"Dad! They're Killing Me!"

Reportedly, Kelly Thomas' last words were "Dad! Dad!" Before this he can be heard screaming "Dad! They're killing me!" on an audio tape pieced together from devices on Fullerton police officers uniforms. This audio was pieced together to match a surveillance video that captured the vicious and brutal beating of Kelly Thomas by six Fullerton police officers. Kelly Thomas was a local fixture in Fullerton known by many for his sweet nature, and of course, for the fact that he was homeless. It was also known by many that he suffered from mental illness. It is the mental illness that compels me to write this post.

It is not that I believe Mr. Thomas' mental illness should take the spot light in this tragic issue, but because others apparently think his mental in-capacities are an excuse to push forth their own insidious agenda. Yesterday, on May 9th of 2012, The Los Angeles featured a front page article titled Beating video may be a mental health watershed. (The link I've provided is dated May 8th, and its title differs slightly from the printed article). It is a shameless propaganda piece for mental health "advocates" who think they can use Kelly Thomas' murder to further their own gains.

This week, after the tape was played for the first time in court, it exploded in the public consciousness — one YouTube version had been viewed 91 times each minute — and became an instant touchstone for those who advocate for a more robust and effective mental health system.

Advocates for the mentally ill said they viewed the recording, the centerpiece of the prosecution's case against two officers accused in Thomas' death, as something akin to their Rodney King video.

Somehow, in spite of certain facts, mental health "advocates" believe that Kelly Thomas wasn't murdered because of an out of control cop culture that encourages Dirty Harry tactics and needless use of force, but want people to believe this tragedy happened because of Kelly Thomas' mental illness and the poor, poor pitiful police officers are haplessly stuck dealing with mentally ill people:

In the case of the King video, civic activists felt they had a record, at long last, of something they'd been trying to articulate for years: that the relationship between African Americans and Los Angeles police was fundamentally broken. Similarly, advocates for the mentally ill say they now have a record of a scattershot, chronically underfunded mental health system. This is what it looks like, they said, when schizophrenics fend for themselves on the streets, when their only interface with the government is with haplessly unprepared police officers.

"I think I'm a fairly strong woman. I've seen a lot of tragedy over the years. But I am reeling," said Carla Jacobs, a veteran Southern California mental health activist, shortly after watching the recording.

So giddy and greedy is Carla Jacobs agenda, she continues:

The tape, she noted, will be picked apart during the legal proceedings. Some will argue, she said, that Thomas should have been more respectful, and worked harder to follow instructions. Others will argue that the officers should have received better training. None of that, she contended, will matter in the end.

"As far as I'm concerned, the blame — the guilt — is on the mental health system that left Kelly out on the street and didn't provide him with the treatment that could have prevented this horror," she said. "I hope we can develop a collective memory and recognize the tragedy that we have caused."

As far as Jacobs is concerned the Fullerton Six are blameless in this matter and the real culprit is some mysterious "mental health system" that apparently creeps through the night like a phantom demon causing all sorts of mayhem.

In interviews, advocates said the beating death and its recording could fuel meaningful reform — in mental health funding; in the use of coordinated, "wrap-around" social services; in persuading wary or defiant patients to consent to treatment; and, in particular, in the training of police officers to defuse encounters with the mentally ill.

This, of course, is what these mental health "advocates" are after. Forcing people into mental institutions, because what this article fails to explain - even while the L.A. Times has explained this elsewhere - is that Kelly Thomas did not want treatment:

Around the age of 20, Kelly Thomas was put into a mental hospital for the first time, but he did not like being confined, so Ron Thomas moved him into a board and care home for the mentally ill. He was fine if he took medications consistently, but he told his mother they made him tired and gave him nightmares, Cathy Thomas said. “Then he would stop taking his meds and he would leave the board and care houses and wander the streets,” she said.

Interestingly, the internet article linked stops way short of the printed article featured on the front page of the L.A. Times and then continues on page 9 with another title that reads: video focuses mental health debate. Here are some things the internet article linked leaves out:

But armed with a distrubing, crystaline recording of Thomas' beating, mental health advocates are pushing for systematic reform -- even in an age of shrinking budgets.

"It should be evident to anybody that this man need not have died," said Randall Hagar, director of government affairs at the California Psychiatric Assn.

