Criminal Responsibility

It certainly speaks to the compassion in this community when so many friends and co workers of Phyllis Hards have spoken out through their pain with such empathy towards the man who took her life.

The recent sentencing of Dale Huttunen has also generated some frustration and a sense that the sentence is not long enough.

I would like to remind everyone that Dale Huttunen has a life sentence. He is incarcerated in the solitary confinement of his mental illness. Two lives were lost that day, although it could be argued that Mr.Huttanen's had been gone long before this tragedy occurred. We will continue to hear of these types of violent acts as long as we continue to ignore the monster under the bed that is mental illness.

We are putting people on the street with serious problems. There are people in our community whose mental illnesses have either been unrecognized, ignored, under treated, languished on waiting lists, or treated and released into the world to get along by themselves. Which of them is the next to lose touch and hurt or kill someone?

In many cases the mentally ill are unemployed, very poor, and often homeless. I challenge anyone to try and find assistance for a mentally ill loved one with a lack of funds. How do we suppose the mentally ill are to live the best life they can and obtain the immediate and ongoing treatment they need if they have no money to do so?

How many times was Mr. Huttunen turned away while he journeyed through the underfunded and poorly coordinated revolving doors of mental health services available to him until he lost control of the forces within himself?

We all pay a price for mental illness going untreated and undertreated. Phyllis Hards paid the ultimate price. Mr. Huttunen pays with living the torture of knowing what he did to an innocent and helpless elderly woman and he has to live with that for the rest of his sad and impoverished life. There is no time off for good behavior.

As we remember Phylis Hards and her horrific death, we need to mourn a system that rejects and then criminalizes those on the margins of society...those with severe, untreated mental illness. Locking them up in prison after they do something horrible is not the answer. Ignoring the issue does not make the problem disappear, just as we learned in our community on April 26, 2006.