what do you do if you're a parent of an adult child who is mentally challenged and then goes and performs a horrible horrible act we're going to find out tonight with the wakey prayer in public exposure well welcome to the show thanks for having me first off as one father to another i feel sorry for your loss and for the loss of everyone in this particular circumstance your son was in stoic yes so we got to go back to the day of the event as the cafe racer event took place how did you find out my wife called me i was on the freeway coming down to her house i was around north gate i was going to get off at that the universe and she called me and she was watching t v she had just seen the mug shot photo from the cameras inside the race or she had seen our son standing there and there was no question in her mind her brother's son came over about fifteen minutes after i arrived he had seen to that scene and there was no question there was no question can you describe the feeling at that moment that dad you realize that your son had been the one who would there wasn't any feeling there wasn't any feeling it was just other surprise and numbness at that point protective numbness i've almost vomited on the freeway thinking about that do you sense but i didn't have that sort of feeling at the time it was just detachment from the reality of to me body and what was it like as a young child it was sweet he had difficulties in school that he would go for walks and asked the birdies to come over to his fingers he like nature i didn't show you the last picture but it was in front of one of the largest trees in seattle perhaps the oldest tree in seattle in this war as his mother said if he had a religion it was nature we've gotten letters that say exactly what i thought about him he was an old fashioned gentleman he protected women and children he did what he thought was right he did not get into people's faces and argue with them that started changing when did that happen i would say that these sort of things in the last three years and we've seen other things before as i said he had difficulty in school early in grade school it was called dyslexia he could not perform things from one modeller two to another and relate them he couldn't listen and write he couldn't read and speak about it those things did not communicate in his mind it was very difficult but he but he joined the military though he took  in sheer determination did quite well on that went into the military did not make it through he made it through his basic training he got an assignment at fort drum new york and things started come on our there it wasn't what he thought the military was going to be he didn't have the social skills and understanding to accommodate himself to them and frankly i think the military was quite a mess during that time he came back using methamphetamine he came back after having a good need go off in a trench not too far from his head he came back with the s s tattoo that he did not ask to have put on him he called me once crying could not stay in one place and pursue one thing he lost interest in things when they weren't perfect we saw this is part of the just like you can so most of those sort of simple diseases p him we thought maybe he was drinking and then it was when he's not drinking but why does he have these geographic she'll go someplace be gone not talk to us come back never say anything about it leave everything behind him spend about thirty him lately yes he was angry over the past three years i started talking about frustrated as opposed to rage and hate you going to kill you typing it was frustrated rage about how things ran how the world was how the world was coming to an end the oceans the air the cropland it was all destroyed we've made a mess out of it he loved children he loved children he was a protector he loved to be around the children but you know the cousins and helped him and do things and take them around but he certainly did not want to bring into the world well at the same point in time i mean we all know what happened yes he brought the end of the world not only to himself but to several families yes did you see his over the past several years did you see his angering creasing or his frustration increasing no mostly we saw his isolation and refusal to engage with family i don't want to talk i'm doing something else i'm reading this book i don't know about that as somebody else i'm not involved and he had access to guns yes was it something that you wanted or did it matter you know let me back up from on the record as being a gun salesman for over ten years and doing that someone is low key business we've gotten into this hobby he was brought up around guns his brother was brought up around guns his sister was brought up around guns you know is one of the things that he liked about the military i suppose was the good example with that guns and drugs and extreme frustration don't mix do th lot of things don't mix and that the combination didn't mix too well obviously didn't mix too well when morning were you ever afraid of him in the last three years people have asked me that i was never afraid of him and i was afraid as was his mother for him remember that we didn't see him as aggressive we saw him as angry we thought he would challenge somebody intellectually and get beaten up for telling them they were stupid and didn't know would be talking about we thought that on another occasion team might be just too friendly to somebody to get along with them and that would be the knock on the door and depended on the anybody that's part of isolation you don't have somebody to share those things with some degree with his mother some degree with his girlfriend and some degree with some friends who moved out  the area he would visit he would call but not you know not somebody who could say i need to talk somebody go out and not that sort of a life do you have any idea at all what was it that led him to do the acts that he did on that particular day i had no idea what i did that i had no idea what relation was with those people there were apparently was some little bit of relationship or the attempt to make a