In a blog yesterday, a clinical psychologist named Blair Kilpatrick writes, "In the aftermath of the tragedy in Arizona, I watched as the portrait of Jared Loughner, the alleged assailant, began to emerge. It was predictable and painful. Another young man, whose gradual psychological deterioration appeared to have been recognized but apparently not treated, had allegedly erupted in a horrifying display of violence.
"Although it doesn't require a professional to recognize that Loughner appeared to be seriously disturbed, those of us who work in the mental health field are more likely than most to understand the troubling reality about treatment.
"Even with clear signs of psychosis, it is very difficult to force someone to get help. In most states, the requirements for civil commitment are stringent: The patient must present a clear danger to self or others. Some states add "gravely disabled" to the list, but this requires more than just evidence of psychosis.
"Loughner's descent into psychosis did not go unnoticed. His instructor and classmates at the community college he attended said they feared that he might become violent. Still, nothing I have read about his behavior suggests that there would have been grounds for his involuntary commitment to a psychiatric facility. The experts have begun to weigh in and they seem to agree, even though Arizona turns out to have less restrictive criteria for civil commitment than most states."
She goes on to recall the landmark Tarasoff case:
Tarasoff and Beyond: Legal and Clinical Considerations in the Treatment of Life-Endangering Patients (Practitioner's Resource Series)
The Potentially violent patient and the Tarasoff decision in psychiatric practice (Clinical insights)
17 Cal.3d 425, 551 P.2d 334, 131 Cal.Rptr. 14, 83 A.L.R.3d 1166
View Cal./Cal.App. version
Supreme Court of California
Vitaly TARASOFF et al., Plaintiffs and Appellants,
v.
The REGENTS OF the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA et al., Defendants and Respondents.
S.F. 23042.
July 1, 1976.
Action was brought against university regents, psychotherapists employed by university hospital and campus police to recover for murder of plaintiffs' daughter by psychiatric patient. The Superior Court, Alameda County, Robert L. Bostick, J., sustained demurrers without leave to amend, and plaintiffs appealed. The Supreme Court, Tobriner, J., held that when a psychotherapist determines, or pursuant to the standards of his profession should determine, that his patient presents a serious danger of violence to another he incurs an obligation to use reasonable care to protect the intended victim against such danger, that discharge of such duty may require the therapist to take one or more of various steps, depending on the nature of the case, that complaint could be amended to state cause of action against the therapists, to whom patient confided his intentions to kill plaintiffs' daughter, on theory of failure to warn, that therapists were entitled to statutory immunity from liability for failure to bring about patient's confinement but that plaintiffs pled no special relationship between the patient and the police defendants which would impose on them any duty to warn the daughter or other appropriate individuals and that the police were also entitled to statutory immunity for failure to confine the patient.
Tarasoff was talked about a lot after the 2007 VTU campus massacre. At that time I penned a series of articles examining past tragedies perpetrated by madmen. I too talked about Tarasoff:
Legal liability for the Virginia Tech massacre: Inquiry questions Cho’s mental-health care history
Jim Castagnera
Part 4 in a series
The panel investigating the Virginia Tech massacre met for the first time on Thursday, May 10th. Present was no less a political light than Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, who commented that “we owe it to the victims” to learn all there is to know about the tragedy. He charged the eight-member commission, chaired by retired State Police Superintendent W. Gerald Massengill, to learn all it can about, among other things, the killer’s mental state and mental-health treatment.
Jim Castagnera
In 1966, as we saw in this series’ second installment, U.T. Austin’s resident shrink conducted a session with the tower sniper some three months before the troubled ex-marine climbed to the 28th floor observation deck and shot 45 passers-by. The doctor’s notes eerily reported the 25-year-old Whitman’s fantasy of shooting at people from the tower.
A decade later, in Tarasoff v. Regents of the University of California (551 P.2d 334), the California Supreme Court enunciated a duty-to-warn rule, which has been adopted over the past 30 years by much of the American common law. The decision established an obligation among mental-health professionals to warn the known, intended victim of a patient, doctor-patient privilege notwithstanding.
In 1995, the Virginia Supreme Court had occasion to consider the Tarasoff rule. In Nasser v. Parker (455 S.E.2d 502), the Commonwealth’s high court stated that “we disagree with the holding of Tarasoff that a doctor-patient relationship or a hospital-patient relationship alone is sufficient, as a matter of law, to establish a ‘special relation’” with the patient sufficient to fix liability upon the doctor who declines to warn. Under this Virginia precedent, the mental-health caregiver must “take charge” of the mentally ill individual in order to implicate duty-to-warn liability.
