One of the charming, if bizarre, discoveries I made living in New England was its constellation of splendid, thoroughly abandoned mental institutions. They occupied commanding heights in bucolic rural backwaters—fine Victorian masterpieces of red brick and turreted cupolas. The one near Danvers, Massachusetts, was perhaps the most impressive—the sheer scale and strange, unsettling quiet of it all inspired curiosity. The awe these deserted institutions inspired has never left me.
I thought of the place recently in light of the awful murder of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska by Decarlos Brown on a subway car in Charlotte, North Carolina. The assassination shortly afterward of Charlie Kirk eclipsed the headlines, but each case has a great deal to say about our national schizophrenia over mental illness.
While Kirk's murderer was clearly unstable, he showed no actionable warning signs of the violence he was about to commit. Zarutska's murderer, on the other hand, was a known quantity—a time bomb whose repeated encounters with the law painted a trajectory that could predictably end only in disaster. Brown was trapped in the liminal space between mainline criminal incarceration (where he spent time) and the psychiatric wards of yesteryear, which no longer exist. The societal question over individual liberty and social safety, however, remains.
