Posted on 12/09/2021 6:15:40 AM PST by Pollard
The arsonist who allegedly torched the Fox News Christmas tree was freed after his arraignment Wednesday night because his charges were not eligible for bail under new liberal reform laws.
“I didn’t do it!” suspect Craig Tamanaha, 49, claimed to reporters outside Manhattan criminal court after being asked about the early morning arson that caused about $500,000 in damage outside the Midtown building that houses Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post.
Tamanaha, a vagrant with a lengthy rap sheet who was known to police, also went on an incoherent rant outside the courthouse.
He denied the arson and hurled obscenities at reporters before asking them for a cigarette.
“The moms that want to rape their f—ing daughters — they set it on fire,” yelled the man, who had also allegedly exposed himself outside the Ghislaine Maxwell trial last week. New York Post front cover Dec. 9, 2021.
The suspect was hit with a slew of misdemeanor charges — including arson, criminal mischief, reckless endangerment and criminal trespass — for allegedly setting ablaze the 50-foot-tall artificial tree with a piece of cardboard that was on fire.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
And maybe CNN will just "catch on fire"
Maybe the mutant will burn the whole building down next time ... since that may be the only way these corporate idiots get the message and move the hell out of NYC.
I got involved with genealogy that was mostly my sister’s thing. We had a couple of ancestors that ended up in State Hospitals. Unfortunately, many of those places were horror houses with rampant abuse and even some in the name of science. Quaker Oats fed radioactive oats to a bunch of kids in the Fernald School in Waltham MA. https://historyofyesterday.com/when-quaker-oats-fed-children-radioactive-oatmeal-5e06faf3ce4d
Helen Keller’s long time companion, Anne Sullivan was in one of those State Hospitals(almshouse) in Tewksbury MA and described it later as a very dark time. That home was modeled after the Fernald home. Look at all the recent reports of nurses accidentally giving people covid jabs and just think about the quality of employees in a mental facility. The abuse gets rampant. That’s why they closed them all.
Released without bail.
Next up: He wants to buy a Red SUV. Just because.
A sterling example of the current crime problem. In your face.
I'm betting when FOX gets the tree back up he'll burn it down again.
Hmm, it’s a disservice to society to release him and not provide mental health treatments.
No not surprised , this will only inspire more arsonist around the nation who hate Christmas light up the city park 🎄 trees. Actually this is an attack on Christianity plain and simple.
I’m going out on a limb here but I’m betting this nutjob has had lots of ‘mental health treatments’...
called it yesterday...
Lolololol…did they give him a can of gasoline and some butane grill lighters too???….
I know there was horrible abuse and atrocious conditions in some of those hospitals. It was much publicized in the lead up to the closure of all state mental hospitals. Sickening and heart-wrenching.
The one in my hometown was no Ritz Carlton, but it was not bad. The less crazy ones stayed until the bitter end when the building was about to be demolished*. Ladies in the community (including my mother) did volunteer work there, some teaching classes on quilting, painting, etc. for those who could and wanted to participate.
Back in the late 1960s, our maid (I’ll call her “Jane”) suffered some sort of psychotic break. My mother was driving down a busy highway and saw Jane wandering down the middle of it. She turned around, got her in the car and brought her home with her. While she was calling Jane’s sisters, Jane got all the laundry out of the hampers, dumped it in the middle of the living room floor and poured laundry detergent powder all over it. She was stark raving mad. My mother and two of the sisters took her to the state mental hospital and got her to sign herself in (by filling out the forms, pretending they were signing themselves in!). A couple of weeks later, Jane was fine and back to her old sweet self. Her sisters and my mother were able to visit Jane regularly while in the hospital, and she was well treated, nurses kindly. Being a young child at the tume, I was not allowed (regular hospitals did not allow visitors under twelve at the time, either).
Why not address the abuse and bad conditions in the bad ones, rather than turn them all out on the street? So many end up up as victims of crime. Others are constantly in and out of jail. Some commit small crimes as soon as they get out of jail so they can get back in, because they are fed and kept warm and relatively safe there (consider the court costs, costs for public defenders, etc).
While they might be better off on the street or in jail than in the worst of the old hospitals, are they better off than they would be in good or okay hospitals?
Why not close the “house of horror” type institutions and have more oversight of the good and okay ones? Why not have mental hospitals similar to nursing homes, with regular inspections and ombudsmen family members can complain to if patients are not being treated properly? They could even be privately-owned like nursing homes with Medicaid paying. Having community volunteers like in our regular hospitals and nursing homes (and some of the better old mental hospitals) would help with transparency, too.
We treated it as an “either-or” situation back then. And, it was hoped at the time, all those shiny new psych meds would fix it all, too, so those people could live out on their own. Trouble is, many won’t take their meds out on their own. And not all are helped that much by meds. The “group homes” proposed for those who were helped by meds enough to function somewhat in society never materialized. They were all just dumped in the street.
Don’t we need to rethink it now after decades of seeing that leaving these people on the street does not work? The way we treat the mentally ill in this country is shameful. We would not need to institutionalize most people suffering from mental illness. Many can live outside an institution just fine with family support. Others could live fine in an “assisted living” type residential setting, free to come and go, but with oversight and periodic assessment, and access to needed services and help.
I am no fan of the UK’s NHS, but they did a better job of it when they closed down most of their state mental hospitals:
https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/publications/making-change-possible/mental-health-services
Much is handled by charities. We need a similar system here.
*There was a small group of elderly people, not mentally ill, staying in part of the top floor. They did not belong there, but liked it much better than the state nursing home and kept signing themselves in, claiming mental illness, until finally they just let them stay. They were the very last to leave and were much distressed at having to go to nursing homes. It did not cost the taxpayers extra, as the cost to let them stay there was about the same as the state nursing home.
Gosh what if the new Christmas tree was designed to topple over when someone climbs up inside with a lighter and wads of magazine paper? Gosh, that’d be a shame if someone holding the lighter got trapped in his own arson. Gosh.
Wow. How in the hell does anyone go from stark raving mad to ok in just a couple of weeks? Was she off her meds? Did she ever relapse?
I was a kid at the time, so not sure. “Jane” had Type I diabetes, and I dimly recall my mother speculating that a blood sugar problem or something related might have set off the problem after she Jane had been in the hospital a few days.
Okay, I just looked it up and a diabetic with severe hypoglycemia can become psychotic:
I wish I had known that then, when the other kids teased me about our “crazy” maid. I loved her so much and very protective of her, defended her. The teasing stopped after a while, though.
She never relapsed, as far as I know. After she retired, she would still come to visit us and have dinner. She died of breast cancer in her mid-70s. I still miss her. She was wonderful and will always be a part of me. Her sisters were super cool ladies, too, and I adored them as a little girl.
Wow, I am glad it all worked out.
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