In the Virginia Tech killer’s case, reports indicate that police first investigated the future mass-murderer in November 2005, following up on another student’s harassment complaint. Cho was directed to the university’s Office of Judicial Affairs. The complainant declined to press charges, saying that Cho’s unwelcome attentions were merely annoying, not truly harassing.
A month later another female student filed a complaint against Cho with the VTPD. This time, after the campus police interviewed Cho, another student called to claim that Cho appeared to be suicidal. This call resulted in issuance of a detention order. The troubled young man was subsequently evaluated at Carilion St. Albans Behavioral Health, an independent mental-health facility. Following this counseling intervention, say police, they received no more student complaints about Cho.
Also in the fall of 2005, a Tech poetry professor had Cho removed from her class. Nikki Giovanni told the media she found the young man’s poetry so intimidating and his presence so menacing that, when two students who shared her anxiety stopped attending class, she moved to remove Cho. Describing Cho as “mean,” she told CNN, “I knew when it happened that that’s probably who it was.”
These facts beg the questions: In the fall of ’05 should Cho have been removed from more than just Giovanni’s poetry class? Should he have been kept in custody -- even institutionalized -- when he was taken to the mental-health facility?
A May 8th editorial in the Roanoke Times complains of “No Teeth in Mental Health Laws in Virginia.” The piece goes on to contend that Cho’s fall ’05 release from custody was inappropriate because he was diagnosed as “depressed and imminently dangerous.” In eerie emulation of the Texas psychiatrist’s suggestion that tower-sniper Whitman make an appointment for the following week, Cho was ordered to pursue outpatient treatment and then released. As with Whitman, Cho’s next appearance on the radar screen was gun in hand.
The ultimate question is whether on these facts Tech assumed any legal liability vis-a-vis Cho’s victims and their families in terms of a future wrongful-death action. Though the young man’s meanness and intimidating behavior in Professor Giovanni’s poetry class fit a profile of a potential menace to the campus community, profiling alone cannot form the basis of legal liability for the university. Indeed, whether profiling has any future in campus security is a problematic issue at best. (See the third installment in this series.)
Under the Virginia Supreme Court’s variant of the Tarasoff rule, Tech may well be found to have “taken charge” of Cho in 2005. Although he named no specific victims, whom Judicial Affairs and campus police could have warned, the Commonwealth’s courts may prove to be sympathetic to injured survivors or the parents of the deceased victims, who choose to sue. As with Ohio law after the Kent State shooting of 1970 (see this series’ first installment), the Commonwealth’s highest court ultimately may be called upon to determine whether such anticipated wrongful-death actions are capable of prevailing under Virginia common law.
In an earlier piece in the series I recalled Charles Joseph Whitman, who in 1966 killed a lot of people from the tower of the University of Texas in Austin. Whitman, too, had showed signs of being dangerously crazy before he acted:
Legal liability for the Virginia Tech massacre: Have reforms birthed by the U of Texas tower shootings made a difference?
Jim Castagnera
Part 2 in a series
In August 1981, just out of law school and fresh from a bar exam, I reported for duty as an assistant professor of business law at the University of Texas, Austin. Not long into the fall semester, I learned that when the Texas Longhorns won, the 307-foot tower dominating the campus glowed burnt-orange. As attractive as the tower was, I also soon learned that it was closed to visitors. By contrast, in 1966 the 28th floor observation deck hosted some 20,000 tourists annually. Here's why.
Jim Castagnera
On August 1, 1966, a 25-year-old ex-marine named Charles Joseph Whitman, having murdered wife and mother the night before, climbed the University of Texas tower and shot some 45 passers-by. He managed to kill 14, before being shot to death himself.
Addressing what went wrong before and during the tower massacre changed the way not only the University of Texas, but all of higher education, thinks about and tries to deal with dangerous people on our campuses.
Identifying and treating the mentally ill student
On March 29, 1966, Whitman - who was then a student at U.T. - was referred to Dr. M.D. Heatly on the university’s health center staff. Dr. Heatly opened his report, “This massive , muscular youth seemed to be oozing with hostility.” Whitman admitted “that he had on two occasions assaulted his wife physically.” He told Heatly that in the marines he’d been court-martialed for fighting. Most remarkably, Heatly recorded, “Repeated inquiries attempting to analyze his exact experiences were not too successful with the exception of his vivid reference to ‘thinking about going up on the tower with a deer rifle and start shooting people.’” The good doctor’s solution? “No medication was given to this youth at this time and he was told to make an appointment for the same day next week; and should he feel that he needs to talk to this therapist, he could call me at any time during the interval.”