For instance, mental health workers have demonstrated the resounding success of a style of therapy known as "whatever it takes" - founded in the notion that mental illness is typically accompanied by physical illness, poverty, and other problems. These programs have languished because of funding deficiencies. Some advocates said the Thomas case could resurrect the effort to force institutions shouldering the burden of that frayed safety net, such as hospitals to pay for the fix.

Of course, "whatever it takes" is poorly defined in this article, so much so that one could reasonably argue that the Fullerton Six actually did employ a "whatever it takes" therapy on Kelly Thomas. Regardless, it shameful and inexcusable that mental health "advocates" are partnering with a metropolitan newspaper to obfuscate facts in a desperate attempt to gain funding and more draconian control over those deemed mentally unfit.

All those police should go to prison. I found the video to be a documented murder, not a beating

reply to post by Jean Paul Zodeaux


NEVER let a good crisis go to waste.
Now is the time, while folks care...
Sad but true.

reply to post by Jean Paul Zodeaux


What can we do to help with this case? My first instinct on this case is the Mexican Cop was not even legal in this country. He may have used false id to gain employment. Is there anyone on this website to look into this? This Mexican Cop was just waiting to kill a poor white man, you can see this by his behavior.

Second issue, I am getting sick and tired of people calling others Mental! I do not feel like this man was mental. The guy was homeless and needed clothes and a hair cut. Why was he even on the street homeless? From information I read the victims dad use to work for the Sheriff Department.

Do you know how many people are diagnosed with mental illness and nothing is wrong with them! Did you know if you have ever been thrown into a mental hospital in the United States that they put you in a database with The Department of Health and Human Services with people that have Aids and have been put in drug treatment programs. Do you realize how much money our health care system makes off a person that is thrown into a mental hospital. The average rate per day is 1000 to 2000 a day. Do you know how much Medicaid Fraud is committed by hospitals by messing with the coding in treatments. Do you know these victims are forced to take medication without even knowing the side effects. Do you know that you lose all of youre civil rights when you are forced into a hospital. Did you know that the Police can beat youre door down and illegally break into your home and dragg you away to a hospital where you are going to be tortured! Did you know that any fool can make things up on someone and take out Involuntary Committment papers and destroy someones life forever!

Check out Citizens Commision on Human Rights out of California

My poor 17 year old child is being held in a mental hospital in Raleigh, NC and he is not Mental! I just got off the phone with him and he told me that he had already asked for an attorney, but it would be next week before he could see them. He told me that they were abusing him but would not tell me how. My child sounds like he has been overmedicated! I have done everything in my power to have him released. My child said that a doctor Childers is abusing him at Holly Hills Hospital in Raleigh, NC..Can you guys get someone outside of that hospital to investigate where the children are being held. All I can do is go to work everyday and do what I can without having an attorney.

A month ago, on April 8th of 2012, The Los Angeles Times wrote another propaganda piece titled: Task force seeks to change California's mental health commitment law. Here is the first paragraph:

A homeless man plagued by schizophrenia is beaten to death by police in Fullerton. A man from Fort Bragg fixates on aliens for years while denying he is ill, then kills two men before dying in a gunfight with law enforcement. A Nevada County mental health client who had refused additional care storms into a clinic and kills three workers.

Lumping the sweet nature of Kelly Thomas with two other "schizophrenics" who both killed people, the L.A. Times shamelessly smears Kelly Thomas for no better reason than to push forth a "commitment" agenda that would force people into mental institutions.

The Aliso Viejo Patch pushes the same agenda and willingly distorts the facts this way:

The death of Kelly Thomas, a schizophrenic homeless man, following a violent confrontation with police in Fullerton garnered national attention this month as grainy footage from security cameras and witness cell phones surfaced.

Countless articles from across the country, including Wikipedia claim that Kelly Thomas was a "diagnosed schizophrenic":

Kelly Thomas was born April 5, 1974 to Ron Thomas, a former Orange County Sheriff's deputy,[7] and Cathy Thomas.[8] A diagnosed schizophrenic, he was a "fixture" among Fullerton's homeless population.

