Home schooling a kid with Aspergers doesn't make a Mom "overprotective", nor does getting an Asperger kid into a special engineering program and planning to live near the kid. Sounds to me like a Mom who wants to help her special needs kid.
"I think she simply refused to admit the degree of his illness,...
You just said that she was overprotective of his illness. Now you claim that refused to admit the degree of his illness. I would think that one who is protective of an illness, does so because they admit, at least to themselves that the illness is serious enough to need her assistance.
.. and once he was out of school, she had no more reality checks at all.
Here's a reality check for you. You are making things up without knowing the facts, basing your opinion on your own perceptions of expected behavior.
Now if you can demonstrate that this kid had a history of violence, and that the mother had a history of trying to sweep the violence under the rug, then that would be a valid point.
But you didn't demonstrate that.
Your premise is that violence is the only thing that marks a person as having mental problems. He was actually flagged in school for extra attention not because he was violent, but because he was too timid (he went down the hallways with his back pressed against the wall, for example) and also had other problems that were probably organic, such as the inability to feel pain.
He had way more than Aspergers (although even that is a very complex problem that is far more than a language disorder, as it is sometimes portrayed) but his mother consistently avoided having him evaluated for care. Even the security chief at his school had been told to keep him under observation, so obviously other people were uneasy about him for a variety of reasons, either because they feared he would receive ill treatment from the other students or because they were afraid he would do something to himself or others. Mid to late adolescence is usually the time when full blown psychosis comes on, and these people were experienced professionals who knew this.
Violence is not the sole indicator of the need for specialized care, and one of our problems in dealing with the mentally ill nowadays is that illness is defined solely by violence. Hence, the person can’t receive any mandatory care until he has already killed or injured somebody.
One of the best suggestions so far was an article by D.J. Jaffe that just appeared in the National Review offering a five-point plan for restructuring our mental health care system (someone posted it here earlier today). And one of the key points was that there are other indicators of mental illness than violence, which usually comes only at the end of a gradually unfolding paranoia...but when it happens is devastating.
Sorry, I’m sure his mother meant well, but she’s dead herself and so are some twenty 6 or 7 year olds because of her bad judgment and massive denial of reality.