Posted on 01/07/2014 7:46:39 PM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
A North Carolina family is mourning the loss of their 18 year old son after he was shot and killed by a police officer.
Mark Wilsey called 911 for police assistance with his son Keith, who was having a schizophrenic incident and threatened his mother with a small screwdriver.
Wilsey said two police officers showed up and were able to subdue Keith, but the arrival of a third officer caused the teen to become agitated, and the officers used a Taser on him.
Wilsey told WECT that officers had his son down on the ground after the teen was tased a few times and an officer said, “We don’t have time for this.”
That’s when Wilsey says one of the officers stepped between the two who were holding Keith down and fired, killing his son:
(Excerpt) Read more at freedomoutpost.com ...
There you have it. Who among us has seen a seriously mentally ill/psychotic individual having an ‘episode’? Ever see the specials on TV about such children, being committed over and over for short periods only to return to their tortured parents and terrorize the house again? Parade Magazine had a cover story, not long ago, and buried in the article was glancing mention of the boy having attacked his father. The man needed hospitalization.They took him home again and ‘hoped’ he wouldn’t do it again.
People like this are stuck in this loop forever-until a tragedy ends it. The mental patient kills someone ( Newton) and they end up institutionalized or dead. Why CAN’T parents who are determined( or forced by lack of institutions) to keep their offspring be afforded legal permission to control the mental patient without fear of ‘abuse’ charges?
I do not believe the father in this case COULD NOT have stopped his son. He was unwilling to exert the violence necessary to stop him- so he called the police to take physical control of the situation.They did. Did he think they could intimidate or talk to him, or use force?
Now-if it took PHYSICAL ATTACK to stop this 90 pound schizophrenic wouldn’t it have been better for the father to employ defensive violence? I’m assuming he loved his son and would not have gone so far as to kill him. He might have had to, to protect his wife. I hope he wouldn’t have been charged with murder had that happened. He shouldn’t have been charged with cruelty if he had to physically injure his son either.
If fear of charges stops parents like this from doing what is necessary, that fear should be removed.
No parent who loves their child-insane or not-will willingly hurt them; but if the danger posed by such a child is overcome by defense of themselves or someone else,and fear of the law becomes a factor, calling officers of that law in to deal with it can end like this. They will employ the violence instead-and in some cases much more violence than the parent was willing to use.
It very well could be that this cop was overarching. But we’re getting 1-sided stories (as always). And then we’ll have people bellyaching that the cops’ testimony doesn’t count. What do the original 2 cops think? What is there story, and do they think the 3rd was excessive?
I agree on the surface a gun vs. Screwdriver seems uneven, but maybe something else was happening.
I admit too that it seems if the guy was already down with 2 cops that it was probably unnecessary.
I once was robbed on the street at gunpoint in the middle of the morning in downtown Philly. The arriving officers asked for a description. In addition to race, height, weight, age, type of weapon and the fact that he had about four white hairs in his black mustache, I said he was wearing a medium turquoise polo shirt with a thin white horizontal stripe.
Apparently this last was too much information. They radioed out "red white and blue striped shirt." When I told them that was a misleading description of the shirt, they shrugged, did nothing to correct the radio report, and took me for a ride around the projects to see if I could see him on the street. That ride scared me almost more than the mugging.
It's a conundrum. The kid had just turned 18. What if he got bruised by his dad, then called police later and told them his father had assaulted him?
The mother, in a video on another thread, said the local police had been there a few times to help them, that they were very helpful on that day, that they had the situation under control -- she praised them and expressed gratitude -- but then this other cop who didn't know them or the boy arrived from another district and shot the kid -- the father said within seconds of arriving. The news report said 70 seconds from radioing in to say he was arriving at the scene to radioing in that he had shot "in self-defense."
And they were in a narrow front hallway of the house.
Wow, thats hard to read about. I thinks its called 1st degree murder.
2nd. He didn’t know this person and wasn’t planning it out ahead of time.
I am a EMT and I have had a number of mentally ill patients where the police had to use force or threat of force to subdue the patient or compel him to go to the hospital.
I have nothing but praise for our local police department in the cases I have seen. They have been patient, firm, low-key, and professional, and have always managed to defuse the situation rather than escalate it. Even when the country SWAT came in, they spent four hours talking down a patient with a knife. There are very good police departments in the country, and good police officers and I count us very fortunate to have them here.
But I read about other places where things like this happen and I shiver.
A few years back my boss and her husband were killed by their schizophrenic son. He had been violent in the past and they could not get him committed for more than a very short time to stabilize him, and then he was out and unstable again. I don’t know if something like a stun gun always on their persons would have helped but it would have given them a chance.
I agree that it sounds like the cop that shot did so unnecessarily. The police were regular visitors and ‘know’ the situation? Sounds like cops were expected to, regularly, do what mental institutions should. That shouldn’t be their job.
How insane is it to say that the mental patient has to violently assault someone before preventative measures are taken? IMO- if one has a documented mental patient in their home there should be NO, NO way they can be prosecuted for protecting themselves. Laws allowing self-defense apply in every other case, why not with mental patients-ESPECIALLY with mental patients. Is martyrdom now a requirement?
