Another Mass Shooting Caused By Mental Health System Failure

From 11/21/14 Tampa Bay Times:

By this point, on Oct. 8 — six weeks before May would walk into the Strozier Library on the FSU campus, level a handgun and start shooting, wounding three — May's friends had tried at least three times to get him the care he desperately needed. Every time, they were told, he didn't qualify for that care.

In interviews with the Tampa Bay Times on Friday, May's friends described their frustrations over the past three months with the area's mental health care system, one that couldn't save May despite desperate pleas from loved ones who watched him dissolve into paranoia before their eyes.

"You have to commit a crime to get the help you need. Why isn't it the reverse?" said Kimberly Snagg, a Houston lawyer who described May as one of her best friends. "This could have been avoided. The entire thing."

By late summer, May had begun acting strangely, his friends said. He was worried his neighbors were watching him. He heard them talking about him through the walls of his apartment.

It was alarming to his friends, but it was nothing, they said, compared to what was still to come.
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May told his friends that the officers at the Las Cruces Police Department laughed at him when he showed up on the morning of Sept. 7 to make a bizarre report: Someone was watching him through a camera hidden in his apartment. And he was hearing voices coming in through the walls as he bathed.