Within days of the August 1 shootings, the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health, founded decades earlier on the U.T. campus, ramped up efforts to improve availability of services for psychologically troubled members of the campus community. Student-counseling services were expanded, including services aimed specifically at patients in “crisis situations.”
The university closed the tower for two years, then closed it again in 1975 following a series of sporadic suicide jumps from its heights.
Today, every campus has its counseling center and its policies on threats of violence and suicide. Yet costly, high profile lawsuits involving students’ violence toward themselves and others abound. Universities still struggle with responsibility for campus safety and the individual rights of students, specifically whether to treat or expel such students. And, as the VTU tragedy demonstrates, identification and prevention remain elusive goals.
From Keystone Kops to campus police departments
According to author Gary Lavergne, who wrote a book about the tower shootings, “The university (in 1966) had no real police department, only a few unarmed men who spent most of their time issuing parking permits.” Today, the U.T. System Police website states, “Our official creation as a police agency occurred in 1967 and was largely the result of a sniping incident on August 1, 1966 on the U.T. Austin campus.
During the 1967 session of the Texas Legislature, authorized the Lone Star State’s public colleges and universities to commission their security personnel as “peace officers.” Countless campuses across the country followed suit. For example, Philadelphia’s Temple University on the city’s dangerous north side boasts one of Pennsylvania’s largest police forces. Meanwhile, most U.S. cities similarly taking their lead from Austin, Texas have created SWAT teams.
Nonetheless, as the VTU tragedy bitterly attests, campus police and city SWAT teams are no magic shield, when pitted against a determined mass killer.
Texas tower redux
The U.T. Tower was once again reopened in late 1998, following $500,000-worth of renovations to prevent jumping. Tours today are sadly by appointment only.
In yet another piece in the series I ask whether profiling makes any sense:
Legal Liability for the Virginia Tech massacre: Is profiling worth considering?
Jim Castagnera
Part 3 in a series
When the police use profiling, it’s condemned as racist. When the customs service does it, it’s similarly assailed as discriminatory and unconstitutional. Still, it’s being done. Travel & Leisure magazine reported in January, “The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) recently began rolling out a new security program, Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT), at dozens of airports around the country.” Time magazine explained, “TSA employees will be trained to identify suspicious individuals who raise red flags by exhibiting unusual or anxious behavior, which can be as simple as changes in mannerisms, excessive sweating on a cool day, or changes in the pitch of a person's voice.” Although such techniques invariably arouse the ACLU, should colleges and universities consider adopting them?
Jim Castagnera
Before you answer, consider the case of Dawson College. On September 13, 2006, Kimveer Gill parked his car in downtown Montreal, removed a cache of weapons from the trunk, forced a passerby to carry his extra ammunition, and walked the short distance to the college’s campus. At the main building’s back entrance he opened fire on students standing on the steps. His hostage ran off with the extra ammunition as Gill entered the building and walked to the cafeteria, where he shot two students. Ordering the others in the room to lie on the floor, he fired randomly until police arrived. Taking two more hostages, he attempted to escape until, shot in the arm, he took his own life. The toll: one student dead, 19 more wounded.
Police later found Kimveer Gill’s profile posted on a website called VampireFreaks.com. In the accompanying photo he wears a black leather trench coat and sports a Beretta Cx4 Storm semi-automatic carbine, one of four guns he took to Dawson College. Visit VampireFreaks.com today and you can purchase “cyber-gothic clothing” on a related link called clothing@F---TheMainstream, and read featured interviews with “Velvet Acid Christ,” “Zombie Girl,” and “Grendel.” Gill’s own VampireFreaks screen name was “fatality 666.” His last login was at 10:35 AM on the day of the shootings.
In the aftermath of the Dawson College shootings, the so-called “Goth” subculture came under sharp attack in the media. Hardly a high school or a college on the North American continent is without its clique of Goth enthusiasts in their leather, chains, piercings, tattoos and bizarre hairstyles. Operators of Goth shops and websites found themselves defending the lifestyle and adamantly disavowing violence. Some expressed shock at the 55 graphically violent pictures posted on Gill’s VampireFreaks web page.
