I appreciate the detail, and I don’t disagree with anything you’ve written. I simply have a problem with people who look at a situation like this and their immediate reaction is “that person should be locked up.” (not saying you said that, mind you)
To those people, I say: We tried involuntary institutionalization for a long, long time, and it was an unmitigated disaster where people with legitimate mental illnesses were driven more into psychosis as a result of subhuman treatment and relentless stigma. We know a lot more about mental illness than we did just a few short decades ago, and the longer we ignore that those maladies are just as much “illnesses” as things like the flu, the more we invite violence like this. Mental illness is a problem none of us give a single shit about until an untreated, hopelessly abandoned person with a crippling mental illness does something that directly impacts one of the rest of us. Then suddenly it’s knives out. None of us want to pay enough to fix the system, we just want to bitch and complain inside our safe little bubbles where we can rely on a retributive justice system to repeatedly dole out harsh punishment that gives us an illusory sense of security so we can go back to our normal lives. Folks fire off “thoughts and prayers”, we put the person in jail (or to death), wash, rinse, repeat.
Sorry for the rant. Coming from someone who lost a bipolar family member to suicide, people like this piss me the fuck off, and I just had to put it out there.