Officials must be vigilant to help mentally ill…
Officials must be vigilant to help mentally ill students
By Editorial, Jeff Mcmenemy and Jack Mcmenemy |
PUBLISHED: April 22, 2007 at 12:00 a.m. | UPDATED: July 12, 2019 at 12:00 a.m.
When I first heard about the gunman at Virginia Tech who shot and killed 32 people, I instantly thought about Wendell Williamson.
Williamson is a former UNC-Chapel Hill law school student who went on a shooting rampage in January 1995 in downtown Chapel Hill.
He shot and killed two people, and wounded a Chapel Hill police officer before another police officer shot him and ended the ordeal before he made his way to a busier thoroughfare.
Carrying an M1-rifle and loaded with ammunition, Williamson, a paranoid schizophrenic who had stopped taking his medication, believed he was telepathic and people were either trying to kill him or steal his telepathic abilities.
I was a younger journalist at the time working in the Chapel Hill bureau for the Durham Herald-Sun and covered Williamson's shooting spree and his trial, where a jury quickly found him not guilty of murder by reason of insanity.
Since the trial, Williamson has appeared on "60 Minutes," written a book about his disease, successfully sued his former doctor for not taking better care of him and wandered away from Dorothea Dix Hospital in Raleigh, N.C., where he is being held.
The police officer who shot Williamson and ultimately stopped him from killing anyone else, once told me in an interview that he knew he had to stop the shooter before he got to Franklin Street, which is the main drag in Chapel Hill, or the death toll would have gotten much higher.
Officials at Virginia Tech weren't so lucky.
Seung-Hui Cho, the 23-year-old gunman, was able to kill 32 people before he turned the gun on himself.
Quite rightly, there has been a ton of speculation about the killings, including about the killer's access to the small but powerful handguns he used to kill 32 of his fellow students, the college's handling of the emergency and Cho's motives for the slayings.
But the thing that connects the two cases for me is the fact that two different students suffering from severe mental illness — both had been hospitalized for treatment — were allowed to continue going to classes and walking around freely on campus right up to the time they started killing people.
In both cases, school and mental health officials had numerous chances to intercede, but did not take the steps necessary to protect the innocent students or get the help both Williamson and Cho clearly needed.
Williamson, an Eagle Scout and former high school class president, got to the point before his shooting rampage where he'd walk into bars in Chapel Hill, sit alone and talk and yell as he carried on conversations with himself.
During Williamson's trial, his defense attorneys played an audio tape of Williamson's confession to police, something that is rarely done because it helps prosecutors prove their case.
But anyone who heard the tape will no doubt tell you that Williamson was insane when he went on the shooting spree.
When a police officer suggested helpfully that Williamson showed some concern for people walking the streets and didn't want to kill just anyone, Williamson angrily interrupted and said with chilling and unwavering conviction that he had to kill "everyone" because they were trying to steal his telepathic powers.
All of us in the media and the public in general like to try to find some reason or motive when something like this happens.
But the truth is that if Cho was truly mentally ill at the time of the shootings, and his committal lends credence to that, there's likely no reason in the killer's malfunctioning mind that we would understand.
People with severe mental illness do not think clearly. Their brains are not working and when they have access to guns and large groups of people, tragedy can result.
Some may be tempted to score political points with the tragedy, but the only clear lesson that can be learned from the killings is that college and mental health professionals must do everything they can to get sick individuals the help they need, and to protect innocent students.
But even then, they are dealing with an inexact science, because they are dealing with human beings, even if they're terribly sick and dangerous ones.
Jeff Mcmenemy
Jack Mcmenemy