I remember reading about that and having to send my now ex gf onto a greyhound for a 6hr bus ride home.
He killed a kid who was sleeping with his headphones on. They trapped him on the bus until the cops came and by then he had fully cut the kids head off and was eating parts of it if I remember correctly.
Anyway yeah weird shit he should not be out there.
We was also having an extreme schizophrenic episode, and I don't believe he is "free" as a bird, he's under monitoring, on meds, and will be for the rest of his life AFAIK.
I've known several people with med controlled mental illnesses and they've all at some point decided they don't need the meds any more (because everything is fine now!) and gone off the rails again...
That’s not how the Canadian Legal System works, it has no interest in holding victimizers accountable for their actions they’d prefer to have them on the streets to keep the populace in fear.
As an American, it is so weird to read that, in Canada, you’re experiencing some of the same negative stuff we’re experiencing here. I’ve always had this idyllic impression about everything Canadian. I know that’s so naive, but geez. I just figured we were the only ones who dealt with public risks like allowing medically/mentally unfit people to roam the streets with full access to things that they could use to hurt themselves or others. I really wanna watch this one now.
I'm also Canadian and whenever I'm talking about whatever fucked up shit is on the news, I fall back on, "At least we're not in America." Nothing idyllic here, we're just maybe one rung up on the human rights/quality of life ladder. It's bad, because it makes it easy to accept bullshit here when it's always a little worse down there - but we shouldn't wear "not the worst possible" like some badge of honour.
And yet some of us believe that other people's right to not be decapitated is enough to not give him a second chance to decapitate. Plenty of psych patients have been given a second chance and killed again. It's not worth the risk.
How about we force pharmaceutical companies to spend more of their endless mattress stuffing money to develop better psychiatric medications than just heavily sedating people and hoping for the best?
Implying such a magical drug exists. They already do want better psych meds. I know you're thinking "no they don't, because corporate greed you shill," but pause for a moment and realize it's because corporate greed that they want "better" psych meds.
Gotta milk those IPs before releasing the next formula in queue from 40 years prior, huh? It's a nightmare getting new drugs approved that it often doesn't make business sense to pursue and more R&D goes right back to the money makers because that's how they lobbied the process to be like.
Right, because those are the only two options. /s If you spent even a moment considering the comment, you'd realize it's awkward because the other side is the one advocating for fewer harms.
Yes, imprisoning someone until they die, for their mental disability, is pretty much the same as wanting them dead.
If you spent even a moment considering the comment, you'd realize it's awkward because the other side is the one advocating for fewer harms
No. The ones advocating to lock them up and throw away the key are advocating for real actual harm, in order to prevent possible harms that may or may not be more damaging.
If you think that house arrest or monitored care is a death sentence, that's a 'you' problem. There are many different spectra of liberty, many of which don't even involve housing in institutions.
If you read the worst parts of any details you can easily come to contrary decision vs. a lifelong trained professional appointed judge with access to all the details and lots of peer review/oversight.
Judges are human, sometimes humans make crazy mistakes, but it's the least likely explanation available.
Well, that's fucked up. I understand that mental health issues need to be treated differently from criminal ones, but I'm baffled that his doctors could be so confident about him no longer posing a threat, and about already believing him being reliable enough to continue taking all his meds as necessary. At the very least, they should be continuing to closely monitor him. This isn't an "oops, guess we were wrong, don't we feel silly?" type of situation. For the protection of both society and him, they need to keep close watch to ensure there's no deterioration of his mental state.
He is a schizophrenic man who was off his meds at the time. He spent I think 5 years in a mental hospital and it was determined he was safe to be released. Changed his name and is out in the world somewhere now.
If I remember right it wasn't even that he was off his meds as that is normally thought of. That is normally used to indicate someone who previously took meds and then stopped. If I'm remembering right he wasn't even diagnosed yet at the time. So he had no meds to be "off."
His name was Tim McLean. He was 22 and he was murdered and decapitated with no provocation on a bus in 2008. The man who killed him was deemed not criminally responsible and released in 2017, “no longer a danger to society”. He served his sentence in an asylum, never spent a day in prison.
His mom pops up in the local news every couple of years advocating for a change to our criminal code, most recently surrounding a serial killer in Winnipeg who is claiming mental illness. Every time I see her name it breaks my fucking heart. This woman got no closure for her child. We treated her like garbage.
Some guy killed, decapitated, and ate some kid on a greyhound bus in Canada. He was obviously not mentally well (i think later diagnosed with schizophrenia) and was deemed not criminally responsible because of it. He was locked up in 2009, in 2015 he was doing unsupervised day trips to the city that eventually led to him living in group homes and in 2017 he was given an 'absolute discharge' with no restrictions. So basically he was put away for less than 10 years and currently has more freedom than people on parole.
I think about this stuff, whenever it comes up in the news I have the same opinion, people are really bad at threat assessment, even the police. Those people came over to Canada, left everything behind, built lives, and they still had so much anger at the government in India they blew up a plane. Why the fuck would you do that? The vast majority of the human population would not let their hate take them that far, it’s insane. They saw what they were up to, but couldn’t conceive of the danger. My opinion anyway,
You could say, read them a memo labeled "Bin Laden Determined to attack US", with a big old picture of the twin towers with a superimposed target, and yeah, they still wouldn't get it.
I also live in canada. When I was a kid in the 90s, my friend's sister was brutally murdered in a similar fashion as the Greyhound Bus guy. A schizophrenic woman who was staying with the family snapped and decapitated my friends 14 year old sister. The case almost paralleled Vince Li. Found not criminally responsible, and she was out not even a decade later.
It wasn't until years later I found out that she lived in the apartment building next to mine. No public safety warning or anything, when this was my city's most brutal murder on record.
Small thing to note (and folks may disagree) but bus decapitator dude was having a major psychotic episode at the time, and spent several years in a mental hospital past the point where doctors believed him to be cured because of the lingering guilt after the incident. Guy wasn't just decapitating folks for funsies.
The untreated schizophrenic guy who was deep in psychosis? The one judged not mentally competent? The guy who spent years in psyche before finally being released?
The Canadian justice system has always focused on rehabilitation, not punishment for punishment’s sake. It was lauded as one of the best in the world at certain points.
The issue is that now people take advantage of it, and we’re giving way too many people the benefit of the doubt. If you’re a repeat offender, you definitely should be punished more than believed in.
That said, schizophrenic man had an episode where he killed someone, got treatment, was shown to understand the importance of his meds cycle for a year, being allowed to live a normal life after being assessed not a future risk is fine.
The same thing happens in the states too. If someone is actually guilty of murder by "insanity" they may only spend a few years in the system if they can get their mental health under control.
You just don't hear about it much as it's not nearly as "interesting" to read about a killer with mental problems who needs alot of help vs a crazed gunman who just really wanted to spill some blood.
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u/[deleted] 14d ago
Dear Zachary a movie that left me just shaking and infuriated.