15 days ago, I was home sick from work when I got a call from a friend. She told me that our mutual friends Larry and Denise had been stabbed to death in their home in Pasadena.
Larry was a chef and a teacher. Denise was a retired music teacher. They were wonderful people, full of boundless generosity. That generosity compelled them to take in a distant cousin who had messed up his life, and not only give him a place to lay his head but get him a job (which he promptly lost). Just after 6am on that Monday morning, he attacked his hosts with (cruel irony of all cruel ironies) Larry's kitchen knife. Larry called 911 after his cousin fled, and gave his name to police, who arrested the bloody suspect on the street outside.
Denise died in the ambulance en route to the hospital. Larry died in surgery.
There is no way to understand what a loss like this does to a psyche unless you have been through one. Like all of our friends, my wife and I are shattered. Of special concern to us is our 13 year old daughter, who has been close to Larry and Denise for years. She is an incredibly mature young lady but we are on the lookout for signs of post traumatic stress.
There was a beautiful outpouring of grief and love in the days following the murder, and it helped us stay on our feet, but still, nothing makes sense. These are the last two people on the planet who could have provoked another person to violence, and in fact the evidence that's been disclosed points to severe mental illness including but probably not limited to a drug-induced break from reality, grandiosity, and obsession with violent media.
There are signs that his mental state was of grave concern for Larry and a few of our other friends who had met the killer before the fact. But nothing was done. I suspect that the thought process was something akin to, "Maybe he'll settle down. It's not like he's going to snap and stab us to death."
Strangely, to this day, I don't know if anything could have been done. And that's the political crux here.
On a blog where the news of the murder appeared days after the tragedy, one especially rank commenter offered, "Knife control now," seizing the opportunity to heap ridicule on gun control advocates. Obviously, that's horseshit, since Larry's cousin could well have ended up killing many more people including his would-be arresting officers had he been armed with a handgun or something more powerful. Thank God he was not.
Gun nuts often use mental health as a red herring to distract from the problem of gun violence. Prior to this unspeakable crime, I dismissed the need for our country to address issues of mental health precisely because they seemed to originate from political opponents. My tune has changed.
Our society has failed the mentally ill. Our society failed my friends' killer, who could have and should have been treated in a secure facility were his symptoms properly diagnosed. Now, should he ever regain his mental health, he will live out his days burdened with the horror of what he did (he does not seem to remember or acknowledge it yet, if reports are to be believed). There are thousands of people out there living with psychopathologies that under the wrong circumstances can prove dangerous or fatal to themselves or others, and there is no mechanism or system for preventing that.
I don't know what the solution is. I haven't gotten that far, to be perfectly honest, because my feet remain sunk in a quicksand of grief and confusion. When I ponder what's happened for any period of time, I feel myself sinking deeper.
You are a smart and empathetic bunch. What do we do about this?
Thanks for listening. I am grateful.
3:49 PM PT: I just checked back in and would like to thank all of you collectively, rather than individually, for your wonderful expressions of sympathy. Obviously a solution isn't the easiest thing to come by, but you have given comfort and it's very much appreciated. You're good people. Thank you.