His sorry azzz sister, Jalaa’a Brinsley, said, “If you have emotional issues and you’re ... going ... constantly going in and out of jail ... you know ..... prison, clearly something is wrong. He should have been offered help .... in the system .. right? ... but he wasn’t.”
So it wasn’t really her brother’s fault?
The solution would have been to keep the thug locked up in prison but then she would have complained about her brother being locked up in prison.
Jalaa’a, It is not society’s responsibility to take care of your family. It is your family — not mine. Your family failed and now your muzzie brother has now found his eternal resting place.
I don't believe a single solitary word of it. I was in California prisons for 25 years. Prisons are now the de facto asylums. They GET the mental health treatment by law. She is full of BS.
Not saying that it applies in this case, we don’t know enough, but I have seen loving, caring, intact families who failed in frustration to find help and solutions to family members suffering from violent mental derangement. The law, the medical providers, the System doesn’t exist to deal with this. Many, if not most, violent offenders behind bars are clinical psychotics who were not under treatment when they offended. 50 years ago, they would have been in state asylums. Certainly not an ideal solution but at least society would be safe from them, and they’d be safe from society.
One of these unfortunates was shot five times by officers under my command and killed. He was running around terrorizing a suburban housing plan, swinging a kbar knife. It wasn’t the first time, he did it not two weeks prior in the neighboring town. That time he was disarmed by a skillful baton strike and swarmed. He was a long time schizophrenic and was duly committed according to the law. However, once his meds were adjusted, he could no longer be held and was released onto the street, where he promptly quit taking his meds and became psychotic again.
This time, having learned from his previous encounter, he had wired the knife to his hand. Three officers kept him covered with their sidearms while two tried again and again to disarm him and separate him from the knife. As one would feint the other would attempt to strike the knife hand with a baton. Five cans of pepper spray were expended and three batons broken, to no apparent effect. His arm was broken in two places. They even beaned him with a landscaping rock, causing what our celebrity medical examiner later ruled a “non-survivable” skull fracture, yet he remained on his feet for 40 minutes as the battle moved through backyards and into a wooded area.
Finally after another attempted baton strike, my officer backed as the guy again swung the knife at him, and my officer got his feet tangled in the underbrush and fell. The actor lunged at him and three opened fire. The fired five shots, connecting in the torso with three and the extremities with two. One clipped his aortic arch and he died. Notably, one went through his hand holding the knife and still didn’t dislodge it.
I went to his father’s house to deliver the notification. I was accompanied by a deputy county coroner. It was now late at night. As I got out of my car in front if the house he greeted us from the door saying, “Had to put him down, did you?” I was stunned. He invited us inside. We sat at his kitchen table while he laid out the whole story. Normal white teenage suburban kid. No indication of mental illness, when one day in his 18th year, he was sitting at this same table, talking and joking with his best friend. Without saying a word, he got up from the table and went out to the garage. When he came back, he had a claw hammer and with no warning struck his friend repeatedly with it, nearly killing him.
Thus began his descent into violent, paranoid schizophrenia. Cycle after cycle he would try to kill someone, be hospitalized and treated and when the medication took effect, he would become something like his old affable self and then be released. You cannot be held anymore if you are no longer psychotic.
But he hated the feelings and side effects of the meds. He became adept at avoiding them, tonguing the pills until he could spit then out or otherwise faking taking them. Soon he would go psychotic again, attack someone - lather, rinse repeat. His family was in greatest peril. Dad told us of how he would sleep with a gun under his pillow and finally gave up sleep altogether as he would sit awake, watching his son sleep in fear of a repeat of the episode where he awoke and saw his son standing over him with a butcher knife.
Throughout all of this he begged doctors, hospitals and courts to keep his son in secure custody, for his protection and the protection of those around him. It was in vain. Once his meds were on board and adjusted, he could no longer be held and was released, and the cycle would repeat.
Dad said he knew that his son was coming there to kill him when we intervened. He had called and threatened his dad that afternoon. Dad showed us the gun he was going to use to defend himself from his son if we hadn’t stopped him. He apologized to us for us having to kill his son. He said he was thankful none of our guys were hurt.
I was speechless. What do you say to a dad who just lost his son to a disease for which he couldn’t get treatment? He didn’t blame us. He blamed the disease.
That was many years ago. Today I blame the disease too, and I have never had qualms about what my officers did that day. But you know what, I DO blame the ‘System’. It failed this troubled young man and failed his family who struggled in vain for years to find help for him. Sorry but I expect a little better from our society and institutions that indulge in their liberal fantasies about mental illness and those who suffer from it. The rise in homelessness, bag ladies and hobos shuffling along talking to themselves. It didn’t come from Reagan’s economic policies but rather from muddle headed liberalism that shut down the state hospital system and ‘liberated’ these unfortunate people out into the street with no good alternatives but to sleep in culverts and urinate on sidewalks and freeze to death and sometimes kill and be killed by the police.