Or off them, and does it really matter?
The corporate pre$$ won't draw the connection, and one need only watch television advertisements to $ee why, but more and more these prescription pharmaceuticals are involved in horrendous acts of gruesome slaughter.
"The long spiral down of Edwin Alemany; From early childhood, Amy Lord’s accused killer gave many warning signs of uncontrolled mental illness" by Eric Moskowitz | Globe Staff, August 11, 2013
By the time Edwin Alemany was 18, he already had a long, well-documented history of serious mental health issues that included hallucinations, severe depression, and a psychological disorder characterized by hostility and defiant behavior.
He once threatened to blow up his school, occasionally disappeared for 24-hour stretches, and oscillated unpredictably between sweetness and rage.
Um, hello.
“At times he can be polite and the next minute he is swearing,” his teacher, guidance counselor, and middle school social worker wrote in a report just after his 14th birthday in September 1998. “Edwin’s moods change dramatically (usually from one day to the next) w/out any apparent precipitant.”
Alemany, who now stands accused of attacking two women in South Boston last month and abducting and brutally murdering 24-year-old Amy Lord, spent several stints in psychiatric hospitals as a teenager. He was prescribed medication and regularly monitored by the state Department of Youth Services and a special Boston Public Schools program for children with learning disabilities and emotional problems.
But after his 18th birthday, care from the state came to an abrupt end, according to his family members. Alemany left DYS custody, dropped out of school, and assumed responsibility for his own mental health care.
“He came out with a huge pack of medicine and he said, ‘I’m not taking these anymore,’” said a brother-in-law who has been a close presence in Alemany’s life since Alemany was 14. He asked not to be named for fear of backlash related to his relative’s alleged crimes.
In the years that followed, Alemany repeatedly came in contact with the criminal justice system, largely for relatively minor crimes like theft and trespassing, according to interviews with several close family members and a review of more than 100 pages of criminal records and childhood mental health documents kept by his family.
Minor by whose definition, Globe?
Of course, when you are representing for criminal bankers I suppose I should expect such things. That's why the illegal in illegal immigrants doesn't mean anything to them.
On at least three occasions, police officers witnessed Alemany threatening to kill himself or others, or acting eratically. But in the documentation of his 14 arrests between September 2002 and March of this year there is no indication that a judge ever ordered a mental health evaluation or that he was otherwise targeted for psychiatric care.
Just fell through the surveillance system cracks, huh?
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Alemany’s immediate relatives, who agreed to be interviewed on the condition they not be named, spoke to a reporter in the living room of their Mattapan home. They said they know another side of Alemany — a loyal and loving son, sibling, and father. They say he maintained a long-term relationship with his girlfriend and relishes taking their 4-year-old daughter to the park and to the beach in South Boston.
He is an avid fisherman who likes to fix cars, they said. He tends a tank of tropical fish and cares for a tiny dog named Lily.
This spring, he stayed up until 3 a.m. filling 300 plastic Easter eggs with candy, money, and trinkets for his daughter and other young relatives to find during a party he organized in his parents’ yard, they said.
“He’s not a monster,” said his mother, red-eyed and speaking softly. “He’s a loving kid.”
Other than the brutal murder and other assorted crimes.
********************************
But in June 1999, when he was 14, he was prescribed Prozac and Dexedrine and admitted for one of his several in-patient stays for psychiatric care, after increasingly aggressive behavior that included throwing a garbage can at a teacher.
Pretty strong pharmaceuticals for a 14-year-old.
“I don’t have to be here,” he told a psychiatrist at Brookline’s Bournewood Hospital, who noted Alemany refused to show remorse or acknowledge a need for help.
He spent four years moving among juvenile detention centers, residential psychiatric hospitals, and his family’s apartment, while floating in and out of McKinley Middle School and McKinley Prep, both highly structured, therapeutic public schools in Boston.
In 2002, when Alemany was 17, his mother signed a youth services department consent form authorizing medications including antidepressants and an antipsychotic drug for her son. The form indicated he was having hallucinations. His relatives said he wrestled with hearing voices for more than a decade and has repeatedly cut and harmed himself while threatening suicide. They said they’ve never seen him be violent toward anyone but himself.
Why wasn't this guy confined to a mental hospital?
Police records show multiple instances of physical altercations — minor compared to the horrific violence he is accused of committing in July, but also hinting at alarming volatility.
?????????
Not long after Alemany left DYS care at 18, in June 2003, the owner of a Roslindale pizza shop spotted him in a median on Washington Street, yelling and punching a traffic sign. When the owner drove past, Alemany hurled a rock at him.
