Originally posted by happykat39
I think what you did was admirable. But now let me ask you a question. What would you have done in the exact same situation if the troll had not been
the son of a good friend. Please think about it and answer honestly.
OK, time to answer my own question. I would have gone to the police whether I knew him and his parents or not. That kid had some really fuzzy
caterpillars crawling back and forth between his ears and needed serious intervention. No matter what his parents did, unless they had bottomless
pockets, they would not have been able to get him the level of help he needed without court ordered treatment and court ordered monitoring of that
treatment.
I had a stepson from my second marriage who was seriously manic depressive (what they used to call bipolar) and neither his mother before I met her
nor myself ever got him the real treatment he needed even though we could have easily paid for it. By the time I married her she was not well off
enough on her own to manage the treatment and he was over 21 by the time we married so we could do nothing but try to get him legally committed.
Needless to say, if you knew the state of Illinois mental health systems in the 80s, it was a futile attempt.
He finally ended up staying away from his pizza delivery job for about a month because he was in a serious depressive state and needed to fix the
clutch in his car. When he came back the only reason he got his job back at all was because one of his younger brothers had filled in for him. But the
owner of the pizza place (actually a restaurant, bar and take out/delivery place in a small strip mall) had given some of my stepson's hours to
another driver who had a family and had been recently laid off from his regular job. My stepson, now in the manic phase, did not like this other
driver and went ballistic over having HIS hours given to the guy.
Here are the events as they unfolded in chronological order...
1 - He trashed the other drivers pickup truck with a sledge hammer.
2 - He was sleeping at my machine shop at the time and a couple of his friends were there as well (I was already in the process of going out of
business). When he came in I got a call from one of the friends asking if I had my guns there. I told him that I did not. They told me that he was
extremely agitated and did not seem to recognize them or one of his brothers who was also there at the time. After he gathered several 5 to 10 gallon
containers and left the friends called the police. When the police caught up to him and tried to restrain him for questioning during the struggle he
bit the little finger of one officer completely off through the bone, bit part of the ear off another officer and cut the third officers face bad
enough to need 6 stitches.
He was then taken to the mental ward of the local hospital for evaluation.
3 - What the police didn't know at the time of the arrest is that those containers he had taken from my shop were full of a total of about 35 gallons
of gasoline and he already had them stored on the roof of the pizza place. When arrested he was on his way back to torch the place, at a busy evening
meal time I might add, after failing to get any more containers.
4 - He was transferred shortly after the arrest to the county jail where he stayed for about a year during the long court trial.
5 - After the trial he was judged guilty but not mentally competent to be released so he was then sent to the forensic ward of the Elgin State Mental
Hospital where he was to remain until he was deemed safe to return to society by at least two doctors and a judge.
And now we reach the point of most of this story. Had he been able to get proper intervention at an earlier age he might have been at least partly
curable. You see his problem existed since early grade school. And the second point is that the mental health system in Illinois had been so severely
dismantled by a governor who wanted the money for other purposes that it was impossible to keep him in the Elgin facility when the courts kept jamming
new patients into the facility without funding to meet the rising need. He was eventually released, even though he was refusing his meds at the time,
to make room for new arrivals. The last I heard of him was after I moved out of state and got a phone call from one of his friends (I kept my Illinois
cell number) trying to see if I could do something as the stepson was talking about dreams of chopping off the heads of his "enemies".
The reason for this rather long story is to point out the need for early and proper intervention. And that is why I would have gotten
the courts involved in the case you cited if it were my call. Hopefully the state he lived in had better mental health services than Illinois
did.