According to victim and witness statements, the suspect yelled "Allahu Akbar" during both attacks, according to NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch. The NYPD is currently evaluating whether this is a potential hate crime, she said....
While the perpetrator has no known mental health history with the NYPD, the initial investigation suggests that mental health may have been a factor, the commissioner said.
More than a year before Caleb Vazquez and a friend attacked a mosque in San Diego and killed three people, the police were so alarmed by Mr. Vazquez’s behavior that they secured a court order to confiscate his father’s guns.
“Child was involved in suspicious behavior idolizing nazis and mass shooters,” a police officer wrote in a January 2025 protective order.
Mr. Vazquez, who was found dead on Monday shortly after the police say he and a friend attacked the Islamic Center of San Diego, had at some point been placed in an involuntary psychiatric hold, according to documents filed at San Diego Superior Court.
He must have been pretty dangerous to get an involuntary psychiatric hold. Before red flag laws, people that were thought to be dangerous to self or others would be subject to psychiatric observation. Taking away guns was not the goal. It was making them nit dangerous with all weapons: guns, gasoline, cars, knives, baseball bats. But red flag laws are gun-specific because they are not about public safety but gun confiscation.
One of the deranged teens behind the San Diego mosque shooting walked away from a mental health facility the day before carrying out Monday’s deadly attack, sources said.
Caleb Vazquez, 18, left the Park Mental Health Treatment Center the morning before killing three people at an Islamic center with 17-year-old Cain Clark, law enforcement sources told The Post.
What does "walked away" mean? He was apparently on a temporary psychiatric hold which could mean Welfare & Institutions section 5150 (72 hours for observation) or 5250 ("not more than 14 days of intensive treatment related to the mental health disorder or impairment by chronic alcoholism"). Neither of those something from which you "walk away." Both are part of the deeper problem of deinstitutionalization. As the psychiatrist who treated my brother during his first 5250 stay put it: "Anyone who still appears dangerous to a judge after 14 days of Thorazine, is pretty scary."
4/15/26 KETV. Police responded to a kidnapping:
Investigators said officers arrived at the location and immediately found 31-year-old Noemi Guzman near the southern parking lot entry, standing by a shopping cart with the child inside.
Omaha police said Guzman was making multiple threats with the knife, and officers gave multiple verbal commands for her to drop the knife. She refused to drop it and cut the boy, officials said.
Two officers shot the woman, Noemi Guzman, after she cut the boy and refused to drop a knife she had stolen from the store, the police department said in a news release....
Omaha police said Guzman is the same woman accused of stabbing her father and breaking into the rectory of an Omaha church.
In 2024, investigators said Guzman doused her father with a flammable liquid and cut him with a knife.
That previous crime ended up:
Guzman pleaded not guilty to charges of assault, arson, burglary, and criminal mischief. She was later found not responsible by reason of insanity. The case is still open. KETV Investigates is continuing to examine the court documents.
I understand that there may have been good reason to find her not guilty by reason of insanity. (This incident seems to confirm it.) But why would you put someone out on the street with a history of insane violence? She could not lawfully buy or possess a gun, but as she demonstrated, getting hold of deadly weapons is not hard. In addition to risk to others, it is hard to imagine that she would be safe on her own. She certainly was not in this situation.
Months before Jesse Van Rootselaar became the suspect in the mass shooting that devastated a rural town in British Columbia, Canada, OpenAI considered alerting law enforcement about her interactions with its ChatGPT chatbot, the company said.
While using ChatGPT last June, Van Rootselaar described scenarios involving gun violence over the course of several days, according to people familiar with the matter.
Her posts, flagged by an automated review system, alarmed employees at OpenAI. Internally, about a dozen staffers debated whether to take action on Van Rootselaar’s posts. Some employees interpreted Van Rootselaar’s writings as an indication of potential real-world violence, and urged leaders to alert Canadian law enforcement about her behavior, the people familiar with the matter said.
