All I can Say is DAMN!
Socrates
137 Posts
More screwed-up stuff...Baby in stroller stabbed on New York streetNEW YORK (AP) -- A knife-wielding man stabbed a 10-month-old baby in her stroller, critically injuring her, police said.Isabelle Avins was rushed to a hospital where she underwent surgery Wednesday night. She was listed in critical but stable condition, police spokesman Detective Brian Sessa said.At the family's request, the hospital on Thursday declined to provide further details.The nanny was walking with the baby around 5 p.m. when the man approached them a short distance from the girl's home, Sessa said."He just came out of nowhere," witness Hennessy Arias told the New York Post in Thursday's editions. "The baby was hysterical, crying. ... She was crying and trying to gag for air."The nanny, identified only as a 20-year-old woman, screamed for help and cradled the baby.Isabelle's father, Jon Avins, also praised the nanny."The babysitter saved her life," he told reporters outside the family's apartment building. "She's like a member of our family."Bernard Derr, 48, a man with a history of psychiatric problems, was taken into custody a short time after the attack and held on attempted murder and other charges, police said.Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.Find this article at:http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/08/ba...d.ap/index.html~Crates
Comments
The real question here is, why was this man out walking the streets?
My point exactly.
We need to get our fucking priorities straight in this country.
You can't bet letting fucking lunatics with documented histories of mental illness out roaming the streets with knives.
wtf?
um, this is news? everyone knows the public mental health system got their budgets slashed to fuck in the 70's and 80's and all these people got dumped onto the street... at least half of all bums you see on the corner should rightfully be in a hospital...
http://eightiesclub.tripod.com/id343.htm
"Many experts pointed to the "deinstitutionalizing" of patients in mental hospitals that occurred in the Sixties and Seventies as part of the problem. In the early 1960s, days of heady and high-minded social reform, the decision was made to begin closing the "snake pits" -- mental hospitals -- and to create a new system of local mental health centers. To that end, President John F. Kennedy signed the Community Mental Health Centers Act in 1963. It was hoped that new wonder drugs would enable many patients to function once they were reintroduced into society. The result: the number of patients in state mental hospitals declined from over 500,000 in 1960 to 150,000 twenty years later. But community-based services were not adequate to take up the slack; by 1988 it was estimated that most of the nation's largest cities had no more than 10% of the institutional placements necessary for the mentally ill.
Where, then, did the mentally ill go? By the mid-Eighties, reliable studies revealed that about one-third of the homeless fell into this category. Some were former mental hospital patients while the rest were younger mentally ill individuals who had never received institutional care. And the other two-thirds of the homeless? According to Dr. Irwin Perr of the Rutgers Medical School, the conventional wisdom was that 25-50% had alcohol or drug abuse problems. The rest were the "new poor" -- the jobless or those displaced by the gentrification of inner city areas. The number in low-income families unable to find affordable housing rose from 8.9 million in 1974 to 11.9 million in 1983. In New York City, tax abatements in the early '80s encouraged developers to replace flophouses with luxury condominiums. Similar urban policies had the same effect across the nation. Restrictions on the sale and rent rates of subsidized federal housing, approved in the 1960s, were expiring. Between 1974 and 1983, according to Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies, nearly 900,000 SRO (single-occupancy units) that rented for less than $200/month were lost. The number of SROs in New York fell by 89%, from 127,000 to 14,000. Where once the ranks of the homeless were dominated by single men, now at least a third were families without homes, often unwed mothers with small children. "
these are the kinds of stories that stigmatize people with mental illnesses. a good 99% of people with mental illness are not violent to other people.
I'm not saying all people with mental illnesses are like this.
But there are a lot of mentally ill people both with and without criminal history's walking free because there's just no $ for treatment, room in hospitals etc.
I'm aware of all that, I think I just got more emotional over it having kids, myself.
Yeah, I dont think anyone was saying all mentally ill people like to stab babies. The sad truth is that a lot of mentally ill people that can't function in society are forced to live on the streets. They can't work so they don't have health care or housing, and many can get it together to get the few social services that might help them. I worked in a food stamp enrollment campaign for a while and the process is confusing and difficult even for most well educated and well adjusted folks. The mentally ill get the shaft. There is an old run down state hospital near where I grew up. My mom told me when they shut it down in the 70's they basically just gave the residents a bottle of pills and wished them luck. Some had family willing to help many did not. Hence about 90% of the local homeless population originated from that hospital.