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Shouted Out “Who Killed Michael Shereda?” When After All, Was It You and Me?
Another verse of Sympathy for the Demos? On Saturday, the 1st of September, 57-year-old Michael Shereda was surrounded with family, celebrating the joyous occasion of one of his granddaughter’s first birthday. Nearby, 22-year-old Miguel Mansour, sat on a bench inhaling a hallucinatory gas. Mr. Shereda moved, alone, to tell Miguel to stop his lawless conduct in front of children.
On Friday, September 7th, over 100 people gathered to honor Mr. Shereda’s memory as the murdered man was laid to rest. Miguel Mansour is in jail, pending psychiatric evaluation, prior to possible prosecution for first-degree murder. He had stabbed Shereda in a rage.
Witnesses said the victim allegedly had asked the suspect to stop taking drugs at a park bench at Grant Park in front of children when the suspect flew into a rage and attacked him. The victim was knocked to the ground and then stabbed more than one dozen times, said Amanda Pasho, who lives across from the park.
“(The victim) fell to the ground, he had blood all over him,” Pasho said. “He had his arms up to fend off the man from stabbing him. The man put his knee in the guy’s abdomen to hold him down and then put his arm across his face and began stabbing him with a knife, like non-stop, just jabbing at him with the knife.”
Michael Martin Shereda’s obituary:
SHEREDA, Michael. September 1, 2018. Age 57. Best friend & companion of Debbie. Loving father of the late David, Angel (Mark), Erin (Josh), Tami (Matt), Jillian (Dion), Angelina (Martinis) & Kelly. Treasured grandfather of Madie, Christian, Preston, Kalli, Keegan, Marky, Steven, Jeffrey, Nathaniel, Paisley, Anthony, Kaycee, Noah, Kylee, Kobe, Kassidy & Brightyn. Proud & adored great grandfather of Alana-Sophia & Greyson. Cherished brother of Jerry (Kris), Joan (Dan), Nancy (Nick), Janet (Leo) & Jimmy (Becky). Fun & loving uncle of many nieces & nephews.
Yes, it was Miguel Mansour who was seen killing Mr. Shereda, and he was apprehended in the same park. But who is responsible for the killer being there and daring to kill a community elder? A follow up story starts to unfold the chain of causation: the suspect had a warrant and had been released from a mental hospital.
According to Macomb County Probate Court records, Mansour showed signs of mental illness on Dec. 9, 2017, after which Sterling Heights Police Officer Lamar Kashat petitioned the court to admit Mansour to a mental hospital.
Mansour “wanted to pour gasoline on himself in an attempt to kill himself,” Kashat wrote Dec. 11. “He stated he wanted to kill aliens and eat them.”
Psychiatrist Dr. Basivi Baddigam recommended hospitalization. He diagnosed Mansour as bipolar and depressed “with psychosis,” court records show.
“He feels people can read his mind, and TV talks to him,” Baddigam wrote. “He wants to kill aliens. He admits mood swings and currently feeling depressed.”
Mansour was released Dec. 13 from Henry Ford Macomb Hospital East in Mount Clemens.
We are each dealt a genetic hand, and then life’s cards are laid down in a fateful game of Texas Hold Em. We all see the cards coming out on the table, and seek to explain mental illness by visible events. But, some people are dealt very bad genetic cards. In the case of several early adult onset mental disorders, things go badly wrong at the same time as lots of events we might seek to blame or control.
The onset of schizophrenia is typically in the late teens, early 20s. Men will usually develop schizophrenia between the ages of 18 and 25. Women tend to develop it about five years later. Bipolar disorder usually begins in early adulthood, although there are some children and adolescents who develop it. And there is an increase in the incidence of major depressive disorder after the age when puberty is reached.
Taking illegal drugs is not the “cause,” although it might be the “trigger,” and is frequently a disastrous attempt at self-medication. What is needed is sufficient support, with potentially coercive authority, to keep ill people’s brain chemistry sufficiently regulated to sustain normal thinking. But, Congress started emptying the mental hospitals over a generation ago, passing feel-good legislation for “deinstitutionalization” without ever funding all the community-based mental health systems needed, to keep people on the medications that promised to let most patients function, outside four walls. Maddeningly, the linked story in this paragraph was published in the New York Times in 1984.
With Congress and presidents supporting deinstitutionalization, it was hardly surprising that courts would start finding more and more for mentally ill individuals, against state and local authorities’ power to commit and hold individuals against their expressed, supposed will. Hence, a police officer saw the signs, and acted, a psychiatrist saw the signs, and acted, but two days later, an unstable man was released into the community.
