Today, there are twice as many people with schizophrenia living on
thestreets and in public shelters as there are in public mental
hospitals. Episodes of violence by people with untreated serious
psychiatric illness are on the rise.
Discharged from the Army after being diagnosed as schizophrenic,
Mark Daniel Sallee returned to his hometown of country's homeless
mentally ill. Sometimes he slept beneath a culvert that ran over one of
the half-dry drainage ditches in the Louisville suburb. Other times he
lived inside a makeshift lean-to in a wooded area, in the back of an
abandoned school bus, inside an empty train car, or out in the middle of
a field. Dirt and grease covered him so completely that a waitress at a
local eatery took to calling him "black boy." He stole things from
shopkeepers and spoke to no one, including his family, except to the
threaten them. Once he promised to kill a police officer.
On January 10, 1989, he kept his promise. The story of that event
presents a highly revealing picture of how the dangerous mentally ill
slip through the cracks of American society.
Leaving his lean-to that morning, he carried a loaded, 22 caliber
rifle and wore a one-piece insulated coverall, both of which he had
bought two weeks earlier at a nearby sporting goods store. (Lisa Ludwig,
the clerk who sold him the gun, is notable for being one of the only
people in Sallee's voluminous court record to ever describe him as
seeming sane.) By 10:30 A.M., he came across a man he had never met,
Brian Madison, walking along a creek behind an apartment complex. Sallee
raised his rifle and shot at him, but missed.
He was next seen less than an hour later standing on the east side
of busy Smyrna Road. When a red Ford pickup truck passed close to him on
the narrow shoulder, Sallee raised the rifle to his shoulder, pointed it
at the truck and fired. Again he missed. But a passing motorist saw the
incident and called 911 on his car phone. He said he thought Sallee
looked "upset and angry."
Dispatched to the scene was 42-year Officer Frank Pysher, Jr., a
grandfather and 16-year veteran on the Jefferson County force. That
morning Pysher had told a fellow officer about his plans to retire in a
few more years. "I'm going down to my house on Rough River, fish, and
watch the world go by."
At 42 minutes past noon, Officer Pysher spotted Sallee walking
south along Smyrna Road where it crossed over a freeway. He probably
recognized Sallee from previous encounters, as did almost all the other
police in the area. He pulled over and rolled down his window to speak.
Without warning, Sallee allegedly turned, raised his rifle to his
shoulder and fired two shots through the windshield, striking Officer
Pysher twice in the forehead. At 1:58 P.M., Pysher would be declared
dead, the first county police officer to die in the line of duty in three
years.
Sallee ran from the scene through the semi-rural suburbs until he
came to the backyard of Barry A. Mantooth, 35. "What are you doing?"
asked Mantooth when he saw Sallee running. "What is the matter?"
"Who are you talking to?" asked Sallee, and allegedly fired his
shotgun for a fifth time that day, this time striking Mantooth in the
forearm. Mantooth would be treated and released from the hospital that
afternoon.
By now, more than 25 police officers in helicopters cars, and on
foot were chasing Sallee. He ran another mile or so until he was cornered
in a yard next to the Deeper Christian Life Center. When Officer Dale
Mobley ordered Sallee to drop his rifle, Sallee replied, "Fuck you. I am
not putting it down!"
After a warning shot was fired, according to Detective Dick Brewer,
Sallee "continued to talk and act as if he hadn't heard the shot." Sallee
waved them away with his hands and shouted something many of the officers
couldn't make out, but that "sounded as if he were talking about
shooting," said Brewer. When he seemed to be lifting the rifle again, the
police opened fire and struck Sallee once in the chest. Seriously
wounded, he was taken by ambulance to the same hospital where Officer
Pysher died.
"What did I do?" he yelled as police and medics struggled to
restrain him. "I haven't done anything!"
His mother, Mrs. Donna Dalton, had reason to fear otherwise. Even
before she heard his name on the television news later that day, she
immediately thought, "It's Mark. Oh god, it's Mark."
Her only son had been diagnosed as having paranoid schizophrenia
back in 1978 when, at the age of 17, he shot and killed his stepfather,
Mrs. Dalton's second husband, before her eyes. Yet despite Mrs. Dalton's
repeated pleas to judges and psychiatrists over the years to help her
deranged son, even after Mark had threatened to kill his sister and a
police officer, he was simply allowed to wander about until he killed
again. Now at last, the sick young man who everyone had done their best
to ignore for 11 years had been catapulted into the top news story of the
year in Louisville, with one TV news team even boasting in its
commercials that it had been the first to reach the murder scene.
Tags:
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mental hospitals,
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public shelters,
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thestreets,
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