Lakewood Cop Killer’s Mental Tailspin
Yesterday, the Seattle Times had a good article on the “mental tailspin” Maurice Clemmons, who shot and killed four Lakewood, Wash. police officers on Sunday, had descended into. It’s mostly an interview with Clemmons’ uncle in Arkansas, who is a corrections officer there, and it is disturbing reading.
While it does make me think that mental illness may have played a larger role in this tragedy than I thought initially, the murderer still reads to me as being a sociopath. And, as a reader chided me the other day, you’re right: it’s not an either or. The line between sociopathy (or anti-social personality disorder if you prefer) and mental illness is very thin.
I once had a mental health evaluator who did forensic exams tell me that she feared having to evaluate sociopaths because they always seemed so sane and, she knew, always got through the system and back out into the public, where they presented real dangers to the public.
I’ve read the probable cause statement in Clemmons’ child rape case. It is one of the most disgusting and bizarre documents I’ve read in many years of reading PCs. It’s too disturbing to make publicly available. Suffice to say, Clemmons had sex with one 12-year-old girl (more than once) while wandering around proclaiming himself Christ and muttering other religious oddities. Apparently this was out of character for him.
While clearly in meltdown mode, people with extreme mental illnesses don’t ordinarily go around raping kids and shooting up police. Sociopaths do, however.
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