Once you see it, it’s hard not to keep seeing it. In case after case of recent high-profile violence, the perpetrators were described as experiencing serious mental health problems. Here are examples from just the last two months (August and September).
In the Aug. 27 shooting of students at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis, the alleged killer, Robin Westman’s message to family and friends said he was “severely depressed” and “suicidal for years,” adding, “I am not well. I am not right.” He also said he was “tired of being trans, I wish I never brain-washed myself.”
A couple weeks later, on Sept. 10, Charlie Kirk was assassinated. And his alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, interacted with a lot of the same deeply twisted online “furry” fetish communities that Westman did, among more disturbing details.
Then a couple weeks after that, on Sept. 28, Thomas “Jake” Sanford allegedly shot up and burned a Mormon church in Michigan, killing four and injuring eight. A friend told ABC News that Sanford, a Marine Iraq War veteran, got heavily into methamphetamines while in Utah, and that he was “clearly affected by the drug use.” And when his Mormon girlfriend broke up with him, he then become “unhinged” and negatively obsessed with Mormons.
Here in North Carolina, we’ve also seen tragedies in that time frame, and with similar patterns. On Aug. 22, Decarlos Brown Jr allegedly stabbed Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee. Brown, it quickly became clear, had very serious mental health problems. His latest criminal charge was for misuse of the 911 system, after he asked officers to investigate “man-made material” that had been forced into his body and which controlled “when he ate, walked and talked,” according to CNN.
Reading the Brown family’s account of his mental health spiral is harrowing. After he returned from prison, they say he was a totally different person and would wander the house talking to himself and act erratically, sometimes violently. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia but wouldn’t take medication. The family tried having him committed a couple different ways, but there wasn’t room at the mental health facility. Ultimately, they ran out of options, and Brown left their home, just to wander the streets and ride the trains and buses talking to himself.
Even after the alleged murder, he wasn’t quite sure what happened, still convinced a chip, which he called “material,” implanted in him by police, was likely at fault. He told his sister on the jail phone: “Make sure it was me that did it, not the material. And I’m telling you, the material did it… I never said not one word to the lady at all. That scary, ain’t it? So, like, why would somebody stab somebody for no reason?”
Then, more recently, on Sept. 27, the same weekend as Sanford was attacking the Mormon church, Nigel Edge, 40, a Marine combat veteran Purple Heart recipient, opened fire from his boat into a dockside restaurant in Southport, North Carolina, a quaint tourist haven. Edge had unraveled since his military service, being diagnosed with delusions and PTSD.
He changed his name to start a new life in 2023, but then sued his parents for allegedly falsifying the birth certificate of “a feral child.” His mother responded to the suit with, “Plaintiff suffers from war injuries and he suffers from delusions and PTSD. The VA needs to take care of him!!!”
But he made many more outrageous lawsuits, including that an area church was trying to make him commit suicide because “he is not LGBQT or a pedophile.”
But like with Brown’s mother, Edge’s mother’s pleading led to nothing, and then it was too late, as three were killed and five injured when he shot up the restaurant.
Bipartisan resolve
Thankfully, many of North Carolina’s leaders, from both parties, are seeing this pattern and are trying to find ways to prevent future tragedies. “Iryna’s Law,” which was passed recently in honor of Zarutska, includes stricter requirements for magistrates surrounding procedures for those who are suspected to be a risk to themselves or others. After a mental health check performed on those with certain signs or history, the suspect may be involuntarily committed to treatment. The bill also includes funding for the North Carolina Collaboratory, housed at UNC Chapel Hill, to study the intersection of mental health and criminal justice in the state.
Gov. Josh Stein, as of publication, has not signed Iryna’s Law, due to disagreement over other elements, like the death penalty being revived. But after the stabbing, Stein said, “It’s very important that we have — for those folks who have clear mental health psychoses, and a history of violence — that we have some test,” and “there are reforms we can do to the involuntary commitment statute in North Carolina. Obviously we don’t want to deprive people of their liberty without thorough due process. But there are times when a person is a real risk to other people or to themselves.”
And after the Southport shooting, he made similar comments about having more resources for and processes around the “profoundly troubled” to protect the public.
In his Longleaf Politics newsletter, conservative journalist Andrew Dunn discussed a panel he moderated at NC Faith & Freedom Coalition’s Salt & Light Conference, with Rep. Erin Paré, Rep. Paul Scott, Sen. Dave Craven, and Sen. Ralph Hise. Dunn said the panelists were focused on a follow up to Iryna’s Law, “which most likely will involve long-term treatment capacity for people with severe mental illness who are a danger to themselves or others.”
Asking about “treatment capacity” does seems like the logical next question. If we are going to be involuntarily committing many more people to mental health treatment, where will they go? What if someone is a danger, but, like with Brown, there is no room or only resources for a brief, ineffective visit?
Then, on Oct. 2, NC House Speaker Destin Hall announced the creation of a House Select Committee on Involuntary Commitment and Public Safety, which “will study and make recommendations regarding the intersection of mental health services, involuntary commitment processes, and the safety of the general public.”
This, along with the NC Collaboratory study, seem like positive steps to digging into the facts and trying to find what a new paradigm might look like.
One area of inquiry could include what is often called the “deinstitutionalization” in the 1960s, when capacity in long-term mental institutions were slashed dramatically, as shown by this 2013 chart by The Economist published by The Economist.
Would reducing the number of people in our prisons and shifting them to mental health treatment, hopefully by intervening before they commit serious crimes, be a better approach? Would it end up being more or less expensive?
These are the kinds of questions that will need to be deeply studied. And before I wrap up an already long article, I want to share one final thing on this topic that I found interesting. A man named Mark Laita, who has interviewed over 10,000 people living on Skid Row in Los Angeles, was asked what his takeaways were from all these interviews, and I think it’s very relevant for taking a big-picture view of the kind of deeply troubled people we are discussing and how the issue may best be approached.
“I don’t believe the problem is homelessness at all because if you peel back the layers you’ve got drug addiction behind the homelessness. Okay, like all these people [in Skid Row] are drug addicts. You’d have a hard time finding some that aren’t. So then then you say, oh the problem is drugs like Nancy Reagan said. The problem is in drugs. So you peel back another layer, and then it’s mental illness behind that. Okay and then you can say, oh the problem is mental illness, but what causes that? So you peel back another layer, and you’ve got the childhood trauma, the broken families all that kind of stuff that people went through.”
This was the pattern that he saw emerge after hearing thousands of stories of those living on the streets. Laita said at one time, he thought government was the answer. But now, he thinks helping children before they are traumatized would have the biggest impact, which touches on what I talked about last week regarding the foster system. I only present Laita’s comments to show how deep the roots of the problem are and that “solving” it completely is well beyond anyone’s power. But putting energy towards better mental health treatment is certainly a piece of the puzzle that can’t be ignored when it comes to public safety.