Aaron Bassler—A Mental Health Tragedy?
Kym Kemp / Tuesday, Oct. 4, 2011 @ 6:22 a.m. / Humboldt , Mendocino , Politics
Aaron Bassler in a Fort Bragg High School photo
The following is a guest post by Skippy Massey:
35-YEAR-OLD murder suspect Aaron Bassler’s death brings to an end 16 years of what his family has described as “a slow motion train wreck.”
AARON BASSLER was a shy but seemingly normal boy until his late teens, when he began a dark descent into mental illness, according to his family. He played baseball and had a job delivering newspapers, according to his family. “He was fine. He was happy,” his father, James Bassler, said. But that changed when Aaron reached the age of 18 or 19, according to family members, who believe he suffered from schizophrenia.
BASSLER had at least nine brushes with the law since he turned 19 in 1995, when he was given two years probation for driving under the influence. He’s since been arrested and charged with crimes that include prowling, vandalism, carrying a concealed Glock pistol and resisting arrest, according to court records. Bassler liked and collected guns.
INITIALLY, James Bassler blamed drugs and alcohol use for the change in his son’s behavior. But as the behavior became increasingly strange, he became convinced his son suffered from mental illness. Over time, Aaron’s behavior became more bizarre. Aaron Bassler was unable to hold a steady job for any length of time, his father said. He built a wall around the home in which he was last living, carved into its walls and drew strange, child-like pictures, including of aliens. He grew star thistle in pots. Aliens were a recurring theme. In early 2009, Aaron was arrested for throwing packages containing drawings of aliens, along with fake bombs, over the fence of the Chinese consulate in San Francisco.
HE was placed on federal probation for about a year, during which time he seemed to improve mentally, his father said. During that time, Bassler was required to attend regular counseling. Privacy laws kept James Bassler from learning whether his son had been diagnosed or treated for mental illness. The probationary period left Aaron Bassler’s family with hope that, with treatment, he could improve. Once the probation ended, Aaron Bassler regressed, his father said. Their hopes were dashed by Aaron’s unwillingness to get treatment and their inability to get forced help for him through the courts. By this time he had become increasingly paranoid, delusional, and prone to angry outbursts, relatives said.
WHEN Aaron was arrested in February, James Bassler and his daughter wrote letters warning the court, jail, sheriff’s and county mental health officials that “his family fears for his safety, their own safety and that of the community if this psychiatric disorder is not addressed.” They pleaded with officials to evaluate Aaron and get him into treatment. They never heard back, according to James Bassler.
REPORTEDLY having a history of schizophrenia, prior arrests and hospitalizations, Bassler was left untreated by the California mental health system. Had he been court ordered to stay in treatment, some wonder if perhaps this tragedy would not have happened.
LIKE 25 other California counties, Mendocino County has no psychiatric beds. It has failed to implement Laura’s Law, the California statute authorizing court-ordered treatment in the community. Laura’s Law is California’s version of Assisted Outpatient Treatment (AOT). These laws allow judges to order—after full hearings and considering all the evidence—certain potentially violent seriously mentally ill individuals to stay in treatment as a condition for living in the community. The vast majority of individuals with mental illness will never become dangerous. Laura’s Law is for the others— the ones such as Aaron Bassler.
STUDIES and statistics show both Assisted Outpatient Treatment and Laura’s Law have been effective— significantly reducing violence towards others, suicide, homelessness, arrests, incarcerations, and hospitalizations. Until there’s another murder, the law will most likely continue to be ignored. Mental health services and budgets are being gutted – mental health staff cut, psychiatric first-responders eliminated, hospital admissions reduced, and visits to mentally ill inmates by psychiatrists slashed. State and Counties’ fiscal budgets are going broke just trying to keep their patchwork systems afloat.
TWO weeks ago, Mendocino County supervisors asked their staff to prepare a presentation on the mental health program known as ‘Assisted Outpatient Treatment’. This is a step in the right direction. To note, Humboldt County does not have an AOT program.
THE unintended consequences? Matthew Coleman, Jere Melo, and Aaron Bassler are dead.—Their survivors are left with the tragic consequences of picking up the pieces of Aaron Bassler’s violence and untreated mental illness.
“I am hoping there’s some kind of change made,” said James Bassler, who has been agonizing over the killings and believes such a program could help other families. “He really wanted to hide his delusions from people. But being around him, close enough to him, it was a constant thing.”
JAMES Bassler said that what he considers the county’s failure to take seriously his warnings and his son’s mental illness are at least partly to blame for the deaths. “If he had a little more attention and guidance and control, this would have never happened.”
(The Treatment Advocacy Center, Press-Democrat, Los Angeles Times, and DJ Jaffe of the Mental Illness Policy Organization contributed to this report)
The Press Democrat
http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20111001/ARTICLES/111009967?p=1&tc=pg
http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20110901/ARTICLES/110909925
LA Times:
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/sep/18/local/la-me-aaron-bassler-20110918
DJ Jaffe:
http://www.facebook.com/PORAC/posts/198002340269940
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dj-jaffe/10-years-after-laura-wilc_b_806166.html
Treatment Advocacy Center:
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Top photo copied from the Press Democrat article here.