The man — who had sometimes given Alemany and his friends free food at the pizza shop in exchange for washing windows — got out of his truck and threatened to hit Alemany if he didn’t stop. Alemany lunged and stabbed the man in the stomach with a four-inch folding knife, according to a police report and the shop owner.
The man, who asked that his name not be used, said he believed Alemany stabbed him only out of panic and said the boy’s friends told him Alemany was distraught over a girl.
Yeah, that and "I was drunk" always absolves you for your actions.
Taken in for booking that night, Alemany “struck his head and face off the plexi-glass window and punched the wall with his right hand, trying to harm himself, and threatened suicide,” the police report said.
In April 2008, police responded to a domestic dispute on Gay Head Street in Jamaica Plain and found holes punched into walls of the apartment and Alemany with cuts on his arms and neck. Neighbors said Alemany’s girlfriend at the time had chased him with a steak knife and thrown the knife at him, while the woman told police she did so only after he yelled at her and punched her.
Each was charged with domestic assault, and the police booking form indicates that Alemany’s record showed him to be on a “suicide watch list” from a previous incarceration. The case was dismissed, apparently since neither Alemany nor the woman wanted to testify.
In January 2010, police found Alemany walking down Morton Street in Dorchester just before 8 a.m. on a Sunday, heaving orange traffic barriers into the roadway. When officers frisked him, they found a knife in his right pocket and what looked like a pistol tucked into his waist — though it turned out to be a BB gun. He was found guilty of disorderly conduct and paid a $100 fine.
I'm starting to wonder who this kid knew.
Five months later, after crashing a stolen car into a pole, Alemany was taken to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in handcuffs for treatment. With his legs free, his feet in sneakers, he kicked the face of a nurse who tried to insert an IV into his arm, then kicked and spat at the officers who tried to restrain him.
Alemany pleaded guilty to car theft and assault and battery with a dangerous weapon and was sentenced to two years at Suffolk County House of Correction, where he would stay until 2012. Relatives said it was painful to see him incarcerated again, separated from his infant daughter, but that at least he would receive some kind of regular medical attention.
Alemany worked sporadically between jail sentences, family members said. With a criminal record, steady employment eluded him, but he detailed cars and joined his brother-in-law periodically when the latter managed a private security outfit and a moving company.
In September 2012, a woman choked into unconsciousness while walking home in Roxbury came to with a wallet in her hand that police officials now say contained Alemany’s ID. The detective investigating the case at the time did not pursue charges against Alemany, citing a lack of probable cause. Boston police are now reexamining the incident.
In the attacks in late July, police say Alemany punched one woman and stabbed another. He allegedly assaulted Lord as she left her Dorchester Street apartment for the gym early in the morning, dragging her back into the vestibule and viciously beating her. He allegedly then drove her to five ATMs and forced her to withdraw cash. She was found stabbed and strangled to death at Stony Brook Reservation.
Related: Good Lord
At a scheduled arraignment in South Boston District Court July 25, a psychiatrist who interviewed him in court found him overcome by emotion; Alemany had pulled stitches from his hand — which police say he cut while stabbing one of the women — and could barely speak, saying in a whisper that he wanted to kill himself. Alemany was sent to Bridgewater State Hospital for a 20-day competency evaluation.
He is due again in court on Wednesday, pending the competency evaluation.
Alemany’s family members, interviewed recently at their home, said they pray he will be exonerated. They presented a portrait of a close-knit family that lacks the resources to get Alemany the top psychiatric care he needs or the guardianship power to insist he follow any treatment at all.
Maybe the best thing to do would be just to execute him, huh? I mean, police and FBI do it every day across this country, so.... ????
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It's not as if leaving him in state care would have helped:
"Mass. is leaving more youths in troubled homes" by Peter Schworm and Sean P. Murphy | Globe Staff, August 11, 2013
The number of Massachusetts children removed from their homes for abuse or neglect has fallen sharply in recent years, even as reports of child abuse or neglect have climbed, government figures show. The trend has prompted concerns that more children are being left in dangerous situations, like the Lynn infant who was beaten to death last month.
State social workers are filing 30 percent fewer court petitions to remove children from their homes than they did five years ago, and the number of children removed from their homes has fallen by 20 percent. During the same period, reports of child abuse and neglect have increased by about 6 percent.
Child welfare advocates say the declining number of children removed from their homes reflects a philosophical shift toward helping troubled parents through counseling, drug treatment, and other forms of support so more children can remain at home, an approach widely backed by children’s advocates.
But the decline also follows budget cuts at the state Department of Children and Families that has put pressure on the agency to put fewer children into costly foster care, and has compromised its ability to finance family supports, advocates say.
