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Prosecutors fight to keep Michigan school shooting suspect, 15, in adult jail

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Via: perrie-halpern • 2 years ago • 8 comments

By: Dennis Romero

Prosecutors fight to keep Michigan school shooting suspect, 15, in adult jail

The 15-year-old accused in the deadly mass shooting at his suburban Detroit high school in November should be kept in adult jail as he awaits trial,

S E E D E D C O N T E N T

The 15-year-old accused in the deadly mass shooting at his suburban Detroit high school in November should be kept in adult jail as he awaits trial, prosecutors said Tuesday.

Oakland County Assistant Prosecutor Kelly Collins said during a hearing about the teenager's confinement that he's demonstrated he can be calculating, has a desire to be remembered for his alleged crimes, and enjoys the notoriety the case has brought him, including email from women.

"How to do I get my fan mail, how do I get my hate mail"? he has said, according to Collins.

He has "a deeper and more calculated mind than any other 15-year-old," she argued in court.

The teenager's defense team formally asked the court that he be transferred from Oakland County jail to Children's Village in Pontiac.

Collins said the teen already killed four classmates atOxford High School on Nov. 30 and that teenagers at the juvenile facility would be put in danger that is "contrary to the rehabilitation of those at Children's Village."

"He enjoyed his dark side," Collins said. "He's fascinated with violence."

The teenager's defense team said he's hardly been in direct contact with anyone, except his lawyers, since he's been in jail, despite a possible need for psychiatric supervision.

"The jail is not equipped with handling juveniles," attorney Paulette Loftin said during the hearing.

She said he was removed from "constant watch" in jail. His lawyers indicated in a court filing they plan to pursue an insanity defense.

Because the defendant had no prior criminal or disciplinary school record to speak of, Loftin said, he should be allowed to wait for trial in the children's facility with defendants his age.

Loftin argued that because many of the people sending him email are women, such communication could be better supervised if he was held at Children's Village.

"These are emails from strangers all around the world," Loftin said. "At Children's Village we are able to control that communication."

Loftin did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday night.

Judge Kwame Rowe said he would make a decision in the upcoming days.

The suspect, Ethan Crumbley, has pleaded not guilty to two dozen charges, including murder. His parents are also being jailed on four counts each of involuntary manslaughter in the shooting. They have pleaded not guilty to the charges.

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Professor Quiet

1 Ed-NavDoc 2 years ago

That kid and his parents are most likely certifiably looney toons and need to be locked up in a mental institution.

Professor Participates

2 Paula Bartholomew 2 years ago

A problem with mail is not an excuse to put the children at Children's Village in the path of harm's way by allowing this volatile pos among them. Keep this animal in adult jail where others won't take his shit.

Professor Quiet

3 Sunshine 2 years ago

Without a doubt he should not be around any children. He already proved he is capable of killing them.

Professor Quiet

4 mocowgirl 2 years ago

He has "a deeper and more calculated mind than any other 15-year-old," she argued in court.

Unfortunately, the prosecutor is wrong, wrong, wrong. It could be that one (or more) percent of 15 year olds have an identical mind.

Although the research is evolving, the theory that I have most often read is that psychopaths are born and sociopaths are made.

I was curious and googled "at what age does psychopath symptoms surface".

I cherry picked an overview of an interesting and chilling article.

When Your Child Is a Psychopath - The Atlantic
Samantha’s parents, Jen and Danny, adopted Samantha when she was 2. They already had three biological children, but they felt called to add Samantha (not her real name) and her half sister, who is two years older, to their family. They later had two more kids.

Jen, a former elementary-school teacher, and Danny, a physician, realized they were out of their depth. They consulted doctors, psychiatrists, and therapists. But Samantha only grew more dangerous. They had her admitted to a psychiatric hospital three times before sending her to a residential treatment program in Montana at age 6. Samantha would grow out of it, one psychologist assured her parents; the problem was merely delayed empathy. Samantha was impulsive, another said, something that medication would fix. Yet another suggested that she had reactive attachment disorder , which could be ameliorated with intensive therapy. More darkly—and typically, in these sorts of cases—another psychologist blamed Jen and Danny, implying that Samantha was reacting to harsh and unloving parenting.

One bitter December day in 2011, Jen was driving the children along a winding road near their home. Samantha had just turned 6. Suddenly Jen heard screaming from the back seat, and when she looked in the mirror, she saw Samantha with her hands around the throat of her 2-year-old sister, who was trapped in her car seat. Jen separated them, and once they were home, she pulled Samantha aside.

“What were you doing?,” Jen asked.

“I was trying to choke her,” Samantha said.

