The Other McCain

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Crazy People Are Dangerous

Posted on | May 5, 2024 | Comments Off on Crazy People Are Dangerous

Say hello to Delroy Thomas of Riviera Beach, Florida, who has a lot of problems, including gunshot wounds:

Just two days before an encounter with a police officer that resulted in a Riviera Beach man being shot and wounded on the campus of Suncoast High School, his family sought to get him help.
Delroy Thomas was taken to HCA JFK North Medical Center on Saturday, April 20, to be evaluated for involuntary commitment under Florida’s Baker Act, his brother Calvin Nance said this week. It allows a person to be kept in the hospital for up to 72 hours if there is reason to believe the person is a danger to themselves or others.\
Nance said his brother has long struggled with mental illness and that family members requested that he be taken to the hospital after a recent episode. Yet somehow, Nance said, the hospital released Thomas over the weekend without the family’s knowledge. . . .
“I’m trying to understand why they would have released him,” he said of his brother, who remains hospitalized after the shooting and whose arrest report indicates that he was wearing what appeared to be blue scrubs as he walked toward Suncoast High’s south gate. “We were under the impression he was supposed to be Baker Acted.”
Nance said he believes long-term treatment for his brother would have prevented the school encounter with police.
“The system failed him in so many ways,” he said. “All of this could have been prevented. It should have been prevented. … Everybody could see that he was (struggling).”

Try to imagine the experience of the police officer at the school, when she sees this lunatic walking onto campus still wearing his hospital scrubs, arriving directly from the psychiatric ward. Readers will perhaps not be too surprised to learn that he has an extensive criminal history:

Palm Beach County court records reveal that an encounter that ended with gunfire in a high school parking lot Monday morning [April 22] is the culmination of a series of troubling encounters between Delroy Thomas, law enforcement and area hospitals.
Thomas, 29, faces charges of battery on law enforcement and trespassing on school grounds, among other counts, stemming from Monday’s incident in the parking lot of Suncoast High School in Riviera Beach, while students were being dropped off.
According to the probable cause affidavit in the case, Riviera Beach police Officer Nodane Cherisma approached Thomas when he walked onto school grounds and she did not recognize him as a student. The document described Thomas as becoming physically “aggressive” with Cherisma in an “unprovoked attack.”
Cherisma shot Thomas twice. The affidavit said the officer was “forced to use deadly force to stop the immediate threat to herself and any possible threat to the students and staff on campus.” . . .
This was not Thomas’ first violent encounter with law enforcement, according to Palm Beach County court records.
A 2014 affidavit detailing charges of battery on a law enforcement officer and resisting with violence alleges Thomas “forcefully squeezed” a corrections officer’s fingers, and threatened to kill him. Thomas was in jail at the time facing theft charges. The battery charges were dropped by prosecutors.
Another affidavit from 2018, while Thomas was being held on burglary charges, states that he elbowed and kicked corrections officers who were trying to take him to a medical evaluation. He was found guilty and sentenced to time served amid a five-year sentence stemming from other charges related to the burglary.
More recently, Thomas’ criminal record shows a string of less violent charges.
Court records of five separate trespassing arrests this year:

Jan. 13 at HCA Florida JFK Hospital
Jan. 31 at Saint Mary’s Medical Center. The arrest affidavit showed Thomas was told not to return for a year.
Feb. 15 at JFK Hospital. The affidavit said Thomas had just received treatment there and refused to leave.
March 15 at JFK Hospital. Once again, the affidavit states Thomas had refused to leave following treatment. This encounter resulted in a ban from the hospital.
April 10 at an Intown Suites hotel in Riviera Beach. According to the affidavit, the hotel’s night manager told officers Thomas was an unregistered guest, lying in the hallway.

“My brother got a mental problem. They actually let him out and can see he’s not in his right mind,” Calvin Nance, referring to multiple hospital admissions for his brother Thomas under the Baker Act, said.

The man’s own family wants him locked up in the looney bin, but for some reason they kept turning him loose until he got shot by a cop.

Crazy People Are Dangerous.



 

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Category: Crime, Florida

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