Victims of untreated mental illness

Two recent stories at opposite ends of the criminal justice system mirrored those of Andrea Yates, LaShaun Harris, Sherry Sims, Christine Wilhelm, and so many others.

In Massachusetts yesterday Helen Kirk was found not guilty by reason of insanity for fatally strangling her 3- year-old son. Kirk had a long history of mental illness and believed her son was the devil when she strangled him. She will finally be getting treatment in the state hospital where she is committed.

A young mother in Texas faces a capital murder charge. On Saturday, Alysha Green doused her three girls and herself with gasoline and lit them on fire. One of the girls died; two remain in the hospital.

Alysha’s husband says his wife had a history of mental illness with a past diagnosis of bipolar disorder. She was prescribed medication. She stopped taking her medication and, her husband reported, her behavior deteriorated in the last three weeks.

Will Alysha Green someday be committed to treatment as Helen Kirk was? Maybe.
For now four children are victims of untreated mental illness. The mothers are victims too; once they're brought back to reality they must live with something unfathomable.

To the jury

The LaShaun Harris case will go to jurors today.

During the trial, a cadre of psychologists and psychiatrists called by both the prosecution and defense testified that Harris is schizophrenic and prone to hallucinations. “She had been suffering from it before, during and after” the incident, said court-appointed psychologist Paul Good, whose statement that the schizophrenia caused Harris to kill her children was stricken from the record as conjecture.

"I wonder how my kids are doing ..."

Lashaun Harris (or in some news reports, LaShuan Harris) has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity in the murder of her three young children. The sad recounting of her current delusions is even sadder because if and when she is restored to competency, she will know the full weight of what she did.

In her videotaped confession to police, Harris described how she struggled with two of her boys as she stripped them and plunged them from Pier 7 in an area where tourists stroll along the waterfront. Her youngest boy laughed, thinking it was a game ....

In January, she said, ''I wonder how my kids are doing, if someone good is looking over them.'' She told one family member, ''T.J. is in school and Josh is walking and talking.'' She said her dead grandmother bathes them and ensures they eat properly.

A mother speaks

There are too many stories about mothers with untreated severe mental illnesses who kill their children – and too few answers to the questions of “why?”.

You rarely hear directly from the mothers themselves, people like Andrea Yates or Lashaun Harris.

An unusual jailhouse interview with Naomi Gaines sheds some light … Gaines threw her 14-month-old twin sons into the river in St. Paul and then jumped in after them. She and one of the babies were rescued.

"I know how I was feeling that day. I know I was not the same Naomi who got up with my kids a million times before and fed them and bathed them and walked them and breast-fed them and cared for them," she says. "I wasn't that same person. So I know that I would never hurt them if I had had my sanity."

No death ... but what kind of life?

What passes for good news these days is when people who commit terrible crimes due to symptoms of an untreated mental illness are spared the death penalty.

In Ohio, one prosecutor is mad about it. He swears that Gordon Franklin, 39, will spend the rest of his life behind bars. “We will do all we can to ensure [he] never leaves prison, which is all we can do in this case."

You may remember that Franklin beat his 13-year-old daughter to death with a golf club. You may also remember that he is severely ill with bipolar disorder and was not taking medication.

And California, it looks like the prosecutor will not seek the death penalty for Lashaun Harris, who threw her three children to their death in the bay last week.

There is no good resolution to stories like these – jail is a pretty terrible place for someone with a severe mental illness, and too often you hear that once they are restored to competency, they become suicidal contemplating what they have actually done.

And these cases are far too common. The best solution is to prevent them from happening in the first place. Feeling (understandable) relief that someone won't be put to death for killing their child is a pretty poor second choice.

Who failed Lashaun Harris?

More news on the sad case of Lashaun Harris, the mother in California who threw her three young children to their death from the pier. [Photo is from the Harris family via AP, from happier days.]

- She had a history of schizophrenia and multiple hospitalizations
- She had been hearing voices – that told her to throw her kids in the bay
- She had been off her medication for 4-5 months ("She's been going crazy for a while," her half sister told reporters.)
- On Wednesday, she told her family that “she was going to feed the kids to the sharks.”

People need to start asking why California isn't implementing and using Laura's Law - there is no excuse not to use a law that is saving lives in places like New York,where 74% fewer participants experienced homelessness, 77% fewer experienced psychiatric hospitalization, 55% fewer recipients engaged in suicide attempts or physical harm to self and 47% fewer physically harmed others.

Arguments against implementation ring pretty hollow when you see how many people are being helped in New York (people who, incidentally, are already costing the state quitea bit through emergency rooms and repeated hospitalizations) - and how many people are suffering in California.