OpenAI leaders ultimately decided not to contact authorities.
A spokeswoman for OpenAI said the company banned Van Rootselaar’s account but determined that her activity didn’t meet the criteria for reporting to law enforcement, which would have required that it constituted a credible and imminent risk of serious physical harm to others.
I would not want the Department of Pre-Crime making decisions about gun rights, but certainly a mental evaluation could be justified.
Researchers analyzed health data on 460,000 teenagers in the Kaiser Permanente Health System in Northern California. The teens were followed until they were 25 years old. The data included annual screenings for substance use and any mental health diagnoses from the health records. Researchers excluded the adolescents who had symptoms of mental illnesses before using cannabis.
"We looked at kids using cannabis before they had any evidence of these psychiatric conditions and then followed them to understand if they were more likely or less likely to develop them," says Dr. Lynn Silver, a pediatrician and researcher at the Public Health Institute, and an author of the new study.
They found that the teens who reported using cannabis in the past year were at a higher risk of being diagnosed with several mental health conditions a few years later, compared to teens who didn't use cannabis.
Teens who reported using cannabis had twice the risk of developing two serious mental illnesses: bipolar, which manifests as alternating episodes of depression and mania, and psychotic disorders, such as schizophrenia which involve a break with reality.
Now, only a small fraction — nearly 4,000 — of all teens in the study were diagnosed with each of these two disorders. Both bipolar and psychotic disorders are among the most serious and disabling of mental illnesses....
Silver points out these illnesses are expensive to treat and come at a high cost to society. The U.S. cannabis market is an industry with a value in the tens-of-billions — but the societal cost of schizophrenia has been calculated to be $350 billion a year.
The Christchurch study also controlled for prodomal symptoms of mental illness (was this person showing signs that this was there first?) as well. While only "a small fraction" became mentally ill, these illnesses, especially schizophrenia, are terribly destructive to a society, along with the afflicted individuals. Hence, George Soros' funding of legalizing marijuana.
Nick Reiner was suffering with worsening schizophrenia and became 'erratic and dangerous' when doctors changed his psych medication weeks before he allegedly murdered his parents, insiders say."
Highlights
- •
Mental health hospitalization rates are higher after abortion than deliveries.- •
Risk is elevated for psychiatric disorders, substance use, and suicide attempts.- •
Patients with preexisting mental illness or age <25 years are most at risk.- •
Risk of mental disorders is greatest within five years of abortion.- •
Risk of most mental disorders disappears 17 years after an abortion.Conservative Woman reports on efforts to legalize abortion until birth in Britain, which like most European nations has much more restrictive abortion laws than Roe v. Wade America.
Federal charges were filed on Wednesday against a man accused of setting a woman on fire on a CTA Blue Line train in downtown Chicago this week.Lawrence Reed, 50, was charged in a criminal complaint with committing a terrorist attack or other violence on a mass transportation system — a federal offense rather than a state offense.
Later in the article is discussion of video showing him buying gasoline, his long criminal history, and his bizarre behavior before the judge.
Mental illness is at the core of much of what is wrong in most big cities. This guy's release without bail is another consequence of seeing racial equity as an important part of the criminal justice system.
New evidence confirms a long-held theory that people with schizophrenia hear 'voices' in their heads by misattributing inner speech as external..."When we speak – even just in our heads – the part of the brain that processes sounds from the outside world becomes less active," Whitford explains. "This is because the brain predicts the sound of our own voice. But in people who hear voices, this prediction seems to go wrong, and the brain reacts as if the voice is coming from someone else."
"The suspect, who used to work as an Uber driver and lived in the Pacific Palisades at the time, did not enter a plea at a federal court appearance on Wednesday in Orlando.
"Authorities painted a picture of a man singularly focused on a city going up in flames at a news conference Wednesday, saying the suspect repeatedly watched a rap video that included “objects being lit on fire” in the days before allegedly setting the fire.
