Entry 16:

Dear Jim:

With the eclipse behind us, I'm glad to see that you are finding other outlets for your nature appreciation in NYC, even if it is limited to clucking over coverage of Central Park's poisoned birds.

Here's what I don't understand about the case of Buford O. Furrow Jr. A guy shows up to a psychiatric hospital apparently for treatment and then threatens to stab the staff. Arrested following this assault, he confesses racist fantasies to the police, telling them: "Sometimes I feel like I could just lose it and kill people." He then goes to jail for 165 days. Less than five months after his release, he loses it and goes on a racist shooting spree.

Didn't anyone--the cops or the threatened psychiatric staff--suggest any further evaluation of this man's marbles? And if so, where's the evidence of it? None of the news reports I've read give any real details about the cop's or hospital's records of this fine moment of community policing and mental health care. The New York Times just cites the spokesperson for the prosecutors' office that convicted Buford saying that he couldn't be held in jail any longer for his first-offense crime of assault.

True, my reaction may be the worst kind of post-mayhem 20-20 hindsight: "Why didn't someone do something?!" Who knows? Maybe 10 violent racists a day show up in the average clink claiming they have fantasies of killing people, and it's impossible to know whom to take seriously. But it's incredible to think that a man who is so out of control when he brings himself to a mental hospital that he's arrested doesn't go right back into a mental hospital or some kind of treatment.

I'm sure, as the details emerge, we're going to read a lot stories about the whacked cultural and political climate of our country that allows a man with such a history to get ahold of not just a gun, but a vanful of weapons.

But here's another article that I'd like to read. At what point does the mental health profession step in, if at all, when cops hear this kind of violent fantasy from an obviously violent man? How does the whole process work? And what would it have taken to have sent this guy not just to jail for 165 days but to have his head examined?

Then, I want to read an article about exactly how many cabs there are in L.A. and where they are all hiding.

Yours in breakfast,
Katharine