His history in Bosnia may well have been a big part of how he got so messed up. The family's former landlord, who he threatened with a knife, believes that is a factor, and he's in a much better position to know than we are. However, given the particulars of the young man's run-ins with Utah law as a juvenile, I'm now inclined to blame the courts who didn't heed the huge warnings signs and order serious intervention and supervision (probably including some time confined to an institution) back when it might still have done some good. Earlier news reports had said he had a juvenile record, but that it didn't involve any violence, giving the impression that he just "snapped" to a degree that no one could reasonably have been expected to foresee.
We need to seriously re-think the whole policy of keeping juvenile records sealed. This guy was a time bomb, and if teachers and employers could have had access to his court records, they would likely have interpreted his behavior differently, and responded to it differently.
Some years back, a student at my alma mater, who was living in a dorm at the time, was exposed as a juvenile bomber/arsonist. The only reason it was exposed was because the Secret Service was sweeping the campus prior to an appearance by a major political figure. THEY have access to juvenile criminal records, and based on what they saw in those records, honed in on this girl and started doing some serious investigation and questioning of professors who knew her. Long and short of it was, the Secret Service ended up doing a no-knock entry to the girl's dorm room, after learning that she'd expressed to chemistry faculty and lab TAs about certain types of explosives AND that significant quantities of some chemicals needed to make said explosives had gone missing from the Chem department's supply room. Upon questioning, she reportedly assured the Secret Service that she wasn't planning to blow up the political figure, just the Dean's Office (she had really done things like this in middle and high school, so it wasn't an idle threat). Shouldn't colleges have access to this kind of info about a prospective student, so they can make a reasonable decision about whether it's safe to have her on campus, in Chemistry labs, living in the dorms, etc.?
Agreed. Unfortunately, if you have all of his relatives saying that he was "such a nice boy" now, even after what he did in that shopping mall, he probably would have had that same group then saying the same thing in court back then.
And these days courts also have to worry about CAIR on their doorstep, screaming "Discrimination!" just because he is a Muslim.
If, indeed, his history in Bosnia is a big part of how he got so messed up, we need to rethink our asylum and refugee policies about letting people with this kind of history come into our country for "humanitarian" reasons.We are now talking about bringing in 70,000 traumatized Iraquis. How many Americans will they kill? And, yes, we need to rethink the whole rationale for keeping juvenile records sealed and destroying them once the offender reaches 18.
We need to seriously re-think the whole policy of keeping juvenile records sealed.
I agree with you 1000%. It is one thing to seal the record of a 'youthful indiscretion" like shoplifting or stealing a bike, but any violence toward another person should be in an open record. As I understand the current situation, a student can get transferred from one school to another for a violent act, and the new principal is not allowed to know about the reason for the transfer.