Self Destruction Lead to Mass Destruction

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Mall Shooter Was State Ward For 4 Years
UPDATED: 8:51 pm CST December 6, 2007

OMAHA, Neb. -- Nebraska spent $265,000 and four years trying to provide help to the 19-year-old who became the Westroads Mall shooter on Wednesday afternoon.

Eight people were killed, in addition to the shooter, Robert A. Hawkins.

Gov. Dave Heineman said Hawkins became a ward of the state on Sept. 17, 2002, but parental rights were not terminated and none of his siblings were state wards. Hawkins was terminated as a state ward


Todd Landry, the director of Child and Family Services for the Department of Health and Human Services, said the state spent $265,000 on services provided to Hawkins over the four years he was a state ward. Landry said Hawkins was made a state ward with no parental fault, but because he needed services, which included stays at residential centers and in-patient at a hospital.

Landry said Hawkins stayed at a facility in Missouri called Piney Ridge, plus Omaha's Cooper Village, Lutheran Family Services and Addiction and Behavioral Health Services Inc. Landry said those homes provide addiction counseling, mental-health counseling and behavioral counseling, among other services, but he could not say exactly what Hawkins was treated for under federal and state privacy laws.

Landry did say that one of the treatment periods came after Hawkins threatened to kill his stepmother.

Hawkins Timeline:
2002 became ward of the state
February 2003 taken to Cooper Village
November 2003 arrested for a fight
December 2004 enters foster care
March 2005 charged with possession with intent to deliver
December 2005 went to live with his father in La Vista
August 2006 state care ends under court order

While a state ward, he was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, mood disorder, oppositional defiant disorder and parent-child relations problems.


continued: http://www.ketv.com/news/14792807/detail.html

Jeeze, I herd about this, and its a horrible story. Part of me thinks we should do everything to rehabilitate people like this, including spending hundreds of thousands of $$$ trying to help them (often unsucessfully) and part of me would like to see that if people like this are identified to be a threat to public, to be locked up indefinatly.

Ok, obviously its impossible to tell the future, and im sure plenty of people in his shoes, tho disturbed, wont go out and kill people. Hindesite is 20/20 and its too bad such $$$, time and effort was poured into an individual who would take other peoples lives, that money, time and effort coulda been spent helping someone who could have actually benifited, and obviously I dont think that people like him should be locked up without committing a crime, but a profile should be done on people like him to determine a risk assessment and then everything the government can possibly do to keep them locked up, or monitored, or to prevent them from obtaining firearms, or even paying for treatment.

I dont think someone should be punished certainly for a crime they have not yet committed, maby im having a hard time getting this out, all I know is that I dont want people like him running around with the potential to kill others, my family or myself. Their is many problems and no simple solution or quick fix. I hope lessons are learned and it seems this is just the world we live in, occasionally screwed up people will hurt or kill innocent people.

Can you see that the way these ailing children are being *treated* is unsucceessful and that it does nothing for the child but reinforce their feelings of hopelessness? The parents are dysfunctional, the child is raised in an environment that reinforces his wanting to die - at every angle and venue - it's there - *die*. There is no support of the soul. No acknowledgement at all that he possesses a soul. It's brain activity on its own - survive, hit, kick, survive, kill, beat, defend. And then when the symptoms become *unmanageable* they are drugged. But the problem is still there! It's only masked with temporary bandaids. And the cycle continues until the sickness overflows. And so it has. And he is just one out of thousands.

More institutions are being built as this is written. And the beat goes on.

So if it was me or you in charge of these peoples fate, would you think we would be at odds??

It seems like you have far more hope that these individuals can be treated then I do. I just assumed some are lost causes, and I know thats a bad thing, their really is no way to tell. Indeed, drugs and being locked up is certainly a temporary fix, his backround had a huge impact on him apparently, he had crap parents, tho plenty other have bad parents and dont turn to this.

If you were the govener would you be willing to spend plenty of resources trying to cure these people? What do you propose be done?

If his aggression was linked to the fact that external factors (a.d.d or poor social skills and low self-esteem etc) were involved and he had no one to really look up to then he would give up on all his passions (most likely didn't have any) and obsess over those problems and his inability to solve those problems - this would be linked to poor relationships.

For some people, we don't learn what we should do and be appreciated. People are just there to tell us what to do. Where is the adult intelligent conversations? Nobody has the time or intellect to find it...

And impulsive behaviors can be linked to violence (prejudgest to perhaps a minority of those with adhd) but anger has its own purpose - makes us competitive: we need to learn how to harness that competitiveness. And many cases of behaviors might have other systems unknown to us because we do not devote money to the right research. The corporations are honered for their quick and easy political technological mind-control.

About adhd:

Giving adhd medications are thought to be effective because of the mechanism it has to release catacholamines. There are other targets for medications to treat adhd such as the newest one - strattera. But I think that dopamine release can be linked to aggressive or obssessive compulsive behaviors.

I think that serotonin release caused by ssri's is especially linked to explosive behavior when one is under the effects of stress.

&

Its difficult to have any sympathy for people if we cannot see anything in them that is of good intention beyond their irrational behaviors and/or their explosive behaviors. However, there are other angles to perceive particular people. And other ways to even perceive ourselves. If someone is causing a problem - we don't have time for it and thats the first thing to come to conclusion.

But it takes critical thinking to know ourselves and to understand the brain. Its easy to say that human beings have too much innate violence: but the world and our technology changes after wars or after other types of fixated level of fear and anxiety. And some people who are gifted in some areas are too ingeniously fixated on things and thus our brains' intelligence becomes anti-social.

Related to me, I think that I have charactoristics of anti-social personality disorder. I feel unemotional around many people but it bugs me when I don't have any real feelings towards them and also that other people irritate me because its sad if that is a real problem (but I think this mirrors aspergers too). I have difficulties processing my emotions towards many things.. so many times I feel like I just do things because someone told me to do it or that it popped into my enviroment on accident (this mirrors some type of a.d.d).

I have concluded for myself that my intelligent doesn't really work in many productive kinds of ways unless there is togetherness -not isolation.. I like to read. But many times I give up on finding books and feel like my priorities have lost all value. Many times I feel like people dominate, thinking that they are the guru or authority over things. And other times I don't feel intelligent because I don't see knowledge that I have found in myself because I read about others ideas and try to build on them.

We are social beings (in some ways anti-social?). We live within communities. I don't think that its our inability to solve problems that make us vulnerable. Violence does not win over us. Intelligent people like me can foresee the consequences of our competitive modern world - the consequences to no spiritual life / spirtual purpose in life. This also has to do with the role of community and our morals and principles. Being an isolated individual being told what to do all the time fits into the workaholic and authoratorian society we live in. This causes problems.

Jjstar, just stop. This has nothing to do with autism, except as an attempt to further your bullsh*t ideas that psychotherapy and psychiatrics are destroying us. They're not: they help a lot of people. Stop.
This is, what, your fifth post about this massacre? Enough already.

Considering the fact that I live near Omaha, several people I know actually knew this guy personally.

It looks like medication is the ultimate answer for everything.

I wish this wasn't the case because our society needs people to be more loving then the old captalist mentality of exploit each and every lucrative potential.

My beliefs are not Marxist, certainly not, but I belief that people are not as loving as they could be, and that is the reason.

All they do is create these disorders and these medications, Hawu as they say in Zulu

Hawu!

All we need is too be treated like human beings and each and every day in this sad, unfortuantle world, all we here about is pestilence, violence, rape, destruction and genocide and this is two thousand and eight years after the birth of Christ, when we have all of these modern technology.