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Massiah’s Message ~ The time should fit the crime
Posted on March 13, 2014 by Maple Creek Watching the news this month I’ve realized there’s an epic amount of crime related to mental illness.What the heck is going on? It got me thinking. What is causing North America to be inundated with horrible acts of violence? What happened to facing the consequences for our actions? If you kill someone and it wasn’t an accident, you go to jail. For life.
I habitually go outside and stand in the quiet for a few minutes and think about how great it is to be alive. The other day I thought to myself, we in North America are like a bunch of lab mice running around mindlessly in a maze. We see violence on TV and we feel afraid. We blame other people for our misfortunes instead going out and doing something about it. There were a couple really disturbing stories in the news last week. The first was of a mother in Florida who is charged with three counts of attempted murder. She drove her mini-van into the ocean, with the kids all strapped inside. Bystanders had to rescue the children. One of the two rescuers remarked even though her kid was screaming that she was trying to kill them, she kept saying they were going to be OK. Then she turned the car back into the deep water. The saddest part of the whole thing was that her family had called the authorities two hours earlier to report she was having some sort of episode, but the police couldn’t do anything. They didn’t see her behaving “crazy.” She had all the right answers to their questions, so they couldn’t do anything. She was too good of an actor. She deliberately tried to kill her kids. I was really disappointed to hear that Vince Li is allowed to walk around on unsupervised visits only a few years after he killed Tim MacLean. Let’s not beat around the bush here. In 2008, Vince Li cut off MacLean’s head and tried to eat his eyes and ear as MacLean, an innocent 22-year-old guy on a Greyhound bus, was sleeping. This month Li gets solo visits in the community of Selkirk, Manitoba. He also has staff-supervised visits to Winnipeg and Lockport, Manitoba. How is this possible? How come they didn’t have the decency to let him have visits in another community, one far away from Manitoba? He is insane when not taking medication. Absolutely insane. He was found not criminally responsible, right I get that. It doesn’t nullify the fact he violently killed a random person. Li has schizophrenia. It’s not like he’s going to wake up one day and, miracle of miracles, be cured. He will have schizophrenia forever until the day he dies. All it takes is one day for him to slip up and forget to take his meds and it will be you or me. By the way, how can they prove that he is at low risk to re-offend? Have they stood him in front of a guy with a knife and said do you feel like cutting his head off? He ate MacLean’s eyes, that all by itself should make you afraid. Li told the Schizophrenia Society of Canada in 2012 that he bought a knife at Canadian Tire for an emergency journey to protect himself from aliens. He said voices told him to kill MacLean. MacLean’s mom thinks Li should be locked up for the rest of his life. Can you imagine what you would do if you were caught alone with Li and had no weapon to defend yourself? Everyday I am glad to be alive, and so I just can’t understand why if he’s taken someone’s life he hasn’t been forced to prison for at least 10 years. Or Maybe 22 years is more fitting. After all, that’s how long MacLean was allowed to live. There has to be a penalty, or at least something a little bit more than six years in a mental hospital. There’s no coming back to life for MacLean. He’s never going to go to university, get married or have kids. His mother is never going to have grandchildren. He’s dead and his killer gets to roam Winnipeg with a babysitter.
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