relationship i think it went wrong i the introduction accurate was he mentally challenged mentally disturbed is probably i don't want to use a term that i don't know what i'm talking about well i think he was manic depressive and he had some things that look schizophrenia could be a shim which is what the military talked about that he just put two and two together differently than the army thought two and two added up and i don't know what they meant like that particularly but did you seek help for him we tried to get him to help we try to get people to talk to him i found a fellow who he would not go to just counsellor with he was autistic if you use google and i try to get him to somebody that had been a fisherman in the military and i could never get him to take the step mom tried to get him to a dentist who could not get him to make the second appointment to see a dentist he would comply everything just was do it and then if it didn't work the off to the side so you got to that point where you know it's like i wish something would happen here i wished that there would be something where you know he would not have a choice of backing out and doing things but i told somebody today it's like a two hundred pound fish on a line you want to keep a and you don't want to have a complete severance and you get in because there's your son he's our son you know we did not want him someplace where he's going to end up dying on the street when i'm gone says mom you know nobody will take him he's not got any resources he doesn't have any sort of steady companionship on the outside we know that with a girlfriend it was on an office but you say that nobody will take him but it sounds like he wasn't willing blow to take yes  one of the reasons that you're here and one of the reasons or jerk you know in fact i think what you've said is that while you're out talking about you you want people to know about that there might be ways to help adult children who have mental difficult one of the first things i learned that there is a support network for parents of those children senior parents of adult children there are meetings here and our meetings at har view on a weekly basis there is a weekly meeting in church on the north in the can be accessed through the greenwood community center there are some died never heard of before that i came by in these meetings these meetings i came by because i talk to my friends about my issues and they say i know about this do not something i found on the side of a bus or it's all public service on t v they're not being pushed in front of us kinch all the law is to do you don't have to have eminent danger anymore everybody else has told me that well we have that long but it's not implemented because of money and i'm thinking it's not a money issue lied so that you could have gotten him help call the cops and say was going to kill me and that still works they have to take somebody the d v d situation like this and where some of this is that pitching they have to haul them take a look at the difference between symptoms like he shows in the twenty four seventh's schizophrenia is that if he were talking in his mother was disturbed by his talk please don't talk about people that way rude talk that you might see coming from a k k k type person he has a very extreme views about the war in iraq and the people that were fighting there dehumanizing speech came out of him i didn't think he was going to go down the street and kill somebody who somebody once asked him if he was afghanistan he did not take it as an insult he laughed about it this is kind of funny that his mother would say please i don't like that kind of talk and he would stop he had a piece of control in those situations and somehow that control didn't click this morning that he went into the care you know what i'm trying to say with ed is twenty four hours you know for somebody who can pull it together talk to other people new pins schizophrenia children have been in twenty four hours seventy two hours longer and they learn how to work that system they learned that they just need to do a little i pad be present know what day it is and oriented to the situation give an answer that's a direct response to the question in and they'll probably not be parents of adult children with mental difficulties learning and having some alternatives as to how they can deal with their children and you know it doesn't matter how old they are they're always your children right  forever you've gone back to the cafe racer yourself i walked by it two times in third time i walked but very slowly there were people there on that occasion and they were tending the garden there and  the woman tending the garden asked me if i knew any of those people i told her that was it was my son that was the shooter and she stopped for a second we bonded and we talked for a few minutes and i talked with were you know about how it didn't feel like anything other than words to express sympathy to say i had done all i had done and to hear other people say all i could do was an easy lie because afterwards you see it so much differently you see a different times and you see the urgency that could have been there it's a deck of cards and it's all wild card i want to emphasize that he goes along in a few years it may be getting worse and boom it's got just bad as it can get what have you learned in terms of what kind of help might be out there today support for the parents that's necessary so that you don't get locked in but it wasn't the parents or did the shooting it was not the parents who did the shooting but if the parent had more strategies if the pin and i'm not talking you know it's like how to take care of a difficult child and ways to get them to clean the room if the child is seriously needing help and there isn't going themselves the parents need strategies and somebody to help them work getting that child to the point of taking help of accepting help somebody to hold their hands doing the frustration somebody to say simply lies somebody like at the harbor of your group who says you know i understand how to fill out the forms who's death to put them on to help you get these things