#391 - 06/03/07 02:17 AM
Mental illness & homicide
|
Patricia
Journeyman
Registered: 05/26/07
Posts: 80
|
Offline
|
|
I don't think that any normal person could commit homicide. I think that most of them are either really cold hearted,maniacs,feel a pleasure out of it or just suffer from some other mental illness.
|
|
Top
|
|
|
|
|
#393 - 06/03/07 02:27 AM
Re: Mental illness & homicide
[Re: Patricia]
|
Pyro
Newbie
Registered: 05/26/07
Posts: 46
|
|
Offline
|
|
September 17, 1997, Wednesday, Final EDITION
TO DAD, GIRL WAS SATAN AND THOUGHT HE WAS MESSIAH WHEN HE KILLED DAUGHTER, 6, COURT TOLD
Paranoid schizophrenic Ron England believed he was the Messiah ridding the world of evil when he murdered his mother and six-year-old daughter, a psychiatrist says.
Dr. Ian Jacques told a coroner's inquest yesterday England still does not believe his daughter, Jenny, and her grandma, Marian Johnston, are dead.
Jacques said England - who'd sworn off medication treating his severe mental illness - was "almost functioning on auto-pilot and getting his instructions (to kill) from television."
England called 911 on April 2, 1996, to report he'd killed his mom and daughter at their Duke St. home in Bowmanville.
Marian Johnston, 79, was found slumped on her bed in pyjamas, housecoat and black boots. The former public health nurse, who'd helped England win supervised custody of Jenny over her biological parents, had been stabbed 34 times.
On the floor lay Jenny with a knife embedded in her heart. She'd been stabbed 89 times.
I think that says it all 
Edited by Pyro (06/03/07 02:28 AM)
|
|
Top
|
|
|
|
|
#394 - 06/03/07 02:28 AM
Re: Mental illness & homicide
[Re: Pyro]
|
Pyro
Newbie
Registered: 05/26/07
Posts: 46
|
|
Offline
|
|
Psych patient injured officer
Parents of a psychiatric patient had been unable to get him help on the day he assaulted a police officer, a court judge heard on Tuesday.
One of the officer's arms was seriously injured in the assault.
Wellington District Court Judge Anne Gaskell sentenced Timothy Francis Coakley to 200 hours community service. She said that not long after the incident Coakley had to be admitted to an acute psychiatric hospital ward.
Coakley, 38, an invalid beneficiary of Waikanae, was found guilty of assaulting a police officer with intent to obstruct him on December 13, 1995.
Judge Gaskell said Coakley had broken the glass doors on his mother's china cabinet. His mother called police, hoping to get him taken to hospital for treatment.
She said Coakley's father turned up after the police and was angry about the damage. When Coakley began advancing on his father, police intervened and arrested him.
Coakley had then put his hands around the constable's throat and pushed him back through a plate glass window before pulling him back through the broken glass.
Judge Gaskell said the officer suffered cuts to his back and shoulder and upper arm. The tricep muscle was nearly severed. Coakley was pulled off the officer but had to be restrained from attacking him again.
Judge Gaskell said Coakley had a long history of psychiatric illness and a report written for sentencing said Coakley did not think he was ill or that he needed treatment.
"However, if you don't comply with your medication then you are a serious danger to yourself and others," she said.
|
|
Top
|
|
|
|
|
#395 - 06/03/07 02:29 AM
Re: Mental illness & homicide
[Re: Pyro]
|
Pyro
Newbie
Registered: 05/26/07
Posts: 46
|
|
Offline
|
|
MAN GETS TREATMENT, NOT PRISON;
The Daily News of Los Angeles May 30, 1997, Friday,
Opting for treatment rather than prison, a judge reluctantly sentenced a mentally ill Simi Valley man Thursday to five years' probation for lunging at a police officer with a pocketknife in December 1995.
Judge Charles Campbell said although Mark Timothy Pedersen remains a danger to the community, the defendant should be given a chance to deal with his schizophrenia at a residential treatment home in Oxnard.
