This is sad, and it’s not the first time. Kevin Heisinger, 24, had attended student orientation at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and was taking the train back to his home in Evanston, Illinois. That train makes a stop in Kalamazoo, where I live, and while he was using the station bathroom a schizophrenic man who had stopped taking his medications beat him to death.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time in recent years that a mentally ill person has killed a student in Kalamazoo. About 6 years ago, a schizophrenic man in an assisted-living style community stabbed to death a female graduate student who was working at the facility as part of her efforts to become a social worker.
I covered the murder trial for a local paper, and to be honest I don’t know how court reporters do that kind of work. The testimony was very graphic, and I had more than a few nightmares over the three or four weeks of the trial (this was especially so since it was clear that the victim likely suffered immensely as she was still alive but way past medical help when passersby found her).
In Detroit a couple years ago two women murdered a social worker who was doing her best to try to help one of the women regain custody of her child, who had been removed from the home following abuse charges. After that there was briefly a movement to get a law passed that would have required police to accompany social workers if the social worker requested it.
The sad irony of these cases is that social workers and others tend to dismiss as ignorant and even bigoted people in communities who oppose having mental health facilities located near them. For awhile the state of Michigan wanted to put an assisted living home for mentally ill individuals. When the local neighborhood association protested that there was already one such facility in the immediate area and the state should try to find someplace else to locate it, the opponents were generally portrayed as backwards and to a large degree bigoted by the local media and those advocating for the facility. Eventually, though, the state did change its mind.
Clearly society needs to offer assistance to the mentally ill, but too often state agencies, officials, and social workers have a “my way or the highway” attitude that dismisses legitimate community concerns.