Wikipedia, however, is citing another article printed by the Los Angeles Times and round and round we go declaring Kelly Thomas a "diagnosed schizophrenic" but who the hell diagnosed him as such? And, by the way, just what the hell is schizophrenia? The National Center for Biotechnology Information in their PubMed Health Section state:

Schizophrenia is a complex mental disorder that makes it difficult to:

Tell the difference between real and unreal experiences

Think logically

Have normal emotional responses,

Behave normally in social situations

Of course, no one can reasonably tell from 30 minutes of video footage and audio recordings whether Kelly Thomas is a schizophrenic or not, however outside of the "I sleep in trashcans" remark made early on by Thomas, the transcripts reveal a lucid man who appears to be able to clearly differentiate between real and unreal experiences, appears to be quite logical, with normal emotional responses and quite frankly, given the circumstances, is behaving quite normally in this social situation. It is the police officers who appear to have a problem telling the difference between real and unreal experiences, unable to think logically, with abnormal emotional responses, behaving quite abnormally in this social situation. So, I ask again, who the hell diagnosed Kelly Thomas as schizophrenic?

PubMed Health continues with their explanation of schizophrenia:

Schizophrenia is a complex illness. Mental health experts are not sure what causes it. However, genetic factors appear to play a role.

Of course, many mental health experts are not sure about much, and cannot even agree on whether schizophrenia is actually a real disease. Psychiatrists and psychologists, such as R.D. Laing, David L. Rosenhan, Ronald Leifer, Theodore R. Sarbin, James C. Mancuso and Thomas Szasz have all been very vocal in their criticisms of how schizophrenia is diagnosed, whether it is actually a mental illness, and have been critical of psychiatry in general. Szasz calls schizophrenia "the sacred symbol of psychiatry" and explains the problems this way: ""Mental illness" is an expression, a metaphor that describes an offending, disturbing, shocking, or vexing conduct, action, or pattern of behavior, such as schizophrenia, as an "illness" or "disease"..."If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; If you talk to the dead, you are a schizophrenic."

The jury should still be pondering the question of psychiatry's efficacy, even as a jury is called to ponder the guilt of two Fullerton police officers who have - in spite of overwhelming evidence against them - plead not guilty to the charges against them.

I don't have words for how these officers treated this man. Daily me and other officers I work with deal with psych patients. Such an over the top response would not be considerred. There are restraint techniques that should have been used and weren't. They also failed to employ the taser when they were supposed to and instead went to batons.

Every officer I have shown the video to has said, "some people should never be cops." I feel saddened and sickened by this event and pray peace for Mr. Thomas' soul and his family.

I am mixed on the use of this by mental health advocates. There does need to be more support for the mentally infirmed. However, some people will function harmlessly outside of the institutions and medication. We need a better social net for these people, but guys like Thomas can function fairly well in the world and harm no one.

reply to post by Jean Paul Zodeaux


The thing is that these type of patients can go months or years without a break. So, he may have been pretty much "normal" that night. Many of the more lucid ones will even feel the break coming and head to the police or hospital on their own. There are different levels of the disease. Some live their whole lives with only mild disurbance.

From the video it seems like he was showing mild symptoms, but nothing that would be seen as threatening. Why were the police called on Thomas in the first place?

reply to post by Jean Paul Zodeaux


Who was the guy from Fort Bragg? This is important, I want to research this.

reply to post by Jean Paul Zodeaux

nice catch JP,

the DSM also known as The Big Book of Mental Illness is a tool of political and social control. it's definitions always change to suit the political tides.

Is Schizophrenia Really a Black Disease? bigthink.com...

Who decides what "insane" means? This was the major question of Ken Kesey's countercultural classic "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," which illustrated how mental illness could be deployed by the establishment to crush the individual. But a recent book by University of Michigan psychiatry professor Jonathan Metzl suggests that Kesey's novel might not have been far from non-fiction. In "The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease," Metzl documents the shifting interpretations of schizophrenia through the 20th century, tracing its evolution from a "white middle-class woman's disease" to an "African-American man's disease." Specifically, with the political upheaval of the civil rights movement, popular culture began to associate angry black men with schizophrenia, which in turn influenced the way doctors interpreted and diagnosed the illness.
***
"In particularly the early 1920s, 1930s, 1940s when the idea of schizophrenia itself was first coming to the United States from Europe there was a general assumption that persons who suffered from schizophrenia were either shy or calm or they were geniuses," Metzl says. "It was often represented as an illness that afflicted white novelists or poets and as I say, these were very often in popular and psychiatric representation assumed to be white people." But during the massive societal upheavals in the middle of century, ideas of sanity and insanity took on new meaning. "All of a sudden in the 1960s, American culture, newspapers, magazines, movies start to represent angry African-American men as in part being inflicted with a new form of this particular illness," and this change in popular perception of the disease directly influenced the clinical definition of it, Metzl argues. "All of a sudden in 1968, the second version of the Diagnostic Manual comes out and there is new language that says 'aggression, hostility, projection.'" The image of a schizophrenic person was all of a sudden more violent and unstable than the schizophrenic of 20 years before.