“The state is saving money, but not necessarily protecting children,” said Marcia Lowry, executive director of Children’s Rights, a national advocacy group working to improve child welfare systems that has brought a class-action lawsuit against the department. “It’s clear there are financial pressures on the agency, and this raises questions about how much those considerations are playing a role in decision-making.”
The risk of leaving children in unstable homes was realized last month, when a 3-month-old boy was fatally beaten in a Lynn home plagued by drug addiction, mental health issues, and troubling outside influences. Anthony Gideika, the boyfriend of the baby’s mother, Jennifer Nelson, is accused of fatally assaulting 3-month-old Chase Gideika....
Related: Maury Povich Murder in Massachusetts
Now what am I going to do for afternoon TV?
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Meanwhile, back in the old neighborhood:
"‘New Southie’ can’t mask drug problems" by Billy Baker | Globe Staff, August 11, 2013
On a beautiful afternoon recently was a beach full of shiny young people — the “new Southie,” a population increasingly drawn by the neighborhood’s proximity to downtown and rents that are still cheaper than many other areas in the city. That migration, along with a glittering new waterfront and new restaurants and stores, had begun to erase images of a grittier past. But the horror of Lord’s gruesome slaying after a seemingly random abduction as she walked to the gym has exposed fears about other problems lingering beneath the polish, a poisonous drug problem that has invaded all corners of the neighborhood....
Whitey kept those out.
The big news in South Boston on July 23 was the 20 hours of terror that Edwin Alemany allegedly wrought on three young women in the neighborhood, including Lord.
Shortly after came news that has become sadly predictable in the neighborhood: another fatal drug overdose. The fifth in 10 days.
Related: Heroin is Here
Sure makes you wonder about the Globe's focus and news choices, 'eh?
Things were bad all around, and just days after Lord’s death, a community meeting in the neighborhood turned epic. Hundreds filled every corner of the Tynan Elementary School cafeteria for the meeting, including many young women wearing white ribbons in remembrance of Lord. Hundreds more listened outside on the street. With so much of Southie gathered in one place, and nearly every big official in the city of Boston on the stage, the conversation quickly turned to drugs. Edwin Alemany was in jail. But the drugs, people asked. What about that?
Lieutenant Detective Robert Merner, the commander of the Boston Police’s Drug Control Unit, said there were 450 new individuals in the court system in the past 15 months.
But it wasn’t until the end of a long series of speakers that John McGahan, president of the Gavin House, a longtime rehabilitation organization steps away from the Tynan schoolyard, hammered home the story of the recent overdoses. “In two weeks,” he said, “in South Boston.”
Officials are awaiting toxicology reports on the victims to determine if there is anything suspicious about the cluster of overdoses, including a tainted batch of heroin or the arrival of acetyl fentanyl, a powerful new synthetic opioid sold on the streets as “fire.” The Centers for Disease Control has warned public health officials of its impending arrival, and it is blamed for 14 deaths recently in Rhode Island. But preliminary testing on street buys from the areas where the overdoses occurred turned up average heroin, public health officials said.
They know where it is being sold and it just continues?
As with Whitey Bulger before them, drugs are not part of the real estate pitch for new Southie....
Maura Walsh and her roommate, Denise Dudko, live next door to the “sober house” where a young woman named Melissa Hardy was brutally slain in June. And they knew Martin Jiminez, the man charged with her killing. He was the charming local, they said, the guy who took pride in telling the newcomers how things worked in Southie....
See: Man charged with killing South Boston woman
But they were not exactly ready to move out of town because of it. They liked living in Southie, they said, and Edwin Alemany’s alleged attacks were just a horrible one-off.
“It’s a shock, but I don’t feel like it’s the true state of affairs in the neighborhood,” Kate Papillo, 27, said as she walked her dog along a stretch of grass on Day Boulevard. She had not heard of the overdoses, but said that side of life felt distant from her South Boston....
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"Police say 2012 triple homicide may be related to earlier crime" by Jeremy C. Fox | Globe Correspondent, August 11, 2013
Boston police said Saturday that the fatal shootings of three women in a parked car in Dorchester last summer may be related to an earlier crime, as they urged the public to come forward with information.
Sergeant Detective Richard Daley said that the killings last Aug. 12 and the wounding of a fourth woman in the car were not random and “it’s possible” they were connected to a prior incident.
“We’re exploring several avenues, and that is one,” he said.
Police have previously said that one of the women was targeted, but declined to say which one. The four women — all friends — were shot around 9:22 p.m. after leaving the Dominican Festival in Franklin Park.
Daley, who is leading the investigation, appealed at a press conference at police headquarters Saturday for anyone who attended that festival to come forward.
“Anything they saw may be innocent and innocuous to them, but it could be helpful to our investigation,” Daley said....
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