Although only a month and a half from his 18th birthday, Mark
Sallee was still technically a juvenile and not legally required to stand
trial for the killing of his stepfather. A coroner's jury did find that
he had killed him, but due to Mark's age and a diagnosis of
schizophrenia, he spent only a few months in a private psychiatric
hospital, Our Lady of Peace. His symptoms soon controlled by
antipsychotic medications, he was released into his father's custody
shortly after Christmas, less than four months after the shooting.
For two and a half years, Mark did fairly well. He took his
medications, earned a high school diploma, enrolled at a local community
college, and worked at a few jobs. Then he complained of being unhappy
living with his father and moved in with his grandmother. Eventually, he
stopped taking his medication.
"He was exhibiting strange behavior again," recalls his mother.
"He'd be laughing at nothing, sitting with a blanket over his head and
giggling." This time Mark voluntarily agreed to return to Our Lady of
Peace. One day, after about a month, his mother came to visit.
"He was standing there with his bags packed," she recalls, "and
they were waiting for me to sign the papers. They said he could go home.
I had told the doctors I couldn't handle him, but I didn't know what else
to do. So I took him home."
Sallee's mother and her three daughters lived in fear that Mark
would become violent again. Although he had stopped taking his medication
and was becoming increasingly menacing, his mother could get no advice
from his doctors, or even any information on what treatments he had
received while in the hospital. That information was confidential, they
were told.
"I couldn't go anywhere," she says. I had a six-year-old and two
teenage girls. I was afraid to leave them with Mark. We were sleeping all
in one room with the door locked. He'd walk around the house, giggling
and throwing things. Our lives just stopped. My daughters quit school,
they couldn't stand it." Routinely Mark made violent threats. Once he
tried to kill the family cat. And now he had taken to smoking marijuana,
a common problem among many schizophrenics as their disease progresses.
(There is no evidence that drug abuse can cause schizophrenia. But when
schizophrenics abuse drugs, in an apparent attempt at self-medication,
the drugs can make the symptoms worse.)
Finally, Mark's mother de tided she had to involuntarily commit him
to the state mental hospital. But at his commitment hearing, the judge
ruled that none of his actions constituted an imminent danger and
declared him free to go. At that point, his mother raised her hand and
said, "Am I allowed to say anything?" The judge said she was. "Please,
please keep him;' she begged. "I know that he needs long-term help. He
has never had really long-term therapy anywhere."
The judge turned to Mark and said, "Are you sick?"
"No," said Mark
And that was that. Mark wanted to go home with his mother
afterward, but she had to refuse for the safety of her family.
"Most people felt sorry for Mark," she later told a Louisville
radio station, WHAS. "And I think a lot of people thought, you know, what
kind of person is she? She knows her son is in this shape. Poor thing's
out,there digging in garbage cans to eat. Out in the cold." At that
point, she broke down crying on the air. "That's the choice you have to
make," she continued. "After society, the system fails, and they're
pushed out by them, you keep them as long as you can, until you know it's
gonna be them or the rest of your family. So you have to push them
out."
After that, Mark broke off all contact with his family. Then, on
May 29, 1984, he enlisted in the Army. In less than two years, however, a
mental status evaluation found him to be depressed and delusional, with a
bizarre thought process. At one point during his evaluation, he told the
Army psychiatrists that President Carter had recently mentioned him in a
speech and told "peanut jokes" about him. The psychiatrists diagnosed him
as suffering from "schizophreniform disorder" and "schizotypal
personality disorder." He was discharged on July 28, 1986.
Returning to Okolona, Sallee appears to have gone quickly downhill.
Reports in his police file chronicle his run-ins with local residents and
shopkeepers: stealing a car radio, shoplifting from a Majik Mart,
throwing rocks at cars passing beneath abridge, yelling at people who
happened to walk by his lean-to, threatening a mall security officer,
rummaging through garbage bins behind restaurants, walking down the
highway collecting bottles and cans.
On April 24, 1987, Sallee was jailed after he rushed at a police
officer who was questioning him. The officer had to hold Sallee down on
the ground until other officers arrived, and Sallee was still so agitated
when put into the car that, according to the police report, he damaged
the police cat's back seat as he was driven to the station. Yet based on
only a single interview, without any check into his 10-year history of
violence and psychosis, a staff psychiatrist at Central State Hospital in
Louisville concluded on May 4, 1987, that Sallee "is not a danger to
himself or others."
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