressed—healed—holistically. And with reason, rather than partisan defiance.

No one need take me aside and explain quietly what an absurd pipe-dream this sounds like; what a useless appeal to “kumbya” mush. But I don’t intend altruism here; I intend to promote survival, as individuals and as a society.

We can begin collectively to address terrorism, untreated mental illness, and the obscene availability of demonic firearms.

Or we can reconcile ourselves to a baleful updating of John Donne’s holistic call: “Never send to know for whom the ‘official’ pretends to mourn. He pretends to mourn for thee.”

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