"Who smiles in a mugshot when your being charged with 6 counts of murder"
Posted on 01/10/2011 6:51:58 PM PST by kristinn
Reporting from Tucson — The parents of Jared Lee Loughner, accused of shooting Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 19 other people, were huddled in seclusion in their Tucson home Monday night, his father crying and his mother so shaken she could not get out of bed, a neighbor told The Times.
As the sun was beginning to set Monday, Randy Loughner called his neighbor, retired gasoline truck driver Wayne Smith, 70, to ask him to get their mail. Smith, who is not particularly close to the Loughners, grabbed the mail and was invited inside.
"They're in there now," Smith said in a subsequent interview with The Times. "They're both in there crying. He's crying and hanging on to me and she's not even out of bed."
Smith described the Loughners as very private and said they knew few people on their street, although they had lived in the neighborhood since before Jared, 22, was born. He said Jared was their only child. Smith said Loughner's mother, Amy, had a good job with good retirement and pay, and Randy was a stay-at-home dad who liked to work on cars.
"He worshipped the boy," Smith said.
SNIP
All three wept together outside on Saturday. "We stood right out there and cried for an hour. I'm a softie," Smith said. "A man needs compassion. He's broken up about his son, but also about all those people who died."
Smith said the family is intensely private. "The best way I can describe it, they're like a mountain man," he said. "They want to be alone."
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
You make some very reasonable points. I hope we learn the answers in the months to come. I imagine that this was a very dysfuntional family where secrets pertaining to each family member’s mental health were tightly guarded from the outside world including family relatives. We’ll see...
A person with a mental illness can do lots of things, but that should not deny them the treatment they need.
We had another client that was an adult in probate who refused to take his medicine. He was a schizophrenic. He had a mom, she was his “guardian” and provided the funds. All the State of Arizona could do was pick him up when they could find him and forcibly give him his meds. The guy was driving without a license but was also a risk to himself. He gave away his money, brought bums back to his apartment. At some point all you can do is what you can and pray.
You are quite right. It is also very difficult to institutionalize them against their will. Charles Krauthammer talked about that this afternoon on Special Report. He said that 50-60 years ago you could do it but now it was very difficult. He was also of the same opinion that I am that Loughner is most likely a schizophrenic. That means he was pretty much normal until just a few years ago at most.
I think you have hit upon a policy that we are not beginning to see is a failed policy that needs to be brought up to date. We need an intervention policy that recognizes that a mentally ill person is the last person that recognizes they have a mental illness.
It has been a suspicion of mine for quite some time.
But seriously, If parents would look at the infant in the bassinet and truly appreciate and fully understand what they are tasked to do, all our lives would be better.
I have a younger brother that showed signs of going down a worrisome path. My parents took him in hand and circumvented his bad tendencies. He had a furious temper until he met his wife and it seemed to melt away. It may also have happened after a few prayers.
He retired as an Air Force officer, married to a wonderful and devout woman and has been a Deacon in his Church. He is also a retired principle from the San Antonio Consolidated School District. His beautiful daughter is a school teacher married to a Baptist Minister with five children, including newborn twins. His son is a Baptist Minister with a beautiful wife and newborn twins.
It can be clearly seen with my other relatives that have not led such exemplary lives, that most of their problems stem from parental abandoning of obligations or parental enabling of destructive actions.
I attribute my success to my beautiful, smart and steadfast wife that has stayed with me for thirty six years, plus the fact that we left the smothering cocoon of our families rather early.
They should not be blamed unless they knew he would commit the crime of murder and did nothing to prevent it.
From the testimony of the people who knew him growing up, he was normal and happy until his senior year. That is when he began showing signs of his mental illness. It went downhill from there.
I hope people don’t hurt his parents anymore than they are already hurting by blaming them for their son’s crime. That a little better - but not much - to blaming Palin for the kook’s crimes.
"Who smiles in a mugshot when your being charged with 6 counts of murder"
That would mean about half of all high school students are exhibiting signs of a mental disorder. The libs have the answer for that in legislation they have been pushing for years. Psych evals for everybody before they graduate high school. Of course that means no firearms ownership for any of them.
That is strange!
Oh, but it would have prevented this tragedy. The real point is that a Parent that was paying attention all the child's life would not have let this illness progress unchecked to this sad circumstance.
The news media is engaging in the same magical thinking that led to this path of destruction, oddly enough, as if a "target," real or imagined, somehow draws violence through some mystical process. And they're too addled with self-importance to realize it.
No, it would not have prevented anything. Schizophrenia occurs in ordinary people in their late teens and early twenties. Nothing his parents did before that could have changed it or anticipated it. Read some of the posts here describing it. It is very difficult for a parent to spot and almost impossible for anyone to force a schizophrenic to accept treatment. That is the way it is, period.
If he was mentally ill,when was he denied treatment?
As far as I am concerned,he crossed the river of no return when he shot the 9 year old girl in the back of the head. That,in my opinion, puts him in the pure unadultred evil category. There are millions of mentally ill individuals that do not murder children.
Also, even with good parents and the best of care, things can still go horribly wrong. I also know this from experience.
I have members of my extended family in the same situation. If you keep feeding the addict, he'll have no incentive to change.
Every Conservative is supposed to understand this, because that is what we want to stop our Federal Government from doing, enabling and abetting excessive social behavior!
Yet when it is happening in our homes, it may as well be a scene from Hamlet.
A friend has a schizophrenic son, and it took him multiple arrests and a lot of hard work over a period of a couple of years to get his son into the hospital for a few months. We have a relative in Oregon who was never able to get her bipolar daughter with multiple personalities who tried to have the mom killed when she was a teenager into treatment, either. The parents ended up taking care of the (disabled from drug and alcohol abuse) babies of hers that she popped out like tic-tacs.
I know the families who have dealt with the mentally ill and the system that won't take them, and they have been pleaded for help. I don't know that his parents did (maybe not) try, but the system is broken.
Evidently no one gives a damn about the innocent 9 year old girl that he shot in the back of the head.
There may be one, but, I have not read the first post expressing sympathy for her family or sorrow for her.
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