''I would hope this experience . . . would have alerted (Pedersen) to the fact that if you take your medication, these things won't occur,'' Campbell said. ''We'll have to wait and see if this was the right decision.''
Pedersen, 33, could have been sentenced to five years in prison after pleading guilty to assault with a deadly weapon - a plea he entered to avoid trial for the attempted murder of Simi Valley police Officer Dave Raduziner.
Pedersen tried to stab Raduziner with a pocketknife during a confrontation in the home of the defendant's parents on Dec. 18, 1995.
The attempted stabbing prompted Raduziner's partner, Officer John Hughes, to fire two shots, one of which wounded Pedersen before striking Raduziner in the thigh.
Raduziner later sued Pedersen's parents for not warning them that their son was violent and unpredictable. The case was settled out of court for the couple's $ 100,000 homeowners policy.
Officers had been called to that home 21 times before the shooting.
Despite his parents best efforts, Pedersen refused to take his medication during the month before the confrontation with police, Holmes said.
|
|
Top
|
|
|
|
|
#396 - 06/03/07 02:29 AM
Re: Mental illness & homicide
[Re: Pyro]
|
Pyro
Newbie
Registered: 05/26/07
Posts: 46
|
|
Offline
|
|
Dad found competent to stand trial Daughter, 10, raped, disemboweled
GOLDEN - A Wheat Ridge man accused of raping his 10-year-old daughter, stabbing her to death and then horribly mutilating her body last summer has been found competent to stand trial.
A psychiatrist recently determined that David Lynn Cooper, 33, who has spent time in the state mental hospital, was able to help in his own defense, allowing the criminal case to proceed. The doctor determined that as long as he continued to take medication, Cooper should remain competent, according to a prosecutor in the case.
But Cooper's attorney said previously that he will plead not guilty by reason of insanity at Cooper's arraignment, which is scheduled Friday. His attorney could not be reached for comment Wednesday.
Once that plea is entered, another mental evaluation will have to be done to determine whether he was insane at the time of the crime. Prosecutors have argued in court documents that someone outside the Colorado Mental Health Institute in Pueblo should do that evaluation because of Cooper's previous confinement there.
Under state law, a defendant can be deemed sane if he knew the difference between right and wrong at the time of the crime.
Cooper told a mental-health official a day after the murder that he raped his daughter before killing her. "David stated he had choked his daughter, had raped her, put her blanket over her and stabbed her. He stabbed her through the heart to make sure she was dead," Wheat Ridge detective Lila Anderson quoted Cooper as telling the official. Police received a 911 call from the home the day of the murder, but the caller hung up when asked what had happened. Responding to the hangup, police found Cooper standing outside. "He held out both hands and said, 'Arrest me, then go look in the kitchen,"' the first officer to the home testified.
Four months before the murder, Cooper was released from the state hospital, where he spent time for attacking his father with a knife in 1992. He pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to that crime, and he was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. Cooper was released on the condition that he continue taking anti-depressant and anti-psychotic medication. The Denver Post
|
|
Top
|
|
|
|
|
#397 - 06/03/07 02:30 AM
Re: Mental illness & homicide
[Re: Pyro]
|
Pyro
Newbie
Registered: 05/26/07
Posts: 46
|
|
Offline
|
|
Woman with Schizophrenia lights Fires
Raleigh, NC
September 3, 1997 Wednesday,
RALEIGH -- Over neighbors' objections, a judge agreed Monday to allow Carol Wilkinson, the mentally ill woman who set a fire at Cameron Village in 1993, to spend two nights a week at her parents' home.
At a hearing in Wake County Superior Court, Judge Robert Farmer changed Wilkinson's probation to permit the overnight visits, but Wilkinson, 44, must continue to spend the other five nights at her home, three blocks from her parents.
Once a National Merit Scholar at Broughton High School, Wilkinson was afflicted in her early 20s with paranoid schizophrenia, an incurable mental illness that causes delusions, hallucinations, feelings of persecution and sometimes violent behavior.
Medications allow many people with schizophrenia to lead relatively productive lives. Wilkinson is taking Prolixin, a powerful anti-psychotic drug, and she works for her father, Dr. James Wilkinson, a Blue Ridge Road dermatologist.