At the time of the murder, there was a bench warrant for the arrest of Miguel Mansour.
In a case unrelated to the Utica homicide, he faces one count of third-degree home invasion and three counts of misdemeanor assault for an incident in June, according to Macomb County Circuit Court records. On Aug. 27, Mansour -– who was free on a personal recognizance bond — failed to appear for a circuit court arraignment/pre-trial conference. Circuit Judge Edward Servitto Jr. revoked a personal bond and signed a bench warrant for Mansour’s arrest.
So, a man was so mentally disturbed that he set off alarms with a police officer and a psychiatrist. Then he got only two days in a hospital, in December 2017. Then he was arrested for violent misdemeanors in June 2018, and released until a hearing at the end of August. This should have been an occasion for another, more serious, mental health intervention. The arrest warrant did not trigger any special alarm, informed by the potential risk of a mentally ill young man spiraling out of control. Under current law, it is most likely that Mansour will be convicted and imprisoned, where he will be one of many violent mentally ill inmates, medicated at state expense.
We have seen Congress act decisively and rapidly. See Obamacare, when Democratic majorities enacted a party priority. See the 2017 tax cuts, when Republicans acted on a party priority. Then see the very mixed response to the opioid epidemic, with President Trump doing what he can, while Congress picked and chose limited favored programs, rather than a comprehensive approach. President Trump’s comprehensive program to address the opioid epidemic includes a call for increased mental health funding. He announced this in his May 2018 Presidential Proclamation of National Mental Health Awareness Month:
My budget also requests new funding for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration to ensure more adults with serious mental illness receive Assertive Community Treatment, an evidence-based practice that provides a comprehensive array of services to reduce costly hospitalizations. Additionally, my budget maintains funding for the Community Mental Health Services Block Grant, which helps ensure that individuals with serious mental illness receive appropriate treatment in a timely manner. Further, it includes new targeted investments to help divert individuals with serious mental illnesses from the criminal justice system and into treatment. Finally, it funds important suicide prevention activities.
So, here we have another, in a decades’ long series of deaths, resulting from our elected officials emptying the mental hospitals, without then funding promised community safety nets. When we are truly motivated, enraged, and mobilized, our Congress critters move decisively, and with lightning speed. So, click away, shake your head with me, post a comment, and then? Will we, the people, truly demand real action at every level of government?
Published in Law
My, my, my. May both families heal and find peace.
Real action like demanding Snyder sign the next constitutional carry bill the legislature sends him?
Maybe the good citizens of Utica need to do some soul searching about why a raving low-life maniac was freed on a personal recognizance bond and allowed to huff away in the center of their park in the center of their town? Why did Mr. Shereda have to bravely confront this vile behavior by himself in the middle of a weekend afternoon in a children’s playground?
If Mansour is a citizen, what levels of government outside Michigan play a role here?
Do we really need a “national conversation” or a national program to spend billions on mental health hospitals to keep violent scumbags from infesting children’s playgrounds in small, prosperous towns?
I see I need to elaborate on the history which led to dangerous, mentally ill people “infesting children’s playgrounds in small, prosperous towns.” Congress took credit, over a generation ago, for feel good legislation, after bad PR (think One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest). Our elected representatives emptied the mental hospitals into our communities, and failed to fund the authorized community mental health centers, that would magically keep mentally ill people on their meds. Read the second news account again.
My cousin with schizophrenia beat his father to death on New Year’s Eve in 1996, badly injuring his mother.
He had stopped taking his meds and there was nothing his family could do, in spite of restraining orders.
Until the death.
Now my cousin is in an institution for the criminally insane and will never leave.
I don’t blame society for my uncle’s death, and I don’t blame my cousin. I don’t accept blame for my uncle’s death or for Michael Shereda’s death either.
The courts issuing retaining orders are papering over courts’ negligence, even culpability. The judges know the only effective order is one of lengthy commitment or compulsory, supervised, medication. That ends up being the order issued after the mentally ill person does great, criminal harm to someone.
My cousin lived for decades never knowing when his wife would have an episode. (They talk about off the meds, but my understanding is that getting and keeping the meds dialed in is not an exact science.) At least once she was found late at night on the nearby college campus with a large kitchen knife. He had his daughters lock themselves into their rooms at night while they were growing up. The problems aren’t easy for anyone to deal with.
My wife works at a specialty graduate school, and they have had at least three students who were problems over the years.
