Crazy fucks roaming the streets.
Arletta McCrimmon’s heart broke when her nephew stepped off the Greyhound bus from Tennessee in late January.
John W. Mallett wore pants that clearly were too short for him.
His boots had no shoelaces. He carried his possessions and a dwindling supply of medications in a little bag.
“I was really hurt to see him like that,” McCrimmon said.
Mallett, 37, had come to Columbus after he was found sleeping on a bench in Nashville, where relatives said he had had repeated encounters with the courts and a mental-health system they have described as lacking.
It was that mental-health system, McCrimmon said, that put Mallett on a bus to Ohio after McCrimmon agreed to take him in.
“That’s why he was here, to start over,” she said yesterday.
In the month or so since Mallett had begun staying with her, McCrimmon said, she never saw signs of the violence that foreshadowed what Mallett now stands accused of: stabbing four people at a Downtown office building on Wednesday before a Columbus police officer stopped the rampage by shooting him repeatedly.
He and three of the four victims remain hospitalized; all are expected to survive.
McCrimmon, 58, said she quickly discovered the challenges of dealing with a loved one who is mentally ill, something she had never done before. Not long after Mallett moved in, he had run out of his medication for schizophrenia.
She said her nephew tried in vain to replenish them by phone because he wouldn’t set foot in a clinic despite her urging.
Such frustrations were new to McCrimmon but are a familiar struggle for families who deal with mentally ill loved ones.
Members of Tea & Tears, a local support group for such friends and family, know that all too well.
The group, in fact, was meeting on Wednesday as a barrage of news reports began about a Downtown stabbing rampage.
Neither the suspect nor the victims had been identified at that point on Wednesday afternoon.
“There were a lot of people crying,” said Christy Murphy. “None of us really knows when it could be one of our own.”
The Gahanna resident said she has a relative with severe mental illness who has been seen “ jumping out in front of cars” and has decided to be homeless. The relative won’t accept help or take prescribed medication.
The anguish of that situation — Murphy feels helpless, despite her many attempts to intervene — is part of the reason she advocates for a law that would more explicitly give probate courts the option of ordering outpatient treatment for people with mental illness.
Such orders could require people to accept treatment and take medication to keep their illnesses in check.
Terry Russell, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness in Ohio, said people with mental illness don’t often hurt others.
“They’re six times more likely to be a victim of a crime than to commit a crime,” he said.
“The national average is that a person with mental illness will die 25 years younger than a person without mental illness,” Murphy said. “In Ohio, it’s even worse; it’s 30 years.”
Still, when the relatively rare horrendous crime occurs — a knife attack or mass shooting — the likelihood that the assailant has a mental illness jumps to 50 percent, Russell said.
He said he expects the outpatient-treatment legislation to be introduced soon, and he knows it will be controversial. But he thinks the bar for involuntary treatment is set too high.
“Right now, the only way you can force a person into treatment is if they are a danger to themselves or others,” he said. “Court-ordered outpatient treatment will address this issue.”
Michael Kirkman, executive director of Ohio Legal Rights Service, said he understands the frustration with scant resources available to help families affected by mental illness.
But the outpatient commitment concept is fraught with potential for overreach, Kirkman said.
“Are you going to create lifetime court jurisdiction over someone because they have mental illness?” he said. “Why take away rights from someone when it’s a system issue?”
And, he said, there might not be good alternatives for people who don’t comply with the court orders.
“There are no beds, and nobody’s building beds,” Kirkman said, referring to mental hospitals.
What drove Mallett remains unclear, police said.
McCrimmon disputed that she had told her nephew to move out, as Mallett’s father said on Thursday. But she said Mallett was frustrated that his plans to move into a place of his own had been delayed because that apartment wasn’t ready.
She hadn’t seen him carrying knives since his arrival and called him “a humble young man.”
Like Mallett’s father, she suspects he went Downtown looking for some kind of housing agency to help. But he disliked being in crowds, she said, so deciding to go during the lunch hour on a beautiful day likely created more stress.
“Our family would like to send out our deepest and sincere apologies to these stabbing victims,” she said.
And though she’s horrified by what her nephew is accused of doing, she said it saddens her to see people with mental illness vilified.
“When this type of thing happens, then we want to call them beasts,” she said. “There are people out here that need help, and we’re turning our backs on them like lepers.”
Murphy said families are tired of waiting for funding and system improvements that never come.
“Our loved ones are running closer to the edge of a cliff,” she said, “and there’s nothing we can do.”
