Posted on 08/01/2012 11:21:12 PM PDT by dennisw
James Holmes came to the attention of the threat assessment committee at the University of Colorado but no further action was taken because he left the school more than a month before the attack that killed 12 and injured 58, sources told ABC News.
ABC News has learned that Dr. Lynne Fenton, the psychiatrist who was treating Holmes, 24, at the school, was also a key member of the university's threat assessment team. The group of experts were responsible for protecting the school from potentially violent students.
KMGH-TV, ABC News' affiliate in Denver, reported exclusively that, according to sources, by early June, Fenton had informed other members of the team about her concerns regarding Holmes.
But on June 10 -- three days after Holmes bought an assault weapon and added it to his already growing arsenal -- he suddenly told the university that he was dropping out of the neurosciences doctoral program with no explanation.
KMGH-TV reported last week that he'd purchased the weapon hours after failing a key oral exam.
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
This seems to be just an extreme example of a broader trend for colleges to minimize and not report campus crime (or in this case threat of crime), so as not to ding the school’s reputation or relations with the local community.
Try "warning the authorities" sometime.
Here's a tip: when it comes to dangerous crazy people, there ARE no authorities.
Look, when a crazy guy gets committed, an army of lawyers springs into action to sue the doctor and get the crazy guy out. There is no judge in the country who will hold a crazy guy with an IQ above 90 for more than 48 hours.
Ha ha.
I thought the deal was that she notified after he failed, before he dropped out—and they didn’t take it any further once he dropped out?
As usual these lunatics exhibited alarming behavior and then the ball was dropped. They were then free to exact their carnage.
. . . He's locked away, btw . . . thank gawd . . .
It is strange that we haven’t read the usual, ‘his father was this, his mother was that, and his high school principal remembers him as...’
” If they knew that he was a threat why didn’t they warn the authorities? They should be held responsible for the deaths because they knew.”
Real life is not TV, and unlike the “Behavioral Analysis Unit” on the Idiot Box screen, real predictive capability is not available. However, history of Russia indicates Goobers in Gooberment agencies will use “psychiatric confinement” to control any person they do not like once they have such authority.
Why should the university be held responsible when they could not know “beyond reasonable doubt”.
May I suggest that evil simply exists, and that evil is best dealt with by those on the scene - armed citizens using their “Natural LAw Right to self defense”.
Please remember that if that movie chain had not banned guns, siad evil could have been greatly reduced.
Thank you!
‘Sue, sue, sue is heard all of the time on this forum which is supposed to be promoting tort reform. Unbelievable”
Prediction of litigation is not equivalent to advocacy for said litigation.
So what would you have had them do? He had committed no crimes up to that point, and suddenly withdrew from the university after failing his oral exam, which was probably the final mental trigger for his rampage.
His first reaction was that Holmes had stop taking his medication.
From his experience/frustration: We have closed so many mental health facilities and underfunded those we still have. If we don't make the mentally ill a priority, incidents such as we've seen lately will increase. Even seventy two hours in house is not enough time to diagnose and establish treatment. Relying on family for care or throwing the patients out on the streets because there are not beds for them in institutions has its costs.
Oh, for goodness sake. She can’t help the shape of her eyes. I knew a woman with resembled her, and she was as solid as a rock— an RN who specialized in caring for high-risk premature infants. This psychiatrist was alerting people about Holmes, when no one else seemed concerned. At least, she should be given some points for that.
They were obviously concerned about him, and no, you don’t actually have to have killed somebody to be considered a threat.
A mentally ill person who is fantasizing about killing people is a threat, and should be committed for observation and stabilization for at least 30 days. The “72 hour committment,” which is the max in most places, is not enough.
Virtually all of our recent mass murderers, including the Columbine duo, had been expressing threats and their parents had tried unsuccessfully to get them committed to residential care.
There was no argument over the fact that Holmes was mentally ill, and the school owed it both to him and to the general population that he was targeting to make sure that he received treatment or was kept in a situation where he would not present a threat until such time as he could be stabilized.
He probably failed the oral because his life was going out of control, btw, not the reverse; and in any case, if that was the final “trigger,” then he should have been prevented from being in a situation where it could happen. And that means supervised residential treatment.
I have had two friends who were unable to get long-term residential treatment for their manic-depressive young adult sons - and both of these young men killed themselves (one of them by causing an automobile accident that almost killed someone else) after being released from 72-hour observation with a handful of drugs because the system could not hold them any longer.
The whole failure here is that of the university. Universities always hide what they consider their dirty laundry, whether it’s a mentally ill student or a child-molesting football coach.
What would you have them do? Arrest the guy for doing nothing illegal on the advise of a shrink?
I see divorce as a secondary cause, a consequence of depravity and general disobedience to G_d.
An unintended consequence of the bra burners??? Probably not. Absolutely it was intended. Italian communist Antonio Gramsci proposed sexual debauchery as a way to destroy the nuclear family, which he saw as the bulwark against socialism. Break down the family and the government raises the kids.
An important cadre of Gramsci's ideological heirs in Germany were the Frankfurt School. Among them was Erich Fromm (so there's your 'bra burner' connection). Their pitch became known as "Cultural Marxism." When Hitler took over he chased those "communists and Jews" out of the country into the Roosevelt administration's waiting arms, quickly to be ensconced in the American university system.
That's an excellent question.
Schizophrenia is a genetically-based biological illness. It is not a charter flaw or the result of bad parenting, or the result of being dropped on your head as a child. Late teens or early twenties is a very typical age for someone who has the genetic predisposition to develop the onset of this horrible illness.
The level of ignorance (by which I mean lack of understanding and education) in the general public is what makes dealing with these illnesses so difficult for families.
When someone says "my son has cancer" their support group draws closer and they find empathy at every turn. When someone says "my son has schizophrenia" they find their support circles move away and empathy is replaced by scorn and blame and ridicule (e.g., "what did THEY do to mess that kid up?") I know. I have two sons - one is an Air Force pilot but the other, our youngest, developed schizophrenia in his early twenties. I'm happy to report he is on the right medication and dealing with his illness as well as anyone could hope for.
99.999% of people with these illnesses do not go on killing sprees, nor are they violent. But it is these relatively rare cases where many people get their only exposure to mental illness in the media.
I am also my state's coordinator for a 12 week education course for family caregivers of people with mental illness. We aim to help families better understand the nature of these illnesses and give them some tools for dealing with crisis, solving problems, more effectively communicating with their ill relative and much more. If anyone knows of anyone with a family member suffering from any type of major brain disorder (major depression, biPolar, Schizophrenia, PTSD, etc), please tell them about the NAMI Family-to-Family Course.
Since you support Chick-Fil-A, you must hate homosexuals and are a threat to kill them in mass. You need to be committed.
Slippery slope... you see where this could go? The event was a national tragedy, but sh*t happens. You could stop a lot of it using Nazi German or Stalinist tactics, but else it is a price of freedom.
Thanks for the information. Is this a nation wide program?
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