Showing posts with label mentally ill. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mentally ill. Show all posts

Saturday, September 5, 2009

Police: "Possessed" Man Attacks Cop After Crashing Into Hospital

Police: "Possessed" Man Attacks Cop After Crashing Into Hospital

By CHRISTINE DEMPSEY

The Hartford Courant

September 5, 2009


SOUTHINGTON — - Saying he's the devil, a man who had just jumped out of a car he had driven into a hospital lobby early Friday attacked a local officer, police said.

The officer used a stun gun to get Matthew Dufresne under control. Dufresne, 31, of Bayberry Drive in Bristol, was charged with two counts of assault on a police officer, first-degree reckless endangerment, first-degree criminal mischief and interfering with an officer, police said.

The bizarre chain of events started at about 2:30 a.m., when a security guard at the Hospital of Central Connecticut at Bradley Memorial on Meriden Avenue saw a car driving erratically through the parking lot, Sgt. Lowell DePalma said.
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Possessed Man Attacks Cop After Crashing Into Hospital

Friday, October 31, 2008

Mentally ill deserve voting rights, advocates say

Mentally ill deserve voting rights, advocates say
Story Highlights
State advocates help those with mental disabilities register, vote

Critics say that allowing outsiders to help could influence votes

All but 11 states have laws limiting voting rights based on competence

Expert says mentally ill have more at stake because they rely on government



RICHMOND, Virginia (AP) -- Clyde Hoy has missed only one election. It was 2002, and the manic depression he had battled for nearly 20 years had taken hold again, landing him in a state psychiatric hospital.

"I wanted to vote, but I felt that I didn't have any right at all," said the 48-year-old. "I asked, and nobody gave me an answer. There wasn't an option."

Advocates are working to change that with a nationwide effort to make sure those with mental disabilities know their rights and exercise them on Election Day.
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http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/31/mentally.ill.voting.ap/index.html

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Woman Accused of Iraq Ties Is Ruled Unfit for Trial Again

Woman Accused of Iraq Ties Is Ruled Unfit for Trial Again
By BENJAMIN WEISER
Published: September 16, 2008
A federal judge in Manhattan has ruled that Susan P. Lindauer, a former journalist and Congressional aide who was accused of working with Iraqi intelligence before the war, is still mentally incompetent to stand trial.

Ms. Lindauer, who had been declared incompetent for trial by Judge Michael B. Mukasey, now the United States attorney general, tried to persuade a different judge that she was now competent.

But the second judge, Loretta A. Preska of Federal District Court, ruled late Monday that while Ms. Lindauer was “highly intelligent” and “generally capable of functioning at a high level in many ways,” she also was suffering from a mental disease or defect.

As a result, the judge said, Ms. Lindauer was “unable to understand the nature and consequences of the proceedings against her or to assist properly in her defense.”

Ms. Lindauer, 45, pleaded not guilty to the charges against her, which include acting as an unregistered agent of Saddam Hussein’s government and engaging in illegal financial transactions with the Iraqi government.

Ms. Lindauer, who lives in a Washington suburb and remains free on bond, said by phone on Tuesday: “I am disgusted and horrified by the decision. The right to a trial is fundamental in a democracy. I have been fighting for a trial because I am innocent and I believe I have the right to prove my innocence.”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/17/nyregion/17lindauer.html?ref=nyregion

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Video Shows Patient Dying on Floor

Video Shows Patient Dying on Floor
AP
Posted: 2008-07-01 12:35:02
Filed Under: Law News, Nation News
NEW YORK (July 1) - Video from a surveillance camera at a Brooklyn, N.Y., hospital shows a woman dying on the floor of a psychiatric emergency-room while people nearby ignore her.

The video was released Monday by lawyers suing Kings County Hospital alleging neglect and abuse of mental health patients at the facility.
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The video is posted on the side bar of this blog.

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Mystery deepens about homeless man

Mystery deepens about homeless man on bench at Friendly Center
Sunday, Jun. 15, 2008 3:00 am
To thousands of motorists passing by him daily at Friendly Center, he was a street person on a bench, a man who appeared one day in 2001 and left just as abruptly in mid-May.

To Kimberly Bono, however, Mark Hoffmann is more than that. He is her father, and the last time she saw him was in 1989. She was 8.

"He was taking us back to my mom's house, and he was crying," Bono, 27, recalled of Hoffmann's last joint-custody visit with her and two younger sisters. "I don't know if he left for noble reasons, or if he realized the mental illness was taking over. I never saw him again, and all this time, I wondered what happened to him."