The practical consequences of this popular-cum-clinical shift in perception was that in the 1960s far more African-American men were institutionalized in psychiatric wards with schizophrenia. "Some had committed crimes, some had participated in civil rights protests, some had been participants in urban riots at the time. They all passed through various forms of the penal system and ended up diagnosed with schizophrenia and locked in the psychiatric wards," says Metzl. But were these men really schizophrenic? Or were they victims of shifting clinical definitions of disease, one that was prone to metaphoric interpretation?

How Schizophrenia Became a "Black Disease" bigthink.com...

not to mention questioning the state as grounds for "treatment" in the former USSR and other nasty political systems

yes there's money in being able to lock people up in institutions
yet i feel there's much more to it as this dovetails neatly with the War against the Poor and homeless

Originally posted by DerepentLEstranger
Santa Barbara seeks to turn the tables on the homeless

Using $50,000 in redevelopment funds, the city is planning to turn 14 benches perpendicular to the State Street storefronts they now face. The idea is to make it more difficult for beggars to establish contact with passersby, officials said. "They'll be sitting with their backs to half the people coming and going on the sidewalk," said Marck Aguilar, a supervisor for the city's redevelopment agency. "They'll have half the potential contacts with the public. It might not be financially beneficial for them."

there was $50,000 to spare for this "slap in the face to the homeless".

why is there always money for wars, scanners,bailouts [when dogs are much better ,like in Israel]special projects and other crap, but never any money to help the homeless, for the benefit of the taxpayers or create jobs [I know. rhetorical question]

$50,000 to turn 14 benches around and give the finger to homeless people.
this same mentality will eventually devolve into outright/overtly violent solutions, for now it's still covert violence.

ultimately it's about shareholder values and raising the real estate prices
all those homeless and po' folk are a threat to profits.
looks like yet another tool to clear the streets of undesirables and raise property values. proof of this is the inhuman arguments being used by some against the deceased

reply to post by MikeNice81


Thank you for your input, Brother. I cannot even imagine how difficult this must be for you and other good cops forced to confront a situation like this. How can any good cop even sleep at night knowing that - at the very least some of them - are deep within enemy lines forced to share trenches with the enemy and call them brothers? How many good cops have simply just walked away from law enforcement because they can no longer stomach the culture thrust upon them? How does anyone safely walk that precarious thin blue line?

In terms of the mentally ill, I think there are plenty of people who do suffer from mental illness and would gladly take the warm bed and hot meals an institution could offer, and I am all for re-evaluating our current policies on funding mental institutions - even if I am a hard assed conservative - but I am not at all in support of forcing any person against their will into any institution until they have shown themselves to a genuine threat to others. By all accounts Kelly Thomas was not threat to anyone, including himself. Conversely, by most recent accounts the six Fullerton police officers were undeniably a threat to others.

I understand that your own personal experience has given you a view of mentally ill people that most probably don't understand, and I do understand that Kelly Thomas may have at some later date become a threat to others if his reported "illness" got worse, but of course, we will never know because of the police officers who were, on the night of the 5th of July, quite clearly and undeniably a threat to others.

In your post below the one I am responding to you ask the pointed question as to why the Police were called and brought to Kelly Thomas that night. The claim early on was that an "anonymous caller" called complaining of someone breaking into/vandalizing vehicles near by. No evidence of this call has been revealed to this date, and no evidence on Kelly Thomas that night to suggest he was doing anything to merit being questioned by police to begin with. There appears to be no reasonable cause what-so-ever in this matter, and of course, there is the audio text of Manuel Ramos declaring: "It seems like everyday we have to talk to you about something, do you enjoy it?" To the best of my knowledge, Kelly Thomas does not have any criminal record, however the California police of many cities, particularly Los Angeles have a long record of harassing homeless people for no good reason at all. Consider just one case Jones v. Los Angeles, where the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals scold the L.A. City Attorneys:

As a practical matter, it is questionable how homeless individuals would either know that they could assert a necessity defense or have the wherewithal to hire an attorney who might so advise them, particularly after being arrested, serving jail time, and losing their belongings.   The argument that at trial a homeless individual would have recourse to a necessity defense so as to avoid conviction begs the question why the City arrests homeless individuals during nighttime in the first place, other than out of indifference or meanness.  

And round and round we go...

