Posted on 01/19/2014 2:31:52 PM PST by Uncle Chip
On Monday, Curtis Reeves, a 71-year-old former police captain, ignored the signs posted at a Florida movie theater forbidding weapons on the premises....
Sitting a row in front of him, 43-year-old Chad Oulson, a former U.S. Navy petty officer, and his wife .....
According to reports, Mr. Oulson exchanged texts with the baby-sitter before the movie started to make sure all was well....
Mr. Reeves reportedly glowered at the couple before asking Mr. Oulson to stop texting. Mr. Oulson ignored him.
Mr. Reeves tried to find the theater manager, but he was busy with another customer.
Words were eventually exchanged while Mr. Reeves' son [a police officer] was in the lobby on a refreshment run.
The dispute quickly escalated. A bag of popcorn was angrily flung. It isn't clear who threw the first kernel. Witnesses insisted it was Mr. Reeves, who, in turn, blamed Mr. Oulson.
Allegedly fearing for his life, Mr. Reeves pulled a .380 semi-automatic handgun and shot Mr. Oulson. The bullet passed through Mrs. Oulson's hand as she tried to shield her husband.....
Mr. Reeves was put behind bars and charged with second degree murder ....
The theory his lawyer spun about his fearing for his life didn't begin to jibe with reality and was widely ridiculed, even by Second Amendment absolutists.
Mr. Reeves helped start Tampa's tactical response team in the 1990s, so his attempts to portray himself as some kind of scaredy cat added an element of absurdity....
Only the most irrational gun enthusiasts are defending Mr. Reeves on newspaper comment boards and blogs. There is a class of very scared gun owners out there who claim they would have done the same thing as Mr. Reeves did under the circumstances. Flicked popcorn kernels constitute assault if Mr. Oulson threw it first....
(Excerpt) Read more at post-gazette.com ...
He had 30 years in the police department to gain the skills necessary to discern a bag of popcorn from a UFO.
The lights were dimmed but not off — which all theatres do prior to the movies while everyone is moving around during Previews. So he had enough light.
He was at most 3 feet away and knew what the man in front of him had in his hands — cellphone and bag of popcorn —
especially when he turned toward him.
When the bag of popcorn hit him, popcorn would have flown in 10 directions and he would have seen it and known that it was just popcorn and he did and that is why he invented the UFO sighting that his lawyer insisted that he was going to produce because he knew and knows that the bag of popcorn was not sufficient provocation for the use of deadly force.
And no one but the perp who claims to have been hit with a UFO is asserting it hit him in the face as if that means anything anyway.
And finally the wife was trying to block the bullet with her hand as the sheriff pointed out but the nutcase fired anyway.
Don’t miss the February 5th hearing — it should be a doozy.
That same experience should have also informed him to not shoot and not offer such a lame rationalization for self defense... or dementia has warped his perception and judgement. What happened was horrible, stupid and inexplicable. So far I have seen no reports that he ever shot anyone as a cop, so now why does he go off half cocked and kill somebody over a petty issue and a bag of popcorn? Dementia pretty much explains all the inexplicable.
<> Dementia pretty much explains all the inexplicable.<>
WADR I don’t see it on the list:
http://www.alz.org/alzheimers_disease_10_signs_of_alzheimers.asp
Alzheimer’s is a type of dementia, but not all dementia is Alzheimer’s.
Whenever you have an elderly person with a serious change in behavior, a neurocognitive disease is most often the cause.
<>Alzheimer’s is a type of dementia, but not all dementia is Alzheimer’s.<>
I didn’t find it here either —
11 Early Signs of Dementia:
http://www.everydayhealth.com/alzheimers-pictures/11-early-signs-of-dementia.aspx#/slide-1
Did you read it all yourself?
“FTD patients don’t have that sense anymore that things that people do could turn out badly,”
“inappropriate interpersonal behaviors...lead to legal trouble” “out-of-character, law-breaking behaviors”
“Staring”
“Losing Empathy”
Those are all stretches —
Dementia Defense won’t fly
Since it can be diagnosed medically, it can be used as a defense.
I have a degree in social work (weird for a conservative, I know) and have worked in nursing homes and hospitals, both medical and psychiatric.
None of these are a stretch. He lacked empathy for his victim’s texting regarding a sick child. There were witness reports of glaring (it is common to mistake staring for glaring when you are the object of the stare).
Inappropriate interpersonal behavior leading to legal troubles... Uh hello, that is exactly what this is.
And it’s definitely out of character. It’s not like he has a rap sheet for assaults and batteries or a lengthy history of complaints regarding excessive use of force as a cop.
I’m just saying, don’t be surprised if it goes in this direction. Or even if convicted, he may be released within a year or two because he has become a drooling, incontinent shell of himself. Stress often causes acceleration of symptoms and prison is very stressful.
Obsessive Compulsive Authoritarians do as well.
There were witness reports of glaring
That was after shooting the texter. He had nothing left to do and no texter left to shoot. So now he could glare at the screen uninterrupted.
Inappropriate interpersonal behavior leading to legal troubles.
Sure -- he has legal troubles now but not before this.
I'm curious as to what he was like over at his church -- churchgoers are notorious for texting during services.
Obsessive Compulsive Authoritarians do as well.
There were witness reports of glaring
That was after shooting the texter. He had nothing left to do and no texter left to shoot. So now he could glare at the screen uninterrupted.
Inappropriate interpersonal behavior leading to legal troubles.
Sure -- he has legal troubles now but not before this.
I'm curious as to what he was like over at his church -- churchgoers are notorious for texting during services.
Not really.
When cops on duty feel fully justified in their own minds that shooting someone who is under control but wiggling because "I don't have time for this" (was his donut getting cold?) then I am of the opinion that cops have been told any reason is a good reason to shoot someone.
So if they want me to come down on their side they had better provide some evidence that they are not out of control trigger happy lunatics first.
So far they tend to be coming up short in the evidence category the majority of the time.
You are forgetting the other texter interaction in December. She said he glared at her for the rest of the movie.
I’d be curios to know if his texting issues are a long time thing or a new obsession in the last few months.
Then there was the neighbor who said he got super angry about his music once and then seemed to snap out of it and was okay again. That is very classic dementia activity.
Anger out of proportion to the offense is a common problem in cognitive diseases.
My point all along is that he is a lunatic, i.e. is likely suffering from some type of age related dementia.
If that's the case then half of our prison population should be in nursing homes instead.
His problem is that he held a lucid conversation with management just minutes earlier.
His problem is that he held a lucid conversation with management just minutes earlier.
________________
One can be lucid but with impaired judgment.
I won’t argue with that —
Our prisons are filled with such persons.
Agreed.
My understanding has been that Reeves was unable to find a manager to speak with, so he returned to his seat.
Did I miss something about Reeves successfully having a conversation with management?
The article says “Mr. Reeves tried to find the theater manager, but he was busy with another customer.”
Early stage dementia is not 100% percent of the time. Nor does that mean that they cannot have a lucid conversation just before or after some bizarre acting out.
Depends entirely what parts of the brain are diseased first and how badly that determines the behavioral manifestations.
There is a good case to be made that 40-50% of any given prison population is suffering from mental illness like bi-polar and schizophrenia and dementia among the older inmates is a fast growing problem in the industrial prison complex.
They use to send them to the state hospitals, but those are all gone now, in favor of the cockamamie “community mental health programs”.
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