School Shooters’ Nikolas Cruz & Audrey Hale Were Recipients of Drug Cocktails. It’s Time to Make Providers Accountable.

Image by Emilian Danaila from Pixabay

July 9, 2024

Finally, journalists are asking the necessary questions relating to mass shootings, how they are investigated, prosecuted and where the responsibility lies.  The Tennessee Star has nailed the questions that have escaped the smartest guys in the room – the behavioral health unit of the FBI, lawmakers, and the entire justice system. Who is responsible and how did the mental health treatments & psychiatric cocktails contribute to the motivations and actions of so many of today’s mass killers.

The Tennessee Star’s powerful series of leaked documents relating to Audrey Hale’s 22-years of psychiatric treatment by Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) is shocking but, remarkably, not unlike the decades of treatment that the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooter in Parkland, Fl., Nikolas Cruz, received at the hands of the Florida Henderson Behavioral Health, Inc.

Henderson is a behavioral health vendor that is funded by the State of Florida and had many opportunities during his “treatment” sessions to determine Cruz’s mental health status. What did Henderson’s mental health wizards conclude about Cruz? That’s right, Cruz was “not a harm to himself or anyone else” prior to his killing spree. Ironically, like Hale, Cruz lived a life of one psychiatric drug cocktail to the next.

The public was made aware during the sentencing hearing of Cruz, from a series of psychiatrists and clinical psychologists familiar with Cruz’s “treatment,” that Cruz had been prescribed cocktails of psychiatric drugs,  beginning as young as 7 years old and yet no one connected to Henderson Behavioral Health was held responsible.

Given the enormous power the mental health industry wields, it’s no surprise that Henderson Behavioral Health was let off the hook by courts. Why? Well, the smart guys in black robes decided that advising the school of the patient’s mental health problems would undermine effective patient-therapist relationships and would discourage mental health professionals from providing mental health services to students. One can only wonder how that’s working out for the families of the deceased.

Nevertheless, it’s not an unreasonable inquiry to establish whether Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) has taken any financial responsibility for the 22 years of “treatment” it provided to the Covenant School killer, Audrey Hale. In other words, has Vanderbilt paid out any money to the families of the deceased, the school or anyone connected with the Covenant School shooting?

Did any of the families of the deceased in Parkland, Fl., sue the State of Florida for its involvement in the years of failed treatment of Nikolas Cruz? Clearly, despite an enormous amount of psychiatric intervention, including serious mind-altering drug cocktails, neither Cruz nor Hale were getting better. And, given the horrific violence connected to both, one could argue that the “treatment” simply was not helping…at all, and may have contributed to the outcome.

The billion-dollar behavioral health vendors that enjoy extremely lucrative contracts with State governments at the expense of the taxpayers (Children and Family Services in the case of Nikolas Cruz) and University Hospitals like Vanderbilt should not only be required to release all the mental health records of any patients who commit mass violence, but also require the treating physicians to explain in detail the mental health treatment that was provided. How else will the public ever understand what ignited the murderous behavior?

The Tennessee Star’s lawsuit seeking the release of documents relating to the Covenant school shooting serves an important public interest.  Only with the release of the documents will the public get a look inside Hale’s decades long mental health “treatment,” including the numerous cocktails of psychiatric drugs prescribed.  It must be pointed out that the powerful cocktail of mind-altering drugs that both Nikolas Cruz and Audrey Hale received have never been tested in clinical studies.  This is uncharted and unregulated human experimentation.

It is clear the investigative notes written by MNPD investigator and the 75 pages of documents about Hale’s mental health treatment records obtained via a search warrant have proven to be powerful evidence that links mental health psychiatric drug “treatments” with both of these killers. C’mon. Somebody’s got some splainin to do.

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