Bono, a technical writer who lives in Stroudsburg, Pa., with a husband and newborn daughter, said she was therefore "flabbergasted" when a relative back in North Carolina recently sent her a News & Record story.

The details matched what she knew about her father, now 51 — his date of birth, the spelling of his name, the fact that he graduated from Lehigh University and had been an accountant at Duke. All doubt was removed when Bono sent family photographs.

Though the man in the pictures looks more than 20 years younger — especially without the raw, weathered look of seven winters and summers outdoors — he has the same strawberry-blond hair and bright blue eyes.

The revelation that her father had been in plain sight for so many years, just an hour from where she grew up, held mixed emotions for Bono.

Was he, then, homeless "by choice"?

"Choice denotes rational thought," said McGee, who shares Haworth's concern for the potential danger and the physical toll chronic homelessness has taken on Hoffmann. "It's already telling. Look how old he looks already."


go here for more

http://www.news-record.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?
AID=/20080615/NRSTAFF/817984475/-1/news1802

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

UK another murder on mentally handicapped innocent

Deborah Orr: We must protect disabled people against this wave of barbaric and hateful crimes
He died in his mother's arms, so badly beaten that his uncle did not at first recognise his face

Wednesday, 30 January 2008


Brent Martin's story should, and could, have been a story of quiet success. The 23-year-old had struggled in his short life with his learning difficulties, and those struggles more than once had become so serious that he had been compelled to spend long periods in psychiatric hospitals. Even a generation ago, such a history might have condemned a young man to an institutionalised life. But we are more enlightened now, in theory at least.


Martin, released in spring of last year into the care of his family, was recognised as a man who was quite capable of living independently, supporting himself through work, paying his taxes, living and loving like the equal member of a civilised society that he was, or should have been. In August last year, he was winning. He was about to start a new job as a landscape gardener, about to move into a flat and live on his own for the first time, and enjoying the time that he spent with his girlfriend.

Then, on 23 August, he was chased for a mile and a half through two estates in Sunderland. Repeatedly, he was set upon by 21-year-old William Hughes, and two boys of 16 and 17. Between them – they had trained as boxers – they bet £5 that one of them could knock him out with their fists. Their attacks got more frenzied until they started kicking Brent, and stamping on him. They removed his lower clothing, at the end, and took photographs of their bloodied selves to mark the occasion.

Brent died in his mother's arms of a massive head injury. He had been so badly beaten that his uncle did not at first recognise his face. Hughes and the 16-year-old admitted murder, while the 17-year-old was found guilty of murder at Newcastle Crown Court last week, after telling witnesses that "he was not going down for a muppet". All three have been warned that they face mandatory life imprisonment, when sentencing takes place next month.




Practical counter-measures are needed when such additional stresses are being perpetrated against already vulnerable people in such a widespread manner. The advances that have been made towards the full participation of disabled people in everyday life are still fragile, and they need to be defended. A concentrated effort to reduce the barbaric lack of stigma around such a cowardly form of criminality is absolutely essential.

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It doesn't matter what country you live in because it happens here too. Remember the homeless people killed here in Orlando and other parts of the country. Why do they do it?

Thursday, September 20, 2007

Mentally Ill Woman in Wheel Chair Shot With Taser Gun Ten Times Within Minutes

A Clay County woman's family said it's seeking justice after their loved one died shortly after being shocked 10 times with Taser guns during a confrontation with police.

The family of 56-year-old Emily Delafield said it would take the Green Cove Springs Police Department to court, according to a WJXT-TV report.

In April 2006, officers with the police department said they were called to a disturbance at a home in the 400 block of Harrison Street just before 5 p.m.

In a 911 call made to the Green Cove Springs, Delafield can be heard telling a dispatcher that she believed she was in danger:

Dispatcher: And what's the problem?

Delafield: My sister is waiting on my property.

Dispatcher: Your what?

Delafield: My sister (inaudible) is on my property trying to harm me.

Officers said they arrived to find Delafield in a wheelchair, armed with two knives and a hammer. Police said the woman was swinging the weapons at family members and police.

Within an hour of her call to 911, Delafield, a wheelchair-bound woman documented to have mental illness, was dead.

Family attorney Rick Alexander said Delafield's death could have been prevented and that there are four things that jump out at him about the case.

"One, she's in a wheelchair. Two, she's schizophrenic. Three, they're using a Taser on a person that's in a wheelchair, and then four is that they tasered her 10 times for a period of like two minutes," Alexander said.
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