Posted on 12/06/2007 7:32:16 PM PST by RDTF
LINCOLN, Nebraska (CNN) -- The troubled teen who killed eight people and himself at an Omaha, Nebraska, mall was placed in a mental health treatment center five years ago after making homicidal threats toward his stepmother, a state official said Thursday.
Todd Landry, director of the Nebraska Division of Family and Children's Services, described for reporters the laundry list of residential treatment centers and group and foster homes where Robert Hawkins spent much of his teen years, because of his behavioral and psychiatric problems.
At one point during that period Hawkins also filed a report with police alleging he was molested by a roommate at one of the facilities. The case was resolved internally, according to the report.
Asked about the allegation, Landry responded, "I can't confirm or deny that that may have happened."
Hawkins was sent to Piney Ridge Center in Waynesville, Missouri, on May 18, 2002 -- a day after his 14th birthday. The center specializes in mental health and substance abuse services, according to its Web site.
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"He also had two psychiatric hospitalizations, and has been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, mood disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, and parent-child relationship problems," Landry said.
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(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
tragedy will be compounded by bad armchair quarterbacking, profiling.
and what else did they label this poor kid with?
does the straw ever break the camel's back?
What these nutjobs will come up with is that anyone who has someone who’s been mentally unstable, anyone that lives in the same house can’t have weapons.
Surely someone's cooking up an anti-gun spin campaign -- a political initiative leveraging itself against a terrible tragedy, per normal for the left.
Take a messed up kid, deny him a parent's love, and bury him in psychobabble and Ritalin and who knows what else. How can it end in anything but all around disaster?
Did he have an evil MySpace account? Because then the gun manufacturer can sue Rupert Murdoch. (sarcasm)
Forks and knives will be outlawed. We will use plastic sporks.
They’ll go well with the government institution food trays.
Overdiagnosed, overmedicated, what else is new?
“oppositional defiant disorder”
In my day, we called that “teenage attitude”
*teenage attitude*
yeah, & my old man had a quick and easy cure which provided weeks, sometimes months of relief.
Come on, come on. Cut to the chase. How many meds was he on?
Oppositional defiant disorder includes such things as threatening and intending to kill their mother. "Teenage attitude" does not.
They teach this in public schools, no? How to defy authority. Then they call it a mental disorder?
yitbos
The foster-mother had to have known this information that he was released less thatn a year and a half from an institution for that condition...
Therefore when she saw him handling an SKS the night before with the other “kids”, she should have snapped...
But then again, I beleive there might be some conditions she had to meet and “maintain” to be able to foster or provide a roof over this kids head for that time she had him under her roof...
As soon as a weapon was seen in or about his person should have been a direct violation of her agreement with the state to provide shelter for this kid...
Now, for those families of the victims who were killed and wounded...This alone is a nail in the coffin for their impending “civil” lawsuits...
There are millions of kids like this
I had one- luckily he never acted out his raging confusion against society- only against himself
There seems to be NOTHING anyone can do about this, except pray through it. The state gave htis kid a lot more help than my kid ever got. God Help the families out there who are struggling.
How do you KNOW he was “denied a parent’s love”? because his family sought help from the courts and mental health community all through his teen years and turned him out at age 18 to live on his own?
Have you ever lived with a depressed violent addict and had to turn to tough love in a desparate effort to save yourself if not him?
You have to live it to understand it. I hope you never do.
From the article:
Hawkins had been on antidepressants but stopped taking them because they made him feel "weird," Maruca-Kovac said. There was no public information on how long he had been off the medication or what the medication was.
Going off antidepressants abruptly can make people very disturbed, even psychotic (link.)
A friend, Shawn Saunders, told CNN ... "I'm not sure the level of depression, I just know he was on antidepressants the last couple of months. I guess it was just getting worse over time with the loss of his job and I guess issues he had going on with the girlfriend at the time."
In other words, he was recently on antidepressants, and very possibly recently stopped taking them.
While it doesn't say what kind of meds he was on, drugs like Paxil or Effexor can take months to get off of, and that includes closely-supervised tapering off.
So here we have yet another instance of someone taking psychiatric meds and then losing it - as well as taking a lot of other people with them.
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