Bottom photo from the KMUD site.
Unless you deal with something (like mental illness in this case) it is so hard to even want to think about how things could have gone differently for Aaron Bassler or others like him. It is not until we ourselves come close to a situation like this in out own lives that we even want or need to give it much thought. Now, Aaron Bassler is “gone”, but the issue of mental health is not. I know this will be a simplistic response, but if any of the proposed mental health programs can be put in place, it will benefit all of us as a community.
Just last night, a homeless type younger man had been “checked on” after having been standing in the rain for at least one whole day and night. He was delusional and paranoid. I don’t know the outcome. I had seen him the day before also. Will he get the help he needs. Can Sempervirens Inpatient offer him help if he needs it?
Once again, my condolences.
It’s useless to second guess the officers who had the final confrontation with Aaron. Their lives were at stake and the risks were high that Aaron could escape and hurt someone else. As much as I had hoped for a peaceful end to Aaron’s run, I have seen nothing that indicates that this was ever going to happen.
My issue is that, in my biased opinion, the family relied on whatever “authorities” were available and not give Aaron the whoopass he so desperately needed themselves. One that only family can give.
This brings up another issue: why our tax dollars go to keep people off the streets with various social programs, and not target the obvious mental health issues that put some of them there. People need to stop pandering to ticking time bombs and expect the police to do it for them.
How sad that we “can’t find the money” to treat the mentally ill, yet it seems like if even a fraction of the money that had to be spent on this manhunt had been available to support better mental health care in the area, that manhunt might never have been needed. It’s as if we’ve forgotten the old wisdom that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
Two innocent victims are dead, the killer, who may not have been able to help himself, is dead, too, countless lives are shattered, friends and family are in mourning, the lives of local law enforcement officers, and the public at large, were put at risk, and a whole community has been traumatized.
I just hope the community as a whole can at least take a constructive lesson from this horrible situation, and focus on what can be done to prevent similar incidents in the future. It seems to me that taking action to improve mental health services in the community would be a good way for people to feel that they can have some kind of influence over the course of events, rather than just hunkering down and waiting for the next ticking time bomb to go off.
No one can be sure whether better mental health intervention for Bassler could have prevented this tragedy. But we do know the outcome of not having that intervention — death, fear, heartbreak, etc. If there is even a small chance of averting all that, then devoting the resources needed to provide some mental health services ahead of time seems like a very small price to pay.
Yet there’s danger in taking such an approach. It assumes that the law, any law, is capable of being applied evenly and justly in all cases where it’s supposed to be applied. That’s unrealistic, to put it mildly, and that goes double for laws that apply to a mental health system that is chronically underfunded.
One also has to remember that our nation offers constitutional guarantees of personal liberty, making a 72-hour psych hold about the best you can do for the legions of 5150s wandering our streets in poverty and mental disarray. You can wish a better life for them, but you cannot legally force them to choose it without following due process. When that same process then comes up short on money and treatment options, the law is exposed as the toothless animal that it is, designed to give more comfort to us than to the walking wounded it’s designed to protect.
The TRUE REASON, Mendocino County has so many Mentally Ill People:
The State of California sent thousands of patients diagnosed with Mental Health Issues to Mendocino County from the late 1800’s until the 1970’s……….. The patients were exposed to everything from “Shock Therapy and Frontal Lobotomies to LSD Experiments and “Ice Water Hydrotherapy” …… To really examine the Mental Health of the County it helps to realize the part the State of California played ion shipping the Mentally Ill to Mendocino County from around the State, and how in the 1970’s Reagan simply opened the doors and put these folks on the streets…… http://mendonews.wordpress.com/2010/01/10/922/
Under the system of laws now in effect courts etc have very little power to do anything to intervene
Mr Bassler’s father may have been correct in his initial diagnosis. Drug use and mental illness are often found in the same patient, and they increase the effects.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/m13q8n7521567312/
17 years later we have an entirely different picture altogether: pale and shallow, sunken and defiant, psychotic, delusional, and antisocial, living on the fringes of society— and wanted for murder.
How does one go from the picture above to the one below? From one extreme to the other? Could anything have avoided the tragic consequences, mistakes— and the brutal violence— that Aaron chose for himself?
I was glued to Aarons story, while it was happening i am 22 just about all the people in fort bragg know me I used to run into Aaron B. he didn’t seem like a killer i have a grandmother who is schizophrenic its very sad I simpathize for The Bassler Familly and Jerry’s familly my mother knew him well and she also knew matt Colemen who i also sympathize for Mental Helth and Drug Addiction problems are not to be solved by the Correctional system. They are things are country needs to deal with in a better and some cases differently …. Joe K..AKA. Mac Joe