But in May 1993, Wilkinson was struggling and out of control. On May 24, she set fire to her parents' house and later started a fire at her father's office, then in Cameron Village's Bryan Building. The fire caused $ 5 million in damage. Merchants have sued the Wilkinsons in civil court.
Wilkinson's attorney, Wade Smith, said that the parents and daughter are devoted to one another and that neighbors have nothing to fear.
"She has become in their minds a monster, and she is not a monster, not in the least," Smith said.
In agreeing with Smith, Farmer told the family to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, and he ordered a review of the situation in two months. (Raleigh, NC)
|
|
Top
|
|
|
|
|
#398 - 06/03/07 02:30 AM
Re: Mental illness & homicide
[Re: Pyro]
|
Pyro
Newbie
Registered: 05/26/07
Posts: 46
|
|
Offline
|
|
THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
August 15, 1997, Friday, HOME FINAL EDITION
Suicide, children's slayings stun twins' family, friends; They saw signs of mental illness, had no idea tragedy was near
VAN BUREN, Ark. - In a two-story home on a bluff with a panoramic view of the Arkansas River, the Hopkins twins grew up as the best and brightest.
One would become a chemical engineer and a Harvard-educated businesswoman. The other would join a nationally known brokerage firm and rise quickly through Dallas' social circles. But beneath the success, relatives said, lurked a mental illness that destroyed Emily Jane Hopkins and nearly claimed her sister, Nancy Jean Hopkins Byrd.
Jane Hopkins, 41, fatally stabbed her 9-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter July 30 and then killed herself with the same kitchen knife in the family's University Park home. Almost three years earlier, a pregnant Mrs. Byrd tried to kill herself and her two young sons with an overdose of a prescription drug.
Dozens of interviews with the fraternal twins' relatives, friends, colleagues and acquaintances reveal nothing that would foreshadow the tragedy to come. Those closest to them did say that they saw signs of mental illness but could not prevent the heartbreak.
"Everybody is sick about it. Nobody understands it," said Bruce Neidecker, 41, who dated both twins and earned with Jean the title of Mr. and Miss Van Buren High School in the mid-1970s. "They are not vicious killers. I can't tell you what happened. . . . If it could happen to them, it could happen to anyone."
From their modest hometown to the exclusive Dallas-area neighborhoods where the twins settled, the slayings have stunned those who knew them and left many wondering whether Jane Hopkins' children could have been saved.
Mrs. Byrd was charged with attempted capital murder and found not guilty by reason of insanity in June 1996. Doctors say she had a bipolar disorder, a form of depression often shared by relatives and whose victims swing easily from excitement to despair.
|
|
Top
|
|
|
|
|
#399 - 06/03/07 02:31 AM
Re: Mental illness & homicide
[Re: Pyro]
|
Pyro
Newbie
Registered: 05/26/07
Posts: 46
|
|
Offline
|
|
The Herald-Sun (Durham, N.C.)
September 07, 1997, Sunday
Schizophrenia brings lifetime of scars for Fayetteville man
FAYETTEVILLE -- Jim Schroer huddles in the park, holding a box cutter and fighting the voice in his head.
"Just do it," the voice orders.
"I don't want to," Jim cries.
"You're going to hell," the voice shouts. "You're no good."
Jim, a film buff, remembers a movie playing at a theater across town. "I don't want to kill myself," he says. "I want to see 'The Untouchables.' "
Jim, like other schizophrenics, is caught between fantasy and reality. His illness is a psychotic disorder, causing him to hallucinate and withdraw from other people. The disorder affects one of every 100 people.
Anger cuts deeply
Medication has helped little. He's not sure death will, either. He's angry at himself and at others he feels have let him down in life.
He slices each arm from wrist to elbow with the blade of the box cutter. The blood runs slowly from his veins. As he loses blood, he feels euphoric.
He passes out, then wakes. It becomes a cycle. He looks at his bloodied arms. "Why am I not dead?" he wonders.
Ten years later, Jim's long white scars are hidden under plaid shirt sleeves, and he still struggles with paranoid schizophrenia. It is the most common type and causes feelings of unreasonable fear on top of other symptoms.