"The suspect also allegedly prompted ChatGPT to generate a “dystopian painting showing in part a burning forest and a crowd fleeing from it,” in the months before the fire started, Essayli said."
It would be tempting to blame social media or rap. AI use is more symptom I think of an underlying pyromania.
The appropriate answer, of course, is match control. "If it saves one life..."
10/3/25 Daily Mail reports that an airliner made an emergency stop because a passenger wearing 15 layers of masks starting screaming that LGBTQs were giving him cancer.
A man suspected of killing four people at a Montana bar and evading capture for a week while hundreds of law enforcement officers searched for him in the nearby mountains faces four counts of murder, according to court records....
"Authorities have not commented on a potential motive for the 45-year-old former soldier. His niece has said Brown long struggled with mental illness."
New York City’s deadliest shooting in 25 years – in a state with some of the toughest gun laws in the nation – is raising questions about how a gunman with a history of mental health issues was able to obtain multiple firearms and drive undetected across several states to carry out the attack.
The gunman who walked into a Midtown Manhattan office building on Monday, M4 assault-style rifle in hand, and sprayed it with gunfire, had a license to carry a concealed weapon in his home state of Nevada, officials said.
He also had been placed on psychiatric hold in 2022 and 2024, law enforcement sources told CNN. But that may not have necessarily prohibited him from obtaining his license in 2022 or buying firearms – depending on the circumstances of the holds, according to gun law experts.
So what went wrong?
While public health experts continue to stress that the vast majority of people experiencing mental health challenges are not violent, questions remain about the details of Tamura’s psychiatric holds and if they would have shown up in a background check.
The case underscores the wide gap in sharing mental health data with the federal government – an issue that can be attributed to inadequate funding to manage or require the data, as well as privacy issues, according to Thomas Chittum, former associate deputy director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Yes, most people "experiencing mental health challenges are not violent," so why is the article focused on two observational holds of Tamura?
Tamura was arrested and charged with misdemeanor trespassing in 2023 in Clark County, Nevada, after he refused to leave a Las Vegas casino after attempting to cash out about $5,000, according to a police incident report. A court database suggests a district attorney declined to pursue the case, meaning the incident wouldn’t have prevented him from obtaining a gun.
The case also throws private gun sales under the microscope.
The AR-15 style weapon used in the shooting was legally purchased last year by the gunman’s supervisor at the Vegas casino where he worked, two law enforcement officials told CNN. The supervisor then assembled it and sold it to Tamura for $1,400, the officials said, citing an interview with the supervisor who is cooperating with authorities.
I suspect black people also have high rates of arrest without prosecutions but that is just racism. Different rules should apparently apply to whites and apparently Asians.
As for the psychiatric holds, it’s difficult to say without knowing the details whether they would have shown up in a background check or prevented Tamura from purchasing weapons, experts say.
“If you were on a 48-hour hold, if you were released at the end of that, it would not affect your ability to possess firearms under federal law,” Chittum said.
Most states barely touch on the area of mental health when a person applies for a gun license due to concerns over privacy issues and stigmatizing people who have mental health issues, according to Eller. One concern, for example, is soldiers who struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, might be reluctant to seek help because they fear their treatment history would deprive them of possessing firearms.
But we were just assured that most people "experiencing mental health challenges are not violent." So why is this a concern?
There’s a concerted effort by veterans’ groups and advocacy organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union to fight against the sharing of mental health records with the National Crime Information Center and local law enforcement, which most states rely on for background checks, according to Eller.
“Groups have been combating that because simply being mentally ill doesn’t mean you’re mentally incompetent, nor does it mean you’re a danger,” he added.
The good news: Nevada requires private party firearms transfer background checks.
In Nevada, the private sale of a firearm between two parties requires a federal background check before the transfer is complete. Both individuals must go to a federally licensed firearm dealer, which conducts the background check on their behalf. There are limited exceptions, including firearm transfers between immediate family members, which do not require this process.