No Clifford, you need to elaborate on why this murderous scumbag is a “mentally ill person” requiring treatment and not a criminal who shouldn’t be huffing drugs unmolested in the middle of a town park in the weekend sunshine shortly after being arrested for breaking and entering.
What we need are brave men like Mr. Shereda armed in their confrontations with thugs infesting our public spaces and more jail cells warehousing these lowlives for lengthy terms after their first serious offences. Sure a few of these men are genuinely insane by M’Naughton Rule evaluation and should placed in mental hospitals.
If we need to rethink the short, medium and long term warehousing of the more than 6 million Americans with schizophrenia and other profoundly disabling mental disorders why is it the responsibility of Congress and the federal fisc? Traditionally these were state programs funded largely by state taxes.
Are you proposing a massive new federal program costing over $100,000 per bed per year?
It’s a tragic dimension of life. There are no fixes for human psychosis and no clinical arrangements without severe drawbacks.
Care managed by families, psychiatrists, social workers and local welfare agencies is probably best for the majority of psychotics who can remain non-violent. For those who cannot, there’s prison for the criminals and hospitals for the criminally insane. Dealing with psychotics is always a harrowing ordeal.
It wasn’t Congress that created the supine culture which has ceded our public spaces to grifters, druggies, criminals and sundry other lowlives. And Congress won’t fix this problem.
I live in one of the reddest counties in Colorado. A beautiful small mountain community with a Town Council and BoCC comprised entirely of Republicans. When panhandlers, grifters and aggressive beggars set up shop ten years ago the local police were relying on a 30 year old dissent by Justice Douglas to do nothing. We organized the local merchants and parents to recall the entire Town Council unless the police took action.
They did. Ceding your parks and downtown streets to lowlives is a choice.
Supine. That’s part of the prohlem.
And these people are mentally ill. That’s another part of the problem that all the programs and love can’t cure.
And the majority of humans with profound mental problems struggle, sometimes on a minute by minute basis, to persist and don’t commit grave violent crimes. The meds work … until they don’t. A humane patient centered clinic staffed by caring souls with limitless patience works .. until it doesn’t. Loving families work until tragic things happen.
I realize my comments above convey a lack of sympathy but sometimes sympathy doesn’t work either, and certainly sympathy towards those with violent criminal propensities is misplaced.
I have no answers but those answers won’t be found in Congress.
Yes there are.
Wealthy people “institutionalize” their loved ones. I know, because my loved one was “institutionalized,” which is to say that she spent three years in a residential recovery program that did wonders for her. Though she was not violent, her illness was not something that could be managed even by a very loving, very motivated, educated and well-informed middle-class family with access to the best that the community had to offer in the way of medical care and support. She needed supportive, round-the-clock care while the medications were adjusted, and she needed to learn the skills required to manage her malfunctioning brain. This was not easy and it took time.
Having done that program, now she is capable of living a real and meaningful life with the support of those family and community resources. For some people, independent or even relatively independent life will not be possible even with treatment, and they will require long-term care…but the same is true of plenty of of other human beings with major disabilities. Should the taxpayer be on the hook for looking after Alzheimer’s patients who can’t afford a nursing home? Shall we imprison the old guy I dealt with last year who, after the onset of his illness, beat up his elderly wife?
Without that program, my loved one might well have appeared to to you as a “scumbag” if you had encountered her in a park. She is anything but.
There are people with severe illnesses that are simply beyond the scope of “community care.” We need Asylums and yes, this is an appropriate role for government funds. This isn’t something even a committed, caring family can handle, and the results of untreated mental illness are so incredibly damaging to the community and the country.
And by the way, taxpayers are already footing the bill for “institutionalizing” the mentally ill. We pay for our prison system—the largest single provider of mental health care. We pay for homeless shelters and “day” shelters. We pay police officers to sit around in emergency rooms for days at a time, waiting for a bed to open up for the crazy guy who has flipped out for the fifteenth time. Mental illness has significant co-morbidity with drug addiction, so we can count at least some of the cost of the War on Drugs as the price of untreated bipolar, schizophrenia, schizo-affective disorder and major depression. And we are paying an unbelievable cost in human suffering even as we waste real human potential.
My folks, who retired out of the Army medical center on the same base, Fort Lewis, that hosted the senior ROTC summer camp, told the story years ago from a psychiatrist. A wonderful 20 year old woman, a successful college student on route to commissioning and a promising military career, had her mental break in the middle of the month long training that would qualify her for commissioning. Her parents had entrusted their daughter to the Army and now had a broken child who would be a life-time mental patient. The Army did not break her, but we all pay for her care through the VA.
