Here's a guy who clearly had many, many red flags and yet he did not get appropriate intervention which could have saved lives! I am so tired of people minimizing, rationalizing, explaining and denying when there's someone who is acting bizarre and needs help! I can't believe the police said he was "so kind and polite" Argh!!!
In the last month, my teenage daughter has had two young men come into her life who had major issues--both of them kind and polite. The first one told my daughter that he was going to shoot someone at school. The kid said he was not joking and he had a list of kids he wanted to shoot. So my daughter reported him. You would not believe what happened next! They called him in and told him my daughter reported him. He cried and said he would never hurt anyone. His parents said that he was "on the spectrum" and was getting therapy. The principal then emails me and says he's convinced that the kid had no intent (because the kid said he didn't mean it). That night the kid goes home and starts obsessively texting my daughter--he's obsessed and angry. We tried to get the parents and the principal to intervene again and they just kept making excuses for him saying, "It's really hard for kids on the spectrum to regulate their behavior--it takes time-- he's in therapy etc etc. He doesn't intend to hurt your daughter he just feels rejected! etc etc" Finally, as the texts got progressively more hostile, they intervened and..... took his phone away.
We've had another young man who glommed on to our daughter as a new "best friend". He was incredibly controlling and every once in a while would reveal a very creepy side. He said he could see dead bodies in their graves in the cemetary. He told me he could see "beings" from the dead just as clear as he could see people and he knew they weren't hallucinations because he had had those too and they were different! He also had several inappropriate sexual comments that scared our daughter. The rest of the time he was oh so kind and polite. We tried at various times to delicately extricate our daughter from him, but his mother would get involved, saying how wonderful it was for her son to have a friend like our daughter because he was struggling so much with his anxiety and loneliness and she was such a huge support to him. I finally told her I think your son has more going on than just anxiety--but she was in complete denial. She just had endless excuses--about the sexual comments ("I don't see how a woman can be sexually assaulted. I mean can't she just close her vagina?") she said "Oh he's just confused about sex and exploring his sexuality..." blah blah blah.
He just showed up on my doorstep this week when I was home alone and scared the crap out of me. He was angry and claimed he got kicked out of the house. I quickly shut the door and locked it and called his mom. He hadn't been kicked out of the house. I told her we don't want a relationship anymore! I have empathy for parents struggling with their kids, but I have to protect my family first.
Parents and therapists need to be more proactive and stop making excuses and minimizing! The above behaviors seem more problematic to me than just being on the spectrum or having anxiety. Now I'm not blaming ER's parents, because it does sound like he was out of the house and on his own and the parents even called the police.
It drives me crazy--and this is from a mom of a Bipolar kid, so I know how hard mental illness is. But people need to get real help and professionals like therapists and police need to take those red flags more seriously! This guy was super creepy and a raging malignant narcissist. It should have been obvious he was dangerous. JMO!!
