The mother of Aaron Alexis speaks
Alexis’ mother, Cathleen Alexis, read a brief statement to reporters in response to her son’s murderous rampage Monday at the Navy Yard, saying she had no idea why he would do such a thing.
“Our son Aaron Alexis has murdered 12 people and wounded several others,” she said in the statement. “His actions have had a profound and everlasting effect on the families of the victims. I don’t know why he did what he did and I’ll never be able to ask him why.”
“Aaron is now in a place where he can no longer do harm to anyone and for that I am glad. To the families of the victims I am so, so very sorry that this happened,” she said. “My heart is broken.”
That is exceptionally sad—and exceptionally admirable for its lack of excuses. I think almost everyone can sympathize with this woman, whose son appears to have been a mentally ill individual (probably schizophrenic) who turned violent. Most schizophrenics are not violent. But some are, and if they don’t seek treatment, or if treatment is ineffective, there is virtually nothing a family can do.
Except grieve, afterwards.
It is also exceptionally admirable, that in what is no doubt her own time of grief, she is expressing sympathy to others.
It would have been very easy for her to “no comment.” No one would have faulted her for doing so. She merits our admiration.
God for her – doing the decent and caring thing.
From September 2008:
“A man known to have mental health problems shot eight people — killing six, including a sheriff’s deputy — in a shooting rampage spanning seven crime scenes in Skagit County.
A woman who identified herself as the suspect’s mother said she has tried for years to get mental help for her son.
‘When they’re over 18, you can’t make them go anywhere,’ said Dennise Zamora. ‘He just turned 28.’
‘Those people, those precious people and that officer,’ Zamora said. ‘This is the truth: I love him, but I would of rather it would have been him than any of them. It’s not his fault that he is mentally ill.'”
The suspect’s name was Isaac Zamora. He’s now in the state mental hospital for the criminally insane, but it took years to process his trial and eventual commitment.
What is the thread that runs through the mass murders that have occurred in the last 20 or more years? Is it not mental illness? Zamora’s mother had tried to get him put away so he wouldn’t be a danger to himself and others. All of the many other killers showed signs of their mental problems. All missed or overlooked because the law says there isn’t much that can be done.
Apparently, Cathleen Alexis had no such suspicions about her son. Or maybe she did and was hoping he would not snap.
IMO, if we are to do anything about this, it would be in the area of mental health treatment, not gun control. I believe, maybe wrongly as I’m no expert, that the laws could be crafted to make it easier to confine people for evaluation of their mental illness, but have protections against a family/community getting their odd, black sheep children/citizens locked away permanently. If that could be done, it would do a better job of protecting society and would still protect people’s rights. In saying this, I have no illusions that such laws would be perfect in either protecting society or people’s rights. Mistakes would be made, but at least there would be better tools for dealing with the problem.
J.J. – I would hope so, also – that is the common thread among the latest mass shootings. The perpetrator was unbalanced, there were obvious signs to the people who knew him … but as it stands, how to lock up someone who may be a danger to others?
A hard question indeed … much easier to make a great fuss about screening, and AR-15s and all. Much, much easier.
Sgt Mom:
It can be done but it takes a great deal of effort for every case. The Left Establishment with its phony civil rights concerns has over the last 40 years made it damn hard, nearly impossible to do.
A bipolar friend of mine went hypermanic a decade ago, was ruining his family, his practice, his finances. The best I could do was to push a family member (with legal Standing) to involuntarily commit him, and that took 3 weeks of my daily trying.
Mama Alexis said good words, but if she did not recognize her son was schizophrenic, she was either dishonest or ignorant (Like Baraq, maybe both). Waiting for someone to snap before acting is just kicking the can down the road.
With a mother like that it might make it hard for haters to not also send a prayer for the shooter. Who knows what he thought. A parent like that can only receive, and lend, sympathy or empathy, even to her son. At least in my back yard. I just hope she doesn’t try to harness it into speaking tours, or a revenue stream!