I honestly do not see how government can avoid involvement. I suppose we could just kill all the mentally ill when they act up, but then we wouldn’t have Judithann here, which would be a tragedy.
Government is necessary to enforce commitment orders. The facilities can be privately run, with various management groups bidding for the contract. People who are that broken are either going to end up in jail, a mental hospital, or dead. Only one has a chance of making the person a taxpaying productive citizen. We have programs that could be changed that would not cost more money.
Thank you, @omegapaladin for your kind words :)
My first psychotic break was about 17 years ago, in Massachusetts; at that time, it was possible to force mentally ill people in Massachusetts to take their meds: once, when I was in the psych ward and refusing to take meds, there was a court hearing and I was informed that if I did not agree to swallow the pills, I would be forcibly injected. I agreed to swallow the pills :)
The law in Mass has since changed: even when someone is in an institution, they cannot be forced to take their medication, ever, apparently. I don’t think this is a good thing: it makes the world a more dangerous place for everyone, especially non violent people who are also in the psych ward with those who refuse their meds.
It seems that most of those who want to stand up for the “rights” of mentally ill people don’t care much when those same mentally ill people kill someone, or kill themselves, or freeze to death. That is a strange kind of compassion.
I agree here. I am out of the community mental health business, but I am strongly for using the power of the state to assist people in getting the treatment they need. Someone in the grip of psychosis is not a rational actor. Same with addiction.
As always…bless you, Judithann!
Predicting human behavior is one of the most difficult things we human beings ever try to do. When I was teaching my kids how to drive, I told them, “Assume every person on the road around you is insane. What does a left blinker light mean? If you answer, ‘The driver forgot to shut off his blinker,’ you may take my car.'” :-)
When I began work in acquisitions for a book publisher, the director of our department said to us, “When you are rejecting manuscripts, be extremely careful. Say as little as possible. Assume the person you are writing to is crazy.” Excellent advice.
When the states started breaking down the old mental hospitals, the number of people the doctors found inside these horrid places who should never have been there was staggering. When societies give the power to get rid of nuisance people to the government, watch out.
I hate tragedies like the one described in the OP, and there’s no doubt we have now gone too far the other way in not helping enough people by giving them 24-hour, round-the-clock care until they are well enough to function on their own.
But even in the best possible situation in which we have sufficient beds available to help people in mental distress, there will be mistakes in both directions–people who are out who should be in and people who are in who should be out. And there are very high functioning psychotics out there who look perfectly normal. It will always be a very tough call for the courts to make.
In the end I think we have to accept that fact and count on our Second Amendment right to arm ourselves as our last line of defense. And practice, to borrow from the Navy SEALs, situational awareness at all times. The price of freedom is intelligent living as individuals. Be careful out there. I like the VUCA image: volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. That’s what life is like in a free society. :-)
Yes, re-institutionalization would probably be a net benefit – keeping in mind that the reasons for the de- were not just cheapness, but the horror shows of state mental hospitals “exposed” by the “One Flew” and the TV exposes of Geraldo Rivera and the like. The cheapness smear is often used against Governor Reagan, as if it wasn’t a country-wide reaction to abuses that (likely) incorrectly erred too far on the side of the liberty of these individuals.
And, the proper loci of action are the states. The federal government does not have the general police power, but the states do.
Basically, the federal government can do some regulatory changes which will not cost more money. For example, if someone is getting certain federal benefits, they can’t be applied toward the person being in a mental asylum. The federal benefits should be on the chopping block in the future, but in the mean time it should be available to someone in a facility that has a chance of making the person a productive member of society and definitely reduces the chance of them hurting someone.
The asylums were state agencies before, no reason to change it.
I don’t mind paying taxes if it reduces the number of crazy bums I have to deal with.
Several comments have referred to the exercise of our right to armed self defense. I do not dispute that right, and urge the responsible exercise of it. And.
You cannot draw and threaten someone sitting on a bench doing drugs.
You are unlikely to draw and successfully fire if you get inside lunging distance and find a man on top of you, stabbing you to death.
If a friend or family member is armed and has enough training, they might stop the attack once it starts, and may save your life. This suggests that advanced first aid training is also important.
Even when a group of professional police choose to close with a mentally ill person, death for an armed, trained officer may follow. See my earlier eulogy for a fallen Arizona DPS (state patrol) officer.