Gill also turned out to be a big fan of the video game “Super Columbine Massacre RPG.” Go to the game’s web site today and you’ll find this statement about the Virginia Tech massacre: “This week, the press is awash with stories about the shooting at Virginia Tech – the deadliest in recent history. Will we remember this tragedy in a week? In a month? In the years to follow? I certainly hope so. I hope we can learn from such sobering events as Virginia Tech, as Dawson College, Ehrfurt, Columbine and all the other horrific shootings modern society has endured. So often the potential for another shooting is just around the corner should we forget the lessons history has to offer us. This process of reevaluation, introspection, and a search for understanding is the value I believe my video game offers to those who play it.” The author, site owner Danny Ledonne is said to have vomited when he learned that Gill was a fan. Presumably Gill wasn’t participating for “reevaluation, introspection, and a search for understanding.”
VampireFreaks and Super Columbine Massacre persist on the web, despite their appeal to the Kimveer Gills out there. No one has definitively proven a clear cause-effect-relationship (albeit the Alabama Supreme Court last year reinstated a $600 million lawsuit against the makers of video game “Grand Theft Auto,” which the plaintiffs blame for the shooting deaths of two police officers and a dispatcher in 2003).
As Goth enthusiasts and video gamers alike point out, tens of thousands of adherents never commit a violent crime. In the absence of a clear causal connection between violence-glorifying cults and games on one hand and campus shooters on the other, academic freedom argues against profiling Goths and gamers as potential threats. And yet … as horrific incidents multiply down the decades, administrators might be forgiven for considering closer scrutiny of students who fall into these categories.
Even administrators who shy away from "profiling" might welcome increased sensitivity among their student bodies. "Snitching" about suspect behavior may not be cool, but it could be crucial. A live-and-let live attitude in residence halls is probably no longer appropriate in our post-VT world ... anymore than a laissez faire attitude at our airports would make any sense in this post-9/11 age of international terror.
This is a subject I have continued to pursue, as in this widely read article.
I mention Korem's book, because this guy makes an interesting case for profiling potential shooters, such as Whitman,the VTU killer, and the most recent madman in Arizona.
Profiling, like "eugenics," is a word that carries a lot of bad freight, especially with liberals. However, whether we speak of jihadist fanatics or madmen such as these, the ability to identify and prevent... if done with civil liberties and human dignity in the forefronts of our minds... may make a lot of sense.
Don't take my word for that. Following the VTU tragedy, the US Department of Education said as much, referring to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA):
FERPA and secondary education: The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974, as amended, and the student
FOR RELEASE:
October 30, 2007 Contact: Casey Ruberg, Samara Yudof
(202) 401-1576
MORE RESOURCES
Letter
Guidance
Resources
Photos
U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings today joined U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff and U.S. Secretary of Commerce Carlos M. Gutierrez to commend Mt. Vernon High School in Alexandria, Va., and Fairfax County for the work the community is doing to equip schools with the knowledge and capability to prepare for and respond to emergencies and natural disasters.
Following a demonstration of the Fairfax County Public Schools emergency preparedness model, Secretaries Spellings, Chertoff and Gutierrez held a press conference, where Secretary Spellings announced the availability of new brochures that provide guidance on the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) to enable schools to better balance students' privacy rights with school safety concerns.
"Nothing is more important to Americans than the safety of their children, and the guidance we are making available today will help make America's schools safer," said Secretary Spellings. "FERPA is not intended to be an obstacle to school safety, and the brochures will enable parents, teachers and administrators to safeguard students in our education system."
In the wake of the Virginia Tech tragedy, President Bush asked Secretary Spellings, Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez to conduct a listening tour across the country with educators, first responders, parents and others to address concerns related to emergency preparedness and school safety. Several recurring themes were heard across the country, including the need for additional guidance on the FERPA, the federal law that protects the privacy of students' education records.
In response, the U.S. Department of Education developed three new guides: one for K-12 educators, one for higher education officials and one for parents. The FERPA brochures for school officials include contact information for obtaining additional guidance and assistance. Understanding the law empowers school officials to act quickly and decisively when problems arise. These guides will further the collection of key emergency management resources available from the U.S. Department of Education to help schools and institutions of higher education plan for, respond to and recover from a serious incident. The guides, accompanied by a letter and handout on emergency management resources, were sent today to schools, school boards, associations and others nationwide.
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