Gah! But I have become so damned cynical. Still, I hope that is that for that from there.
Don Carlos-
Is it possible Alexis was not noticeably disturbed as a younger man? The thing I remember about some of these cases – like the kid at Sandy Hook, the Aurora shooter, and Jarrod Lofner was they all were benign or normal as kids, and got progressively worse as they grew older, especially between 18 and 30 years of age.
southpaw:
Schizophrenia doesn’t usually strike till late teens or some time in the 20s. Some sufferers were always somewhat odd, but some seemed perfectly normal up to the beginning of the disease. It is a dreadful disease, striking young people with pretty much their whole lives ahead of them.
southpaw,
The Virginia Tech shooter exhibited signs of schizophrenia, too. Wasn’t Charles Whitman also schizophrenic?
It’s so insidious. It often hits in late teens to 20s when the sufferer is semi-independent or an independent legal adult. It can afflict intelligent, successful people at the peak of their young adulthood.
If Alexis sought help, that actually makes him exceptional because many schizophrenia sufferers don’t seek help because it all seems normal to them – the voices, the hallucinations, the skewed thoughts, etc.. They resist help when family and friends try to intervene. They don’t know or, for some reason, can’t admit they’re sick. Once diagnosed and treated, it’s often a struggle to keep them on their medication and treatment program.
In a famous case in NYC, a graduate from my HS who was a star in his class – a top student, football team captain, popular, well liked, ambitious, a ‘most likely to succeed’ alpha male – and attended an elite college, became schizophrenic in college. He fought his treatment. A few years later, he killed his parents.
The actress Amanda Bynes is a recent famous case. She’s 27 now. As a young actress, she was a role model and by all accounts a genuinely level-headed, good person, and solid professional. Then her career, publicity, and life took a distinct turn in 2010. By 2012, she was a running joke in the tabloids, and this year, she became famous for very eccentric behavior. Then in July she set a fire on a stranger’s driveway near her childhood home and was caught trying to escape. She’s been involuntarily committed ever since with what’s been reported as severe schizophrenia. Her mom has been granted conservatorship.
The scary thing is that schizophrenia doesn’t incapacitate the sufferer. It doesn’t make a smart, talented, skilled person like James Holmes stupid. It just changes them. It doesn’t turn all of them into murderers, obviously, but there doesn’t seem to be a particular reason distinguishing those that do from those that don’t. Bynes could just as easily have committed full-on arson with fatalities as an oddball fire in a stranger’s driveway. Our society just isn’t set up to prevent the irrational ‘black swan’ threat of schizophrenic killers.
Eric: “Our society just isn’t set up to prevent the irrational ‘black swan’ threat of schizophrenic killers.”
My point is not to disagree, but to point out that our society has intentionally made intervention harder and harder.
A friend shew me a picture of himself, and he said that he was a paranoid schizophrenic. (He wert a good speller.)
It was we. Well, not us, but them.
You see. We all are one.
Aquarius. This is the dawning of Aquariums (less tax and water).
Or Christ shall come.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THW-5OUTSt8
If someone kills should we find the family without fault? Or is a burden of proof upon the family to show innocence?
If family members benefit from family relations, then in cases of clear knowledge, isn’t there a tortious violation when family permits by failure a crime?
sharpie:
The family members are without fault unless they are guilty of the already-existing crime of being accessories before or after the fact. The law is quite sufficient as it stands now.
There is no burden of proof to show innocence. You are suggesting something completely at odds with our entire legal system, something that would be a miscarriage of justice.
sharpie,
There is no way possible to “prove” a negative. I could, perhaps, “prove” that someone did something, but I could never “prove” that someone didn’t do something.
Waidmann
One of the reasons for making commitment and treatment hard to impose is that the professionals aren’t very good at it.
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment
Also that places like the USSR used it for political purposes.