Those who work in mental health say schizophrenia is one of the most devastating illnesses a person can face. Many schizophrenics have severe depression, and there is a high rate of suicide.
Jim has tried to kill himself more than once.
He still thinks about death as a way of ending his mental illness. "People want to soften it. They shouldn't. It's terrifying. It's horrifying. It never stops," he says.
Jim's father, Herbert Schroer, did not spend much time with his wife and young sons. He stayed on the road, chasing get-rich-quick schemes for raising racehorses.
Jim was 8 years old when his mother gathered up the four sons and left Cincinnati. She moved in with her two sisters in Fayetteville.
Years later, after Jim's first hospitalization, Herbert Schroer told another family member that he blamed his weaknesses as a father for his son's illness.
Current research says environment may play a role, but genetics play a larger part.
One of his mother's sisters also suffered from mental illness.
Jim's memories of that time are hazy. He stayed at Cape Fear Valley Medical Center and was heavily medicated. Then he was sent to UNC Hospitals at Chapel Hill. He began to improve.
Doctors had few weapons for fighting schizophrenia when Jim's illness first was diagnosed. It was the 1970s, but they were relying on drugs developed in the 1950s. Thorazine and related drugs caused drowsiness, involuntary trembling and drooling.
Then came the revolution in antipsychotic drugs, starting in 1991 with Clozapine. It still had side effects, sometimes dangerous ones. Clozapine can make the number of white blood cells drop in a small percentage of patients, denting the immune system. Those using it must have frequent blood tests.
|
|
Top
|
|
|
|
|
#400 - 06/03/07 02:32 AM
Re: Mental illness & homicide
[Re: Pyro]
|
Pyro
Newbie
Registered: 05/26/07
Posts: 46
|
|
Offline
|
|
Halfway Heaven - Diary of a Harvard Murder.
By Melanie Thernstrom. Doubleday, $23.95.
On May 28, 1995, Sinedu Tadesse, a quiet Harvard junior from Ethiopia, stabbed to death her quiet, nondescript Vietnamese roommate, Trang Phuong Ho, then hanged herself.
Melanie Thernstrom, a Harvard alumna and a former writing instructor there, tries to explain the seemingly unexplainable: what lethal combination of cultural displacement, psychosexual tension and mental illness led to this event? Thernstrom flits from diagnosis to diagnosis; Tadesse at various times suffers from psychosis, depression and Schizotypal Personality Disorder. Most fascinating, if most debatable, is Thernstrom's interpretation of the murder through a cultural context: Tadesse grew up during the devastating Red Terror in Ethiopia, when wealthy families like hers were imprisoned and tortured; Thernstrom describes her as "having come of age in a society in which the murderers have the power." The real culprit, Thernstrom would have it, is Harvard, which is depicted in "Halfway Heaven" as a monster of arrogance, ruled by lawyers and bureaucrats who, in pursuit of maintaining the university's public reputation, are driving it to moral bankruptcy. Clearly Harvard did not want reporters -- least of all Thernstrom, a former insider -- poking into what they perceived as their business. But the university does have in place an abundance of mental health resources; Tadesse was in therapy, and despite her desperate loneliness, did have a number of people who cared about her. How much responsibility should Harvard bear for the mental health of each and every student? At the end, Thernstrom concludes the murder-suicide is a cosmic act of evil -- and evil can happen any time, any place. Judith Newman
|
|
Top
|
|
|
|
|
#402 - 06/03/07 02:39 AM
Re: Mental illness & homicide
[Re: Pyro]
|
Patricia
Journeyman
Registered: 05/26/07
Posts: 80
|
|
Offline
|
|
That's just sick It's really sad that there are people like that
|
|
Top
|
|
|
|
|
#405 - 06/03/07 02:49 AM
Re: Mental illness & homicide
[Re: Patricia]
|
Fuji
Newbie
Registered: 05/26/07
Posts: 41
|
|
Offline
|
|
If these people were given help at the right time none of this would have happened.
