Top VA Doc Ignored Red Flags About Neo-Nazi Son, Judge Says

[Jilly_in_VA]

A teenage neo-Nazi accused of torching a Texas synagogue last Halloween suffers from “a myriad of mental health issues,” but his parents—one of whom is a well-respected physician now serving as a high-ranking Veterans Affairs official—never got him the treatment he desperately needed, according to a federal magistrate judge.

Further, the judge said, after doctors at a leading psychiatric hospital evaluated Franklin Barrett Sechriest in 2016 and warned his mother and father that their son “should not have access to firearms,” they subsequently “allowed [him] to acquire a small arsenal of firearms, including one shotgun, three rifles and three handguns.”

The explosive details are revealed in a detention order handed down in December by Judge Mark Lane of the U.S. District Court of Western Texas, and are now being reported for the first time by The Daily Beast.

Sechriest, 18, was arrested on arson charges last November for allegedly causing more than $150,000 in damage to Congregation Beth Israel in Austin. Criminal investigators with the Austin Fire Department identified the Texas State University freshman using surveillance footage from the temple’s parking lot that showed his Jeep’s license plate. The plate was traced back to Sechriest’s home in San Marcos, where he was living with his mother, Nicole. Sechriest’s father, Vernon Franklin Sechriest, is a U.S. Navy veteran and orthopedic surgeon who was appointed chief of staff for the VA Healthcare System in Loma Linda, California on Nov. 21, 2021—about three weeks after his son allegedly set Congregation Beth Israel ablaze.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/veterans-affairs-doc-v-franklin-sechriest-ignored-red-flags-about-neo-nazi-son-franklin-sechriest-judge-says?ref=home
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Between Ronnie Raygun, mental health activists, and Second Amendment nuts, we apparently can't do anything to keep guns away from people like this, or make them get treatment.....

[ck4829]

1. Oh please, once again a disservice to the mentally ill

They want to have it both ways.

Parents want to escape accountability for what was brewing under their roof.

And yet he gets diagnosed with a list of mental illnesses longer than my grocery shopping list.

They knew that he was a danger.

[dalton99a]

2. Where the father got his orthopedic fellowship

[Jilly_in_VA]

3. Reminding you

that Creigh Deeds, a state senator here in Virginia, tried like hell to get help for his mentally ill son, knowing he was a danger to himself and others. No dice. Of course the so-called "case manager" at the hospital in the county where he lived totally dropped the ball too when she called maybe two places and they didn't have a bed for the kid so she told him there weren't ANY in the region (there were up here where I am, 3 counties away, FFS, but she didn't even TRY here!) and sent them home. The kid tried to kill his dad that weekend.

OTOH, I am listening to a podcast about the Waffle House shootings in Nashville a few years ago. Remember those? That guy was so clearly mentally ill, paranoid schizophrenic. Absolutely classic. His parents tried to get him help for awhile, but I think they gave up. A court ruled that he was to have no access to firearms, but his dad relented and gave him his guns back and next thing anyone knew, he was in Nashville and one night around 3 a.m. he walked into a Waffle House wearing nothing but a jacket(!)--which should have been a clue something was wrong with him---and starting shooting people. Definitely his father bears some serious responsibility here. So do the other people I mentioned.