NY cops: Man stabs random child 5 times at eatery

WESTBURY, N.Y. — Police say a man carrying a hunting knife crept up behind an 8-year-old boy playing a video game in a New York restaurant and plunged a 4-inch blade into his back five times.

Police say Evan Sachs picked the boy out at random and stabbed him five times in the back Friday night at a Dave and Buster's in Westbury on Long Island.

“Remember Willowbrook?
Geraldo first burst on the national scene with his Willowbrook espose. People were horrified at the conditions. One result- asylums were closed and the mentally ill turned out on the street to be homeless among us.”
I have worked with the mentally retarded for 20 years. Willowbrook was an institution for them, not for the mentally ill. There is a BIG difference in afflictions.Mentally retarded people ARE NOT mentally ill. They have brain damage that causes a low(below 70) IQ that prevents them from living lives that are completely free from supervision. The conditions at Willowbrook were horrendous because a majority of mentally retarded people need tremendous care. Often they are unable to hold a spoon without assistance. At Willowbrook, many of the lowest functioning patients were left to sit in their own feces, banging their heads against the wall. That was an example where the state did not really know what it was supposed to do in order to care for the most vulnerable of people.Now, in smaller programs and residences, they are able to live quality lives with the help of caring people. The Mentally ill are a different story. They were being well served and monitored in larger programs. Those with mental illness can have very high IQs and deceive people into thinking that they are able to live a normal life outside a supervised environment, but that is not so. When they emptied the larger programs of the mentally ill, they often sealed their fate and the fate of others in tragic ways.

“Giuliani got a lot of these people out of the subways and public spaces simply by making it unpleasant to live there and forcing them further away, but to this day nobody has dealt with the mental health issues.”
Do you remember when Ed Koch tried to round up all the mentally ill homeless street wanderers and put them at Bellvue? It was a good idea, but the ACLU got involved and created trouble. They took this black woman, Billie Boggs,(real name Joyce Brown)who lived on top of a subway vent and defecated on the street, cleaned her up, dressed her up and had her recite prewritten speeches about how the city could not force her to go to hospital. It was against her “civil rights.” It was enough to squash the whole program. I read online that she returned to the streets at one point, living over the same subway vent as before, but now resides in a homeless shelter for women that the ACLU found for her. She is sometimes seen on the streets making obscene gestures at passersby. What the ACLU insisted upon was the kind of extreme civil liberties that are absurdities. Not made to take medications and allowed to traipse about without restraint, the mentally ill are among us as witnessed in the incident at Dave and Buster’s.

I do remember the Billie Boggs episode. I think a few years later she actually did end up being jailed and committed because of a violent attack on a passer-by, but from what you say, it seems like she’s on the loose again. I don’t know what it would take to put her away.

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