A man who killed and ate a man has been released back into public life after ten years.
Tyree Smith, from Bridgeport, Connecticut, killed a homeless man and then ate his brain and eyeballs according to officials.
The horrific case made headline news, with Smith found not guilty of murder by reason of insanity after a July 2013 trial.
In lieu of a stint behind bars, Smith was ordered committed to a state psychiatric hospital for 60 years.
But now, ten years after the grim incident, the state Psychiatric Security Review Board said Smith was ready to be transitioned back into the community.
Smith has been released from the facility, Connecticut’s most secure, as of writing.
He will be living in a Waterbury group home, and is not allowed to associate with anyone involved in criminal activity.
The board stated in its report: “Tyree Smith is an individual with a psychiatric illness requiring care, custody and treatment.
“Since his last hearing Tyree Smith has continued to demonstrate clinical stability.
“Mr. Smith is medication compliant, actively engaged in all recommended forms of treatment, and has been symptom-free for many years.”
During the trial, Smith’s cousin Nicole Rabb claimed he arrived at her Connecticut home in December 2011, talking about Greek gods and ruminating about needing to go out and get blood.
When she saw him the next evening she noticed what appeared to be specks of blood on his pants and that he was carrying chopsticks and a bloody ax.
Smith then allegedly told Rabb he killed a man and ate his brains in the Lakeview Cemetery while drinking sake, and grimly warned he intended to eat more people.
A month later, police found Angel Gonzalez’s mutilated body in the vacant apartment on Brooks Street in Bridgeport where Smith had lived as a child.
Police later recovered the bloody ax and an empty bottle of sake in a stream bed near the Boston Avenue cemetery.
The defense’s case rested on the testimony of Yale University psychiatrist Dr. Reena Kapoor, who testified that Smith had kept his lust for human flesh after his arrest, even offering to eat her.
Kapoor claimed Smith suffered from psychotic incidents since childhood and heard voices that told him to kill people.
She then said the voices ordered Smith to eat the victim’s brain so they would get a better understanding of human behavior and the eyes so that they could see into the “spirit realm.”
Kapoor added that Smith went to Subway after eating the man’s body parts.
The report on Smith’s release said: “He denied experiencing cravings but stated that if they were to arise, he would reach out to his hospital and community supports and providers.”
If you have depression and tried to commit suicide, will you always end up depressed and try to end your life?
Or is there more to it all?
Mental illness is not that straightforward.
Even DNA isn’t that straightforward. Epigenetics is a whole subfield dedicated to studying how and why genes in your DNA are or are not expressed.
Dude ate a guy. Would you live next door to him?
Unequivocally, yes I would. I work with people who have severe psychiatric disorders pretty regularly. The difference between someone who is untreated vs. someone who is stable and adherent to their med regimen can be light years.
Part of the reason we fear people with psychiatric disorders so much is because we, as a society, fail these people. We have no reliable system for remanding them to get help, if we see signs they are decompensating. The only system we provide is one that only starts to function when they’ve reached crisis level.
That’s not their fault; it’s ours. They deserve better. A better system could have prevented this crime.
“We as a society fail these people”
How do we fail people that would die off without continuous support?
There is a difference between pointing out that certain policies have better outcomes and ascribing moral fault to a society for the actions of an insane fringe.
You are expressing a very modern and ahistorical paradigm of what makes a human being valuable. Deep history shows us fossilized remains of people with injuries like broken femurs or no teeth that would have been absolutely fatal without continuous support. Disabled people are valuable simply because they are human every bit as much as able-bodied people are, and historically we have dedicated resources to caring for the disabled among us.
It is a very modern idea that labor is the only value a human being possesses, and that those who cannot care for themselves are worthless. What use is anything that we do, if we can’t even be bothered to care for people who cannot care for themselves? What kind of monsters does that pretend we are? And make no mistake, we all start and most of us will end our lives not being able to care for ourselves.
Personally, I view caring for the helpless as a fundamental function of humanity. And yes, we as a society fail at that function, primarily because we fail to recognize it in the first place.
People who voluntarily cause societal harm are not the same as people who suffer temporary (and relatively minor) injuries.
And no those people were not pandered to and taken care of, they were evicted from society or even killed.
“Personally I view caring for the helpless as a fundamental function of humanity”- And you would be wrong. The only fundamental function of humanity is to continue existence.
You are inserting a moral imperative to “save the helpless”. Where the “helpless” are a handful of people who attack and in this case, eat others, and of course their existence is societies fault.
Like I already said there is a difference between making a prescriptive claim that we should do something out of practicality, and a moral claim that society is responsible for the actions of the fringe.
“It’s a very modern idea”- Imagine accusing someone of ahistoricism, and then immediately make false historical statements. Infanticide and senicide have historically been quite common, it is only in modern society where we have enough labor surplus that we are willing to condemn convenient deaths. Of course this is all irrelevant since at no point was I talking about people with injuries, but rather the case of violent perpetrators actively harming others.
I almost want to ask your opinion on abortion, since you are making a deontological right-to-life argument but are directly copying left-wing arguments and phraseology1 and left-wingers are vehemently pro-choice, not that there is any logical rule that they should be.
A lot of critical, open minded analysis going on here.
Perhaps my statement was too broad to be formally provable, but it is quite obvious they they are using buzzwords and arguments exclusive to a certain political sector, completely ignoring it’s lack of veracity and even applicability.
This would be like a libertarian arguing that the NAP, applies to the immorality of eating toast because it was enumerated in the Bible. A wrong argument based on false premises.
If you really cared about critical analysis then maybe you should have pointed out all the false statements made by the OP to them.