FL-Stroke of luck prevented another horror

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http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/12/22/3153777/fred-grimm-stroke-of-luck-prevented.html

A shooting horror was averted last Monday. Who knows? Maybe another massacre, given the volatile combination of a disturbed war veteran’s escalating mental crisis and the astounding firepower he had accumulated preparing for Armageddon.

He was an Iraq War veteran, 26, suffering from crippling effects of post-traumatic stress disorder. His relatives were convinced that with his ever-deepening delusions and with the frightful armory he kept in his West Miami-Dade home, the vet was on the verge of something terrible.

It was only luck, and a Google search, that led them to the right telephone number. They called the office of Judge Steve Leifman, architect of the county’s mental health intervention project. Leifman’s staffers, Cindy A. Schwartz and Habsi Kaba, took the information and dispatched a crisis intervention team to the house. Along with a SWAT team...............

Florida has been fighting it out with Texas for the distinction of the state that spends the least amount of money per capita on mental health. Leifman said we’ve finally sunk to dead last in mental health funding.

“It’s pathetic,” he said.

Maybe, once he’s stabilized, the vet will agree to hospitalization.

Or maybe he’ll be back, untreated, to his apocalyptic visions and a house full of assault weapons, living at confluence of two flawed and dangerous public policies.
 
It doesn't sound like a 'stroke of luck' to me. It sounds like the right things were done and the right people contacted. Hopefully, this man gets the help he needs.

As far as him making his own health decisions, I'm not a Judge, but clearly this man is a 'danger to himself and/or others'.

From the link:

It was what police found inside the house that shook Leifman. The vet had covered his walls with strange paintings and apocalyptic slogans, “all must die,” and “the world is ending,” and numbers and dates, Leifman said, that “all run together.” The vet taped shooting range targets, black silhouettes with human shapes, on his walls. Leifman said it was clear, from the tight clusters of bullet holes, that the former soldier was a very good shot.

Leifman said the siege-obsessed man, wearing full-body armor, had arrayed 10 assault rifles through the house, as if he had intended to scurry from window to window, repelling invaders. Leifman said police found thousands, perhaps as many as 10,000 rounds of ammo. Relatives had also warned Leifman’s staffers that they had seen grenades, though police found none when they searched the house on Monday.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/12/22/3153777/fred-grimm-stroke-of-luck-prevented.html#storylink=cpy

jmo
 

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