Posted on 09/20/2006 8:28:56 PM PDT by neverdem
In the hour before he was killed, on Sunday, Sept. 3, Dr. Wayne S. Fenton, a prominent schizophrenia specialist, was helping his wife clear the gutters of their suburban Washington house. He was steadying the ladder, asking her to please stop showering debris on his clean shirt; he had just made an appointment to see a patient and wanted to look presentable. She said she would be happy to go along, to help control the patient.
It was a running joke between them. For in this part of the country, Dr. Fenton was the therapist of last resort, the one who could settle down and get through to the most severely psychotic, resistant patients, seemingly by sheer force of sympathy and good will. An associate director at the National Institute of Mental Health, he met with patients on weekends, sometimes late at night, at all hours.
“Absolutely the most nonthreatening person you ever, ever met,” his wife, Nancy Fenton, said in an interview last week.
At 4:52 p.m. that Sunday, the Montgomery County police found the 53-year-old psychiatrist dead in his small office, a few minutes’ drive from his house. They soon tracked down the patient he had agreed to meet that afternoon, Vitali A. Davydov, 19, of North Potomac, who admitted he had beaten the doctor with his fists, according to charging documents. When the young man left the office, “Dr. Fenton was on the ground, bleeding from the face,” the documents said.
Dr. Fenton had known that the patient presented some risk: he was young, male, severely psychotic and struggling with a mental state that was frightening and unfamiliar. The psychiatrist was trying to persuade his patient to continue taking medication, Mrs. Fenton said.
The killing, besides devastating the two families involved, has deeply shaken mental health workers...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Very difficult, at least in Illinois.
That's crazy. Is that even if she voluntarily committed herself?
NO....she would not VOLUNTARILY commit herself.
I didn't say she would, I was just wondering if the state would have committed her if she volunteered herself to be.
Sorry, I misunderstood....I don't know, to be honest. I would have hoped so.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.