Placing Blame Is No Cure

Thank you for your excellent, in-depth report by Mack Reed on Kevin Kolodziej (“Courtroom Latest Stop on Tortured Trail,” Feb. 7), who has been charged with killing Velasta Johnson. Your article proves once again how beneficial it is to a community to have more than one newspaper covering events.

A revealing and clarifying story is unveiled by your reporting, a story that’s impossible for an ordinary citizen to gather from the separate departments involved. Spokespersons for each agency are anxious to not place blame on each other and to place the blame on some nebulous or vague notion that gives control and responsibility to something other than their own or any other agency.

There is something terrible and fierce about an agency, especially county Mental Health Services, presenting a picture of this young, mentally ill man as a willful drug user and experimenter, with inattentive concern from his family, when the truth was that he had a history of paranoid schizophrenia and all its associated problems--including a family helpless to hold him in the necessary treatment.

Mentally ill people can live and work in the community, and mental health professionals should help in this transition. If professionals retreat from the reality of mental illness in its most menacing forms, the stigma will never go away, and we will continue to have “time bombs” on the streets.

PATRICIA C. SANDWALL, Member, Alliance for the Mentally Ill, Ventura