Clifford, the range of effective options open to you when you “get inside” lunging distance and “find” a man with knees on your arms stabbing you repeatedly in the chest is admittedly limited.
Yet that is a risible way to frame this issue.
What if this brave man were armed, trained and called for the man to stop his illegal behavior from, let’s say, 40 feet. If self defense cannot be effective here then you might as well go whole Hogg frankly.
What if this brave man could call 911 in this small town and the police could respond promptly and arrest a criminal lowlife plaguing a children’s park? Is that such a radical assumption? Clearly, Mr. Shereda couldn’t operate on this assumption. Why? Lack of a cell phone? Or pervasive indulgence of drugs and criminals in our public spaces?
Collapsing the distinction between the mentally ill who struggle with their internal demons and engage in patterns of self harm with those who commit acts of unspeakable violence on others is part of the problem. A big part. And it is unfair to the great majority who commit no horrible acts.
We should also be very realistic about the “cures” for psychosis. Most meds are essentially tranquilizers. For some, thank God, they give a sufferer the space for their better angels to regain control. For many others, they simply make daily life sufferable.
The most effective and widely prescribed anti-psychotic was discovered almost 70 years ago. Three years before the discovery of the structure of DNA.
There are no easy answers here. Though some easy answers — after all it was you and me — are a little too pat (though I am clearly finding fault in the community responses to public criminality).
That response gained popularity in response to the question “Who killed the Kennedys?”
Correct answer: a communist and a Palestinian fanatic. Confession: I’ve always rather admired Jack Ruby.
There are no easy answers.
I do think we need to have coercive power to force treatment. That power must be well monitored and not abused. It will not be perfect, but we can do better than we are now.
1 in 5 people will have a significant mental health episode in their lives. We, as a society, do not spend enough money on mental illness prevention and treatment.
But do we want those coercive powers exercise by Congress (especially the Congresses we may see in 20 years) or by local governments with local court supervision? Do we want this regimen of enforced mental health run exclusively by hospitals and clinics with sponsors who have passed SPLC bona fides? After Christians have been excluded from adoption and children’s services, who doubts that mental health and rehabilitation will be next?
Let’s be clear. Half the country thinks more than half of the thoughts expressed on Ricochet are borderline psychotic.
I would rather it be local, and I look to the Federal Government to monitor the states to prevent rights from being violated.
True psychotic behavior is clear and no one would mistake it for political beliefs. If you have seen it, you know what it is. A non-perfect system can be put into place. We can do better than we do now.
By the way, Quake, what is your experience working with chronic mental illness or substance use disorder?
I have 25 years in the field.
The contest between secularist-dominated mental health professions and Christianity is worthy of a separate set of posts. Indeed, I suspect you’ll even find a book or two on point.
Please read the linked 1984 NYT article. You seem to have missed my point about Congress and the President setting the conditions for courts to go further. Local courts and elected officials are bound by higher courts’ decisions. We have to reverse the trend. Congress has to build a record of how the laws and court decisions have done harm all the way around. Set the conditions under which precedent can be overturned. Given the extensive federal reach in the healthcare funding systems, there is no path to success that does not include significant federal legislation.
There was nothing risible about my entire comment, from which you chose to fashion a staw man, to set alight, to signal what?
I always know exactly what I am invoking with musical allusions in titles. In this case, neither a communist, nor a Palestinian fanatic, nor a jihadist, nor even a member of a violent gang, did the killing. But you wish to divert attention, where you would not if we were talking about someone professing loyalty to a transnational gang or murderous ideology.
I wish you two folks would find common ground. And even if people can carry weapons, there are reasons why many of us won’t. At age 67, in a life or death situation, my hands would shake so much I’d probably lose my gun to the knife wielder. If grandkids were around, I wouldn’t carry.
Antipsychotics are an entirely separate branch from the kind of tranquilizers you use for anxiety or sleeplessness. (Xanax, Valium, etc) They have different side effects, often including sedation, but they are closer to anti-depressants in how they effect brain chemistry. For one, they are not addictive / drugs of abuse like most tranquilizers. If you are not psychotic or otherwise mentally ill, you are much more likely to receive antipsychotic for extreme nausea like that from cancer chemotherapy. They are also under active development, and from what I read the most common prescriptions are the newer drugs that are more powerful with less side effects. It’s not like every patient is getting Thorazine (which is deprecated) and Haldol nowadays.
The problem is even the newer drugs have some nasty side effects, which often cause patients to drop the drugs. They are really rough in long term therapy, especially the older drugs. That’s why the people need to be confined and medication enforced.