|
|
Top
|
|
|
|
|
#443 - 06/03/07 11:19 AM
Re: Mental illness & homicide
[Re: Fuji]
|
Patricia
Journeyman
Registered: 05/26/07
Posts: 80
|
|
Offline
|
|
Ofcourse these people are mentally ill - there's no way this could have happened if they weren't.
|
|
Top
|
|
|
|
|
#600 - 08/30/07 03:00 PM
Re: Mental illness & homicide
[Re: Patricia]
|
MHJ
Journeyman
Registered: 08/30/07
Posts: 50
|
|
Offline
|
|
There is a huge difference between being disturbed and then being unaware of one's actions
|
|
Top
|
|
|
|
|
#1101 - 09/19/07 05:00 PM
Re: Mental illness & homicide
[Re: MHJ]
|
Shadow
Newbie
Registered: 09/05/07
Posts: 37
|
|
Offline
|
|
There was a case in Texas a couple of years ago, in which a woman suffering from postpartum depression with a psychotic break, believing she was acting on orders form God, severed the arms of her 11 month old infant killing her. My initial thoughts were that she should be sentenced to death. After learning more about the case it was revealed that she had been exhibiting signs of her illness that her husband wither did not or would not see. She was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and rightly so.
|
|
Top
|
|
|
|
|
#1131 - 09/23/07 07:33 AM
Re: Mental illness & homicide
[Re: Shadow]
|
Laureena
Stranger
Registered: 09/23/07
Posts: 10
|
|
Offline
|
|
I think that these people should all be punished rightly, wich means prison or death. Sorry but it's true.
|
|
Top
|
|
|
|
|
#1204 - 12/13/07 04:47 PM
Re: Mental illness & homicide
[Re: Laureena]
|
Quenlin
Newbie
Registered: 12/13/07
Posts: 31
|
|
Offline
|
|
Cold, but then again, I think there should be a limit to how far you can go until insanity wont work. If someone has to use an insanity defense more than once, then obviously curing them isn't working, and should be punished the same as any other person.
Executing an insane person is illegal, but life in prison would work.
|
|
Top
|
|
|
|
|
#1263 - 12/17/07 10:04 AM
Re: Mental illness & homicide
[Re: Patricia]
|
shadingscars
Newbie
Registered: 12/17/07
Posts: 39
|
|
Offline
|
|
I don't think that any normal person could commit homicide. I think that most of them are either really cold hearted,maniacs,feel a pleasure out of it or just suffer from some other mental illness.
Well, the truth is, most of these mental disorders really do not have the effect on the victim as we are led to believe. Normal people do commit crimes and they like to hide under mental problems because it is a get out of jail free card. So many disorders and diseases are made up or exaggerated to get criminals off.
That messiah thing mentioned above is one of them. The guy knew he wasn't, and the truth is he is lying to get attention and to get off.
|
|
Top
|
|
|
|
|
#1595 - 02/08/08 03:59 PM
Re: Mental illness & homicide
[Re: shadingscars]
|
venusdoom
Newbie
Registered: 01/27/08
Posts: 25
Loc: USA
|
|
Offline
|
|
I have to agree with you Shading-Scars. Most of them are made up and people making up excuses instead of giving credit for someone's crazy actions.
|
|
Top
|
|
|
|
|
#1618 - 02/21/08 08:59 PM
Re: Mental illness & homicide
[Re: venusdoom]
|
mcfarb67
Newbie
Registered: 01/30/08
Posts: 25
|
|
Offline
|
|
I really can not stand people who have the nerve to do something like commit a murder, then not even take the credit for it, or blame it on some bullshit illness. I hate these people
|
|
Top
|
|
|
|
|
#1619 - 02/21/08 09:00 PM
Re: Mental illness & homicide
[Re: mcfarb67]
|
mcfarb67
Newbie
Registered: 01/30/08
Posts: 25
|
|
Offline
|
|
I hate all people who would even commit a murder in general, but especially the ones who cannot man up to the fact that they did it
|
|
Top
|
|
|
|
|
0 registered
and 1 anonymous users online.
|
|
|
A forum community for victims and their families of violent and non-violent crimes.