My nephew is a paramedic for the city of New Orleans. I have heard graphic detail of more horror stories than I could have ever imagined. He has been bitten(requiring AIDS tests and innoculations), spat upon, puked on and wrestled with. He’s a big guy and he is expected to ‘help’ people who fight him. There are mental patients galore who are like wild people. Restraints don’t always work. Just last year a teen mental patient was being transported to a medical appointment, and he was put in a ‘regular’ car, so as not to make him ‘feel different’. He jumped out of the car on the interstate and was hit and killed by a truck. I guess he ‘felt normal’ right up till impact, and that’s what matters.
New Orleans is full of mental patients, add 24 hour booze to the mix and calls like this are normal here. The cops and EMT’s are acting as psychiatric workers. It’s hard to have pity and patience when viscious, biting,kicking out-of-control people can fight off three big men. There should be a way to restrain them that protects the law officers and medical personnel. A net gun that can trap and immobilize wild animals comes to mind.They could then be scooped up, screaming and kicking in the net, to be plopped in a secure vehicle. Hand to hand with a mental patient NEVER ends well, and it should be unnecessary.
These mental patients are being protected by a society they are damaging. Your boss and his wife are dead...where is the son now? Institutionalized or being ‘cared for’ by some foster family? If he had been in a professionally controlled environment, his parents wouldn’t be dead. Same for the Newton shooter. To protect HIS rights, all those children are dead.
If I had a child I knew to be dangerous to myself or others, I WOULD find a facility, or-at the very least- make a room in my home into one! Restraints are better than death-theirs or mine.
These things happen because too many parents, and others, think that TREATING schizophrenics normally will MAKE them normal. They are self-deluded, right up to the time the individual is killing them, or they see the violence needed to stop them.
If this turns out to be true, I hope one of the kid’s relatives (or surrogate) corners the nazi bastard some night, sticks a 12ga up his despicable ass, and lights him up.
The mental patients are NOT being protected by society.
The left-wing civil libertarians think even incompetent, delusional people, or people who are only temporarily stabilized and repeatedly relapse, have the right to make decisions regarding their treatment, medications, and movement. So they have liberties in a trade-off that puts them deeper into mental illness, homelessness, exposure, physical illness, being the victims of abuse and crime and committing crimes themselves.
The budget-cutters go along with the idea that “community health” settings can treat the most severely mentally ill, and pretend to believe the drugs we have now have have eliminated the need for nearly all of the hospital beds and secure facilities that used to exist. The son of the Virginia congressman who stabbed his father and killed himself had been evaluated, declared in need of treatment, and released from a hospital the day before for lack of space.
My boss and her husband loved their son so much. They tried so hard. Yes, they tried to treat him normally; they gave him a job and a car and a home but they had no way to force him to take his medication and go to treatment; he was an adult. So normality was the only thing they could offer him to try to keep him on an even keel.
They had money and they knew the health care system. The healthcare system and the legal system failed them and their son. NOW he is in a secure facility for the rest of his life, still with the right to refuse drug treatment, and still refusing.
Acquaintances of mine has had their family life disrupted time and again by a bipolar relative who threatens harm, is put away for a couple of days, then signs himself out because of his "rights", usually just in time to mess up the family's holidays, vacations or work crises, and scare the children half to death. Other friends had a son in and out of various facilities, then breaking into their house over and over. Finally, he was shot by police. They were almost too exhausted by fear of his marauding of their home in the middle of the night time and again to mourn him, but his father died soon afterward and before his time.
Your story about your boss and her husband is absolutely tragic. I’m so sorry for the pain and shock you must have experienced. May they rest in peace.
You made my point. NOW the schizophrenic son is in a facility. WHY did someone have to die to put him there? If there is a place for him NOW, there was a place for him before.
Look- there is money involved here too- money being made by people who are willing to ‘save’ these mental patients from institutions. When the previously existing institutions closed, what happened to the patients? They weren’t killed- some were just let go into society,but there are people being PAID by the states to take them and give them a ‘normal’ life. I personally know of such people. Not only do they make money, they go through ‘pretend’ rehabilitation for the patient-which gives psychiatrists and counselors etc lots of money from the government. In the case of the individual I know of, it’s profitable—and hopeless. Years haven’t changed the patient at all, in fact he’s getting violent and even the psychiatrist is AFRAID of him. Yet he is foisted upon society, taken to Sams Club, restaurants etc.; and has to be physically prevented from acting out. Most places have banned him from their establishments.
Society is being conditioned-by the media et.al.- to pity and understand the ‘disturbed’ and dangerous. It’s costing lives and , in the end, anyone so hopelessly mental can only end tragically anyway.
Thank you! We hear the stories again and again. Families destroyed, people killed, all because of a mental case that is protected by the law. The families can’t find it in their hearts to BE hard and reject these people, and society is prevented from acting to protect itself. So the lunatics really ARE running the asylum-and the asylum is now the normal world.
I see schizophrenics and psychotics as dead people walking. Their loved ones LIVE grieving for the people they are not, and can never be. In the end they will grieve their physical loss- or be destroyed by them. WHY does there have to be so much violence and tragedy endured between? Because individuals-and society collectively- does not want to face ugly reality. Mental disease of that magnitude cannot be fixed.Pretending it can causes tragedy. We either blow off incidents like this as the cost of our delusions, or demand changes in a dramatic, and definitive way.
The parents of this 18 year old-like your acquaintances- are grieving the child they WANTED and SHOULD have had, not the destructive and dangerous one they endured.
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