thepoliticalfreakshow: Hell on Earth: Missouri Parents Turn In...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 01:24:27 -0700

Hell on Earth: Missouri Parents Turn In Mentally-Ill Son Who Allegedly Plotted Mass Shooting At Movie Theater And Walmart, Their Son Was Committed Seven Times, Doctors Attempted To Diagnose Him With Everything From Asperger’s To Bipolar Disorder To Schizophrenia, With No Accurate Diagnosis

The Colorado theater shooting and the massacre at Sandy Hook school have raised urgent questions about the failings of mental health care. Parents are up against many barriers when they try to help a mentally ill child who’s prone to violence.

Two years ago, Bill Lammers’ son, Blaec, was picked up by police at a local Wal-Mart, in Bolivar, Mo., holding a butcher knife and a Halloween mask.

“What he told us was he had picked out someone,” said Bill. “He was going to watch them go into the back room, follow them back there, and hopefully the police would get him and shoot him first before he did anything.”

The Lammers family.
/ CBS News

He was 18 then and already had been committed to a mental hospital twice — once for threatening to put a pipe bomb under his teacher’s car.

Blaec would be checked into mental hospitals, but could only stay for 4 days. Why the limit?

“That was our question too,” said Lammers. “‘Why? Why? Did you fix him? Did you cure him?’”

Four days is the legal limit without a court order. His mother, Tricia, and Bill say Blaec was in and out of mental institutions. At first, they didn’t realize how serious it was. By the time he was 18 and legally an adult, it was harder to get him committed for the long-term.

His doctors would release him with new meds and a new diagnosis, everything from Asperger’s to bipolar disorder to a problem linked with schizophrenia.

“I am here to love this child and to help this child in any way that I can,” said Tricia.

They ran up a $50,000 medical bill searching for ways to help their son.

“Maybe it’s just teenage hormones,” said Bill. “You try and figure out anything but a mental condition.”

Blaec’s violent outbursts and manic behavior forced them to lock up their belongings. One time, he came up behind his sister holding a knife.

Tricia considered buying a handgun for her own protection, until she made a discovery while doing the laundry that changed everything.

“I found a receipt that said ‘Shotgun $865,’” she said.

“And I said, ‘That’s not a shotgun,’” recalled Bill. “‘That’s an assault weapon. That’s an AR-15.’”

Blaec, who had been committed seven times, “legally bought an assault weapon legally from the place [the Wal-Mart] he had walked into with a butcher knife,” Bill added.

The reason: Blaec was never involuntarily committed to a mental institution by the courts, so no mental health record turned up on the background check.

A day after discovering the receipt, Tricia contacted police, who arrested Blaec. He allegedly confessed that he planned to open fire that weekend at Wal-Mart and also considered targeting the local movie theater.

On turning in her own son to the police, Tricia said: “My first thought was, ‘What have I done? I just destroyed my son’s life.’ And people would come up to me and say, ‘No, you saved our lives.’”

She added, “This is my hell. This is my hell. If I make it through this, I go to heaven.”

Now 21, Blaec Lammers sits in the Polk County Jail, charged with three felony counts, including making a terrorist threat. He may face a life sentence. His parents say it could jhave been much worse, but worry that prison is not where he’ll get the help he needs.

A southwest Missouri man accused of plotting attacks at a movie theater and Walmart store legally bought the guns he allegedly planned to use, despite being forced to undergo a psychiatric exam three years ago after stalking a store clerk he said he planned to kill, authorities said.

Blaec Lammers, 20, was arrested last week after his mother told police she feared he was planning an attack. Authorities say Lammers told investigators he planned to open fire during a showing last weekend of the new “Twilight” film and then inside a nearby Walmart in Bolivar, a town about 130 miles southeast of Kansas City.

Investigators determined he legally purchased two assault rifles, and also had 400 rounds of ammunition. He is charged with first-degree assault, making a terroristic threat and armed criminal action, and remained jailed Wednesday on $500,000 bond.

The case has gun control advocates concerned.

Daniel Vice, a senior attorney for the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said Lammers’ case reminds him of what happened before the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007. Student gunman Seung-Hui Cho, who fatally shot 32 people before killing himself, was able to buy two guns even though he had been ruled a danger to himself during a court hearing in 2005.

“We’ve seen it before,” Vice said. “We’ve been trying to fix this.”

The National Rifle Association didn’t respond to a phone message seeking comment. Lammers’ attorney, DeWayne Franklin Perry, declined to comment about the case.

Lammers’ mother said her son had undergone inpatient treatment and has shown signs associated with Asperger’s syndrome, borderline personality disorder and other conditions.

“He didn’t ask to be born different,” Tricia Lammers said at a news conference this week at the National Alliance for Mental Illness in Springfield. “He wanted to be successful and be somebody. Just two weeks ago he asked me – both my kids still call me mommy – he said, `Mommy, do you think I’m a failure?’ I said, `No, Blaec, I don’t.’”

Federal law has banned certain types of mentally ill people from buying guns since 1968, including those who have been deemed a danger to themselves or others, involuntarily committed, or judged not guilty by reason of insanity or incompetent to stand trial.

Lammers was involuntarily committed in 2009, after he brought a knife and rubber mask to a Walmart store and followed around a clerk, according to an arrest report. Lammers, who was 17 at the time, told investigators he was planning to kill the clerk when he heard his name over the public address system and his father hollering at him.

He wasn’t charged, but he was involuntarily committed for 96 hours for a mental health examination. In Missouri, hospitals, law enforcement officials and private citizens can request a person be held against his or her will for up to 96 hours if the person appears to be a threat to themselves or others.