“You realize that would have killed her? She would not have been able to breathe. She would have died .”

“I know.”

“What about the rest of us?”

“I want to kill all of you.”

Jen and Danny had to admit that nothing seemed to make a difference—not affection, not discipline, not therapy. “I was reading and reading and reading, trying to figure out what diagnosis made sense,” Jen tells me. “What fits with the behaviors I’m seeing?” Eventually she found one condition that did seem to fit—but it was a diagnosis that all the mental-health professionals had dismissed, because it’s considered both rare and untreatable. In July 2013, Jen took Samantha to see a psychiatrist in New York City, who confirmed her suspicion.

“In the children’s mental-health world, it’s pretty much a terminal diagnosis, except your child’s not going to die,” Jen says. “It’s just that there’s no help.” She recalls walking out of the psychiatrist’s office on that warm afternoon and standing on a street corner in Manhattan as pedestrians pushed past her in a blur. A feeling flooded over her, singular, unexpected. Hope. Someone had finally acknowledged her family’s plight. Perhaps she and Danny could, against the odds, find a way to help their daughter.

Samantha was diagnosed with conduct disorder with callous and unemotional traits. She had all the characteristics of a budding psychopath.

Psychopaths have always been with us. Indeed, certain psychopathic traits have survived because they’re useful in small doses: the cool dispassion of a surgeon, the tunnel vision of an Olympic athlete, the ambitious narcissism of many a politician. But when these attributes exist in the wrong combination or in extreme forms, they can produce a dangerously antisocial individual, or even a cold-blooded killer. Only in the past quarter century have researchers zeroed in on the early signs that indicate a child could be the next Ted Bundy.
Researchers believe that nearly 1 percent of children exhibit these traits, about as many as have autism or bipolar disorder.

Professor Quiet

4.1 mocowgirl replied to mocowgirl @4 2 years ago

more....

When Your Child Is a Psychopath - The Atlantic
Still, researchers stress that a callous child—even one who was born that way—is not automatically destined for psychopathy. By some estimates, four out of five children with these traits do not grow up to be psychopaths. The mystery—the one everyone is trying to solve—is why some of these children develop into normal adults while others end up on death row.

Atrained eye can spot a callous and unemotional child by age 3 or 4. Whereas normally developing children at that age grow agitated when they see other children cry—and either try to comfort them or bolt the scene—these kids show a chilly detachment. In fact, psychologists may even be able to trace these traits back to infancy. Researchers at King’s College London tested more than 200 five-week-old babies, tracking whether they preferred looking at a person’s face or at a red ball. Those who favored the ball displayed more callous traits two and a half years later.

As a child gets older, more-obvious warning signs appear. Kent Kiehl, a psychologist at the University of New Mexico and the author of The Psychopath Whisperer , says that one scary harbinger occurs when a kid who is 8, 9, or 10 years old commits a transgression or a crime while alone, without the pressure of peers. This reflects an interior impulse toward harm. Criminal versatility—committing different types of crimes in different settings—can also hint at future psychopathy.

But the biggest red flag is early violence. “Most of the psychopaths I meet in prison had been in fights with teachers in elementary school or junior high,” Kiehl says. “When I’d interview them, I’d say, ‘What’s the worst thing you did in school?’ And they’d say, ‘I beat the teacher unconscious.’ You’re like, That really happened? It turns out that’s very common.”

We have a fairly good idea of what an adult psychopathic brain looks like, thanks in part to Kiehl’s work. He has scanned the brains of hundreds of inmates at maximum-security prisons and chronicled the neural differences between average violent convicts and psychopaths. Broadly speaking, Kiehl and others believe that the psychopathic brain has at least two neural abnormalities—and that these same differences likely also occur in the brains of callous children.

The first abnormality appears in the limbic system, the set of brain structures involved in, among other things, processing emotions. In a psychopath’s brain, this area contains less gray matter. “It’s like a weaker muscle,” Kiehl says. A psychopath may understand, intellectually, that what he is doing is wrong, but he doesn’t feel it. “Psychopaths know the words but not the music” is how Kiehl describes it. “They just don’t have the same circuitry.”

Professor Principal

4.2 Ender replied to mocowgirl @4 2 years ago

My thought is that some people are just damaged. There is no help for some.

Professor Principal

5 Ender 2 years ago

Who in the word are these women that would email him and write him letters.

Professor Participates

5.1 Paula Bartholomew replied to Ender @5 2 years ago

The same kind who sent Richard Ramirez, Ted Bundy, Manson, and every other serial killer love letters and marriage proposals.....total brain dead and warped women.

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