through through the system and again she's working pretty much with the the welfare system the indigent system and such there's a very small system of people out there in private practice but if you can't put them in court they can't get them you know that to me is the point where it just feels  my experience this before hand with the kindle laws of new york they're going through a new identity and to that where parents and family will be credited with good information that the person is really the person really is a danger should be an evaluation the person should be held against their will because they realize that is a credible witness to the person's life not possibly somebody who has an axe to grind against them won't believe what i'm saying they're the state has said that well you're just saying this about somebody in the family to get rid of them to revenge on them to do some heavy thing to that person besides waking up from this nightmare and none of it being true it's all true what would you want to have happen now  i want to happen now with my son and five other people dead hundreds of people directly related to them all victims the people i've talked to in the problems they've had getting their children i haven't talked to anybody i've talked to people in the dog walk excuse me is that something in your family or you know that's a catholic over my son and then we relate stories nobody's been that far from somebody that need help nobody has been that far from it and yet we see on the other things on the buses we see all the other things on the t v and we see the number through all sorts of other help i was blind to it for is it not  is it not being spoken about several times in different threads on blogs don't talk about mental illness don't use that word don't talk about demons it's such a strong word even to me if we had diabetes here we would have had at help about it nobody would have been ashamed to talk about diabetes nobody would have thought that it was maybe catching and they should distance themselves from it the military certainly wanted to distance themselves from it visited friends in los angeles and came by on one of his psychotic thought episodes he was going there to reenlist to go in the secret or ops world he was on the day that he did the racers is there was trying to get down to fort lewis to check in with his superiors and all been held down there and thrown out the doors fast as they could rather he was able to purchase a gun yes more than once how do you take a theory permit from this which is a shall issue state i don't know what it means shall issue means you will do this in less you have a good reason two reasons domestic violence felonies been court ordered into a mental facility ordered into not just held and looked at ordered for treatment found mentally incompetent to some degree or done something for lowness that's the exceptions in this otherwise they must give you the permit permit in hand i walk into a store he walks into a store one of the schizo friends from our shelter walks into a store buys a gun walks out with it three day waiting period that's for other people not for people with a permit is that different and once you get the permit it's cashin carry wow there is no psychological evaluation to get that permit california has it how can society be protected from someone with a mental illness like your son could start is to say that before you are allowed to purchase as in costa rica not to carry but to purchase you bring a letter from a doctor i would like to see it differently i would like to see you like this candace law you want to carry guns well let's hear from your family let's hear from a doctor i don't see that as bothering anybody as well regulated militia i was in the business i even spent one year sending a little money to the n r a i gave them up over virginia tech that man had the right had the gun because he had not been  judged incompetent in law incompetent is too high barrier a danger to himself or others or maybe too loose a cannon is high enough a barrier my son would have not passed that barrier so he would have been well whose responsibility is this we here in the united states and probably everywhere but in the united states want to put a blame on somebody whose responsibility is well we're talking responsibility are we talking blame because responsibility is the ability to respond to the situation and then he's his mother and i his brother his girlfriend those who knew him did not respond well enough we did not beat the system until we found the weakness in it that worked but then if you look at the blame he pulled the trigger yeah but there it was society it was these families it was your family it was all of these who are forever victimized victimized and the next time that someone is in this circumstance what is it that a parent can do what is it that a loved one can do what is it that any friend can do to stop this from ever happening i don't know if you can stop it but you can try you can find the resources and never stop trying what resource would you like to have had as his father i would have liked a lower barrier for him to be held in evaluated and not just for a short piece of time i would have liked him to have been checking in with somebody in the profession on a regular basis for several months do you want legislation to you know take place as a result of this what do you want that would be a good point to start with yes yes what should the legislation s lower barriers if somebody says there's something wrong here go with that do not be a shower permit  state let's look at this closely copy what california just a little bit of evaluation rather than rap sheet we only look for a rap sheet in this state or you have to be a criminal to you have to be a criminal court already judged crazy by a court and sent him to a mental jeju tried to send him to get him sent in or i never thought of lying dumb as it sounds today never lied maybe that's another problem with being a parent well as we get and maybe just kind of fear you know if it doesn't happen will i ever see that son again will he ever come around me will he ever trust me