If the private sale between Tamura and the supervisor did abide by the law and the facts can’t prove the supervisor had any knowledge of possible disqualifiers in Tamura’s history, including intended use of the firearm, then the seller likely won’t be prosecuted, according to Eller and Chittum.
Federal law doesn’t impose any obligation on private gun sellers to identify the buyer, conduct a background check or keep any record of the sale, Chittum said.
The Nevada law enforcing background checks for private sales was implemented in January 2020, closing the so-called “gun show loophole” that gun safety advocates have long criticized as a means for bypassing records checks that can flag past criminal history....
Because a concealed carry permit would exempt an individual for five years from a background check when buying a firearm from a licensed dealer, it creates a “nuanced area” where a person could obtain a license to carry and then subsequently be convicted or have a mental health prohibitor and might still be able to use their card to purchase a firearm and avoid the background check, Chittum said.
Some states recognize this issue and routinely run background checks on licensed holders to determine if their license is still valid, Chittum said. Red flag laws, including the one in Nevada, aim to keep guns out of the hands of those who pose a threat to themselves or others.
I agree that states that regularly run background checks on licensees are a good thing; some do so monthly. But this would not have caught anything on this guy. Fortunately, Nevada has a red flag law--for all the good it did.
So, the panaceas of the gun banners: mandatory background checks and red flag laws accomplished nothing. All they have left are gun bans and magazine size limits, which will work just fine unless he uses a handgun. Even a revolver would have accomplished his end result.
CASSIA COUNTY, Idaho — The Burley man arrested in connection with four deaths in two southern Idaho counties was charged with first-degree murder Wednesday.
On Thursday afternoon, the family of Naylor issued a statement on his charges, and the families involved in the case:Emily RaeAnn Awada
Most people who live in the Burley/Rupert community and many of our friends and family members elsewhere have by now heard of the tragedy that occurred on Monday involving our father. We find it necessary to say something out of respect for the victims involved and their family's as well as the community we have been a part of and loved. As mothers, wives, daughters, and granddaughters ourselves it is unfathomable to imagine something so horrific taking place and losing a loved one in such a tragic way. Our hearts and thoughts will forever be with every life touched by this terrible loss.
As daughters we feel that our father finally lost his lifelong battle with a very severe mental illness that has plagued him and our family throughout most of his life. This is the worst type of ending imaginable for first and foremost his victims, but also his family and for himself. We believe that once he has received proper psychiatric care he is going to realize the devastation he has caused, and he is going to have to live with this the rest of his life. We know that if he were in his right mind he would be horrified by his actions. Schizophrenia is a disease that, when left untreated, wreaks havoc on a person's entire life and well-being. Unfortunately, those who suffer often do not recognize they need help, and it is very difficult to get them the help they need against their will. This paired with a lack of community resources or awareness of how to handle mental illness appropriately, it can feel next to impossible to get people the help they need when they need it.
We would again like to express our deepest condolences for the victims and their families, as well as the entire community that has been affected by the events of this past week.
Sincerely,
Kayla, Emily, Hannah, and Kim
My brother's assaults on strangers were never even close to this severe, but I know full well the sense of upset that this tragedy was not stopped before it was too late. Every family member goes through grief and frustration for many years before it ends up here. The well-established correlation between heavy marijuana use and schizophrenia is part of why I have become a fierce opponent of decriminalizing marijuana. While the primary victim is the pothead, there is plenty of secondary damage.
Little else is known about the incident. Authorities say the 40-year-old killer was "known to police", but they haven't revealed a motive for the rampage - only indicating it was unlikely to have been terrorism. "
"If he did indeed target women, why? Were there just more women in his path? Did he think they posed less of a physical threat? Did he resent them?
"Police have said it's a "very, very complex investigation" which will take time, but at this stage they have pointed to his mental health and said there is no indication any ideology was a motive.
"His parents - who spotted their son on the news and alerted police - have said he was a diagnosed schizophrenic who had gone off his medication, suggesting he may have been obsessed with knives."