But such an involuntary hold doesn’t necessarily bar someone from purchasing a firearm, because the federal law requires that a person be “adjudicated as a mental defective,” said Trista K. Frederick, a special agent and spokeswoman for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms office in Kansas City.

Each state has a system for making a legal determination that a person is mentally defective and submitting those records to a federal database.

Frederick said the ATF looked into Lammers’ case but had no information to show he should have been prohibited from having firearms. And the Missouri Department of Mental Health says the state has no central database of orders for 96-hour involuntary mental evaluation commitments.

Mick Covington, executive director of the Missouri State Sheriff’s Association, said people don’t lose their gun rights in Missouri simply because of such a commitment.

“The fact that somebody is held for 96 hours, if there’s nothing else besides that, it’s like picking somebody up on a reasonable suspicion arrest and no other charges are filed,” Covington said. “It’s a big difference between being picked up and looked at, and picked up and having a medical person say this person is incompetent.”

Polk County prosecutor Ken Ashlock, who wasn’t the local prosecutor in 2009, said he doesn’t know what happened to Lammers after his 96-hour evaluation. A longer mental health commitment would have required the type of court preceding that would have barred Lammers from obtaining a gun. But given that Lammers was able to purchase two firearms last week, Ashlock suspects nothing more happened after the initial evaluation.

Polk County Sheriff Steven Bruce said he’s worried about how the state handles cases involving the mentally ill.

“If you have mental issues, if there has been enough of a concern from a family member or public or whatever to alert us to a condition that they feel that you have and we then 96-hour you – good, bad or otherwise – I think that needs to be a point of record,” Bruce said.

Investigators wrote in a probable cause statement that Lammers bought two assault rifles legally in Bolivar. When they questioned him last Thursday, he said he bought tickets to a Sunday “Twilight” screening in Bolivar and planned to shoot people inside.

Lammers also said he planned to shoot people at random at the Walmart store less than a mile away, so if he ran out of bullets, he could steal more “and keep shooting until police arrived,” investigators wrote.

Investigators said Lammers was “off of his medication,” but his mother said Tuesday she didn’t think that was the case. A judge has ordered Lammers to undergo another mental health exam.

Bruce, the sheriff, said mental health care is “pretty precarious” in Missouri and the help people need isn’t always there because “funds are low.”

“The biggest problem is people with issues who it takes medication to keep what we would consider a normal balance,” he said. “And when they don’t take those, I don’t know that they necessarily realize how imbalanced they can become.”

Love means never having to say you’re sorry, according to the popular 1970 film “Love Story.” For Tricia Lammers, love for her son meant contacting police to warn them that the young man was prepared to commit mass murder at a Missouri movie theater showing the latest installment of the “Twilight” saga.

Lammers explained how she had to chose between love for her son, Blaec, and her community. It was love for both that guided her decision to turn her son into authorities.

“First and foremost I am a mother and I love my son very, very much,” Lammers said Tuesday at a televised news conference at the Springfield headquarters of the National Alliance for Mental Illness.

“Second, I am not a hero. I love my community just as much as I love my son. I respect the people who live in my community and I respect their safety and their right to be safe,” she said.

Lammers spoke the same day that her son made his first court appearance and was ordered to undergo a mental health examination. Blaec Lammers, 20, is charged with first-degree assault, making a terrorist threat and armed criminal action. He is being held on $500,000 bail.

Authorities said Blaec Lammers had purchased two assault rifles and about 400 rounds of ammunition and was planning to attack a theater in Bolivar, Mo., then was going to go to a Wal-Mart where he had been arrested in 2009 after following around a clerk while armed with a knife. Tricia Lammers said she had contacted police at the time about that incident as well. No charges were filed in that case. Instead, Blaec Lammers was committed for 96 hours for a mental health examination, she said.

Tricia Lammers said her son has shown signs of Asperger’s syndrome, borderline personality disorder and other mental conditions.

“He didn’t ask to be born different. He grew up his whole life in [his sister] Kristyn’s shadow. He wanted to be successful and be somebody,” Tricia Lammers told KOLR-TV. “Just two weeks ago he asked me — both my kids still call me mommy — he said, `Mommy, do you think I’m a failure?’ I said, ‘No, Blaec, I don’t.”’

Blaec Lammers was 17 in 2009 when he went to the Wal-Mart with a knife and a rubber mask, according to documents released this week. He had just watched the horror film “Halloween,” which he told investigators “got him to thinking,” the arrest report said, according to the Associated Press.

Tricia Lammers called police after finding a suicide note from her son and a missing knife in October 2009. An officer was en route when the mother said her son’s vehicle had been found in the parking lot of the Wal-Mart store in Bolivar, a town about 130 miles southeast of Kansas City.

Blaec Lammers was arrested. Tricia Lammers said she believed her son had secured the weapons for an attack eerily reminiscent of the July shootings at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., where the last installment of the Batman franchise was having its local premiere. Twelve people died in the attack.

[CBS News / The Huffington Post / Los Angeles Times]

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Tue, 18 Jun 2013 01:06:38 -0700

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Tue, 18 Jun 2013 01:05:48 -0700

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thepoliticalfreakshow: Hell on Earth: Missouri Parents Turn In...

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ostracizedpoodle: *gets down on one knee* will you go away

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trvsh: hey baby are you into broke unstable losers

allieeebabyyy:

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The Birth of Baby Yeezus

fuckyeahbiggovernment: high-on-kittens: dam grandpa lou u r...

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ostracizedpoodle: gets down on one knee will you go away