TX - David Stevens, 53, killed in random machete attack, Dallas, 12 Oct 2015

[bluesneakers]

Woah!
http://texas.247sports.com/Board/21/Contents/Thomas-Johnson-has-withdrawn-from-am-16093954

From 2012. I don't even know what to say. It just makes the whole situation more heartbreaking.

 

[Rayemonde]

“I don’t know the power of this voice in his head, but I know it makes him run,” Robert Johnson said from his apartment last week, miles from the jail cell where his son awaits a murder charge. “It makes him walk in the middle of the night. It makes him put on a winter coat in the middle of the summer.”...

Johnson’s mother hung up on a reporter three times last week. Many who knew her suspected she was unstable, even before her son turned strange...


But the summer he left for college, strange stories started floating back to Dallas: That Johnson had stopped getting haircuts and would not leave his room. That he would wear only white clothing. That his faith had morphed into religious delusions...


"He wouldn’t speak with teammates or coaches unless they had biblical names,”...

[Once Johnson] fled from a basketball game after the crowd jerked up their thumbs to make the Aggies’ famous “gig ’em” sign.

“He thought they were Illuminati,” Campbell said...


After a workout one evening, Johnson started chuckling for no reason.

“What’s so funny?” Perine asked.

“Nothing,” came the reply. And then: “I’m going to tell you something and you can’t tell anybody. I’m the messiah. I’m the chosen one.”

http://www.dallasnews.com/news/crim...-ams-rising-star-spiraled-through-madness.ece

 

[Rayemonde]

I think this poor kid has the basis of a good insanity defence. I sure hope they don't execute him, at least. Killing someone because you're mad, then phoning 911 and telling them murder is "like when you don't wake up"? Did he really understand the enormity of what he was doing? It sounds to me like his brain was badly malfunctioning, which wasn't his fault.

 

[bluesneakers]

I think this poor kid has the basis of a good insanity defence. I sure hope they don't execute him, at least. Killing someone because you're mad, then phoning 911 and telling them murder is "like when you don't wake up"? Did he really understand the enormity of what he was doing? It sounds to me like his brain was badly malfunctioning, which wasn't his fault.

I think he does too and IMO it would be a huge disservice to kill him for this.

I don't think he understood, obviously I haven't interviewed him and don't know him, but a lot of what he's been saying rings true, and he's been saying it for years. It doesn't seem to be something he just came up with as an excuse.

 

[neesaki]

[h=1]Ex-Aggies football star Thomas Johnson found incompetent to stand trial in random jogger killing[/h]http://www.chron.com/news/houston-t...ootball-star-Thomas-Johnson-found-7229696.php

 

[wendybtn]

Apparently this guy was severely disturbed and it was evident for quite some time:



http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/l...-johnsons-descent-into-murderous-insanity.ece

I find it very interesting that this writer assumes that getting this man all the psychiatric care in the world would have changed this outcome. The diseased mind fights receiving the treatment that can help it. And the possibility of hitting on the right combination of meds, at the correct doses, taken for a year or more continually to achieve real relief, is not a goal very often reached in the chopped up specialty medicine practiced in the US. I am an RN & I believe our system works well for physical ailments with a good doctor/patient relationship. But in psychiatry, we have a ways to go.

 

[bluesneakers]

This is about the couple (Dave and Lisa Stephenson) who took in Thomas Jefferson and there are no real updates (he's still waiting for a bed and won't leave his cell) but it's well written and I had tears in my eyes by the end. I figured it was worth sharing.

They once lived with jailed A&M star, fight to reach him

Johnson has sat in jail ever since. Ruled unfit for trial, awaiting a bed at a mental hospital, he rarely leaves his cell and takes no visitors - not his lawyer, not his father.

And yet, all summer, through the jail lobby came Dave and Lisa Stephenson - they of suburban comforts and an undying faith in redemption.

Their hall is lined with photos of young men from broken neighborhoods in Dallas who have stayed with them. One had been given away by his parents at a gas station to be raised by an uncle. Another’s father had killed his mother, then himself.

The Stephensons give these young men shelter. They help them find jobs and colleges.

The Stephensons convinced a judge they could rehabilitate Johnson. They picked him up at the foot of the tower and drove him back to their creek-threaded property in Farmersville - a young, ruined athlete who brought nothing but the clothes on his back and a secret sickness in his brain.

In April, a judge ruled - and even prosecutors agreed - that Johnson was unfit for trial, ordering him to be transferred to a state mental health hospital in the countryside. The Stephensons were relieved. They thought he would start getting real help.

But they didn’t know that Dallas County prisoners often wait months for a psych bed. Johnson was still in the jail the next time the Stephensons came to visit.

He didn’t come out of his cell.

Nor did he see Dave and Lisa the next weekend, or the next. Still, they would drive nearly an hour and sit in the visiting booth, thinking Thomas might be finishing lunch, worrying he might be losing his mind in isolation.

Lots more at the link.