Sharpie: “If someone kills should we find the family without fault?”
This comment reminds me of the Amish school shooter in PA a couple of years back. The local Amish community showed up at the killers funeral – certainly a very “forgiving” thing to do.
However, some of them, when asked by the media, said that they not only forgave him for his sins, but, also forgave his widow. WTF? His widow didn’t kill; what did she do to be forgiven for?
Charles,
I suppose one could presume a close family member did not do…something or other about the guy. Failure to act might be considered a problem of one sort or another.
The Tucson shooter had so many run-ins with cops and other institutions, demonstrating nuttiness, that some have presumed his mother’s connections with the sherrif’s office was why he was not coercively treated. Might be true. Point is, one can picture it.
Charles, when the Amish forgive the widow, they mean that they won’t bear a grudge against any members of the killer’s family. I know it’s incredibly in this day and age, but there are still people who will go after the innocent family members of someone who wronged them.
Don Carlos,
I agree. Drawing the line on the rights of potentially dangerous mentally ill people is a stalemated debate within the mental health community. In a political environment where the social good was really the top priority, the recent high visibility schizophrenic killings would be spurring a serious debate on mental health policies and public safety. Instead, the partisans are more interested in gun control proposals. Mental illness is a messier, murkier, more difficult issue than gun control that lacks political points in the game.
Waidmann ,
Infamous Devil’s Proof there. Only the devil could prove that something does not exist (God does not exist, etc).
I know it’s incredibly in this day and age, but there are still people who will go after the innocent family members of someone who wronged them.
like Democrats with Palin and Zim?
Krauthammer is right. This is a national disgrace that mentally ill people are not provided with psychiatric help when they need it, because of prejustice against involutary commitment. It is long overdue to revise this policy and overcome fetishist idolatry of human rights which makes this insanity possible.
Maybe the Left released them into society hoping for just what has happened.
sergey,
Normally, the help is there. It was for Alexis. The problem is dangerous mentally ill people who reject the help when they need it. It’s understandable why they would. It’s not like cancer where someone in their right mind recognizes an alien presence is in their body trying to kill them and must be defeated. These people don’t know they’re sick or don’t process that information rationally.
Involuntary treatment with no permanent cure that involves lifelong most-intimate invasions of mind and body with adverse side effects, often accompanied by confinement and loss of basic rights of person and property, is not an issue to take lightly. Not in America.
I prefer for the population to harden up, rather than rely on centralized totalitarian esque containment of individual humans.
Which is another way of saying I’d prefer to figure out how to defend myself against crazies than to rely on the Omnipotent and Wise government and society to do it for me.
Whenever a person abdicates his responsibility to himself and his duties to humanity, in order to let someone else protect against a threat, they are no longer fully human. They are just animals being “husbanded”. And animals can be slaughtered whenever the human deems it necessary.
And if that means the risk of dying increases… well, as the Ancients said, dying isn’t really the problem.
Eric, the reason why schyzophrenics in psychotic state must be involuntary threated is exactly because they do not understand that they are ill and can do terrible things to themselves and other people. This guy was not simply ill, but positively psychotic when he called police and told them that he was persuaded by 3 strandgers who poison him with radiation through walls and he can hear their voices in his head. These delusions and hallucinations are not a laughing matter, he was a ticking bomb which can explode every minute.
sergey:
And yet the vast vast VAST majority of schizophrenics are not violent. And the vast vast VAST majority of violent criminals are not schizophrenic.
I wonder whether Aaron Alexis had threatened violence along with his reporting of his delusions. One thing I do know is that he had committed violent acts; that should have raised a red flag in and of itself and prevented him from getting the job and security clearance he held.
Perhaps someone didn’t want to be labeled a racist for discriminating against a black because of problems he had in X.
Just like the military officers who heard Hasan’s anti American ravings kept their head down, didn’t say or do anything about it cause the commanding officer, Casey, would have their careers destroyed for it.