Mike, I get that being a police officer is a very difficult job, and having to deal with mentally ill people only makes it all the more difficult, but this is the deal with law enforcement, is it not? The fact that there are people like you willing to step up and do the hard job means you should be hailed as heroes and not overshadowed by the villains who stain the badge, and treat their oath of office with contempt.

those police officers should all be given a pat on the back.
they didnt do anything wrong.
if anything, they were overly nice.

The things that bother me most is the attitude that if you believe that aliens exist, you're mentally ill.

I guess they're going from the standpoint that if you go against the crowd you're mentally ill.

How disheartening.

America was founded on freedom of thought. This is certainly the thought police in action.

I don't see how this is harmful, either to themselves or to others, if you believe in something different. It may be irrational, but there's nothing that says you don't have the right to be irrational.

As long as they aren't truly hurting people, it shouldn't matter what a person believes.

I wish people would learn to mind their own business and let people be instead of worrying about what others believe, and let people believe what they want to believe.

This is sheer conformity,

Frak conformity.

Originally posted by Apollo7
reply to post by Jean Paul Zodeaux

 

Who was the guy from Fort Bragg? This is important, I want to research this.

His name is Aaron Bassler:

Suspected killer's family and mental health advocates say the fugitive should have been compelled to undergo psychiatric evaluation and treatment years ago. They are pressing for changes now.

He was shot seven times and killed six miles east of Fort Bragg.

Originally posted by lacrimosa
those police officers should all be given a pat on the back.
they didnt do anything wrong.
if anything, they were overly nice.

Too bad you weren't there at the time, you could patted them on the back as they murdered Kelly Thomas. I am sure they would have understood your intent and appreciated you support, as sane as they were and all.

Well, these two topics are not mutually exclusive. Yeah, those officers are disgusting and I wouldn't even call them human beings. That doesn't change the fact our mental health care system is pathetic. People are treated as worthless once they are diagnosed as mentally disabled like a schizophrenia. My mom had a nervous break down this past week and she is a RN and taught the EMS program at the hospital near here which was top 3 in the nation when she was teaching. She knows her shat. Well, you should hear the stories she told me. Just the mental abuse the nurses and social workers commit to patients or more aptly inmates is disturbing. All a nurse has to do is start saying stuff like why are you not cooperating or please calm down you are acting inappropriate and the doctors or other nurses immediately brush off the patient. Know what I'm tryin' to say there? The nurses have absolute power over these people and they cannot leave by order of law. It's like the 1920's in that place. I didn't want her to go there at all, but it wasn't my decision and was made without me knowing. There are very real shortcomings and much has to do with law enforcement in the first place. They criminalize everything and people who are mentally disturbed can sometimes come off as weird or wind up in awkward situations like naked in the front lawn. lol No crime being committed, yet instead of helping these people they are locked up and subjected to the scorn and obvious superiority complex the staff has over them. As I said, these two subjects are mutually exclusive from the point of your OP, but they are intimately linked in real life. Obviously, these officers deserve the freaking death penalty, in my opinion, since they often use others as "examples" through severe punishments to frighten the community. Well, frighten the police officers around the country by executing the main culprits and teach the cops that they are not above the law and do not own us. That said, the mental health policies of our country are severely lacking and are based in 1920's science. No need to say one or the other is responsible in this case as both are and the police officers are obviously at fault in this particular case and deserve severe punishment.

Kalifornia cops are out of control. They all need to take psychological exams and those that pass, need to take anger management classes.

reply to post by Jean Paul Zodeaux


Thank You! I will research.

reply to post by Jean Paul Zodeaux

no body was murdered, a schizophrenic homeless person died.
those police did nothing wrong. they were overly nice imo.
anyway, the outcome was positive.

I have been avoiding this video, it's heartbreaking that this is happening, every time I see a homeless person on the street, I think, there goes some mother child, there has to be a better way, why in this day and age isn't there a place for everyone?

Help for everyone,

There are abandoned homes all over our neighborhood,

He shouldn't have had to have died like this,

Originally posted by lacrimosa
reply to post by Jean Paul Zodeaux

 

no body was murdered, a schizophrenic homeless person died.
those police did nothing wrong. they were overly nice imo.
anyway, the outcome was positive.

Perhaps you could join Jay Cicinnelli and Manuel Ramos defense team while those two Fullerton police officers go to trial for murder and manslaughter, and you can explain to their jury in the same eloquence you do here how the outcome was positive.