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Showing posts with label Threat Assessment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Threat Assessment. Show all posts

Friday, February 5, 2016

Lawyer told police of client's alleged plot after speaking with ethics hotline

By Debra Cassens Weiss
American Bar Association Journal
Originally published January 12,2016

A Pennsylvania lawyer revealed his client’s alleged plot “take back” the home of his ex-girlfriend using an AR-15 rifle and body armor after consulting with the state bar’s ethics hotline, police say.

Revelations by the lawyer, Seamus Dubbs of York, likely saved lives, police say. The York Daily Record has a story.

The client, Howard Timothy Cofflin Jr., told police after his arrest that he planned to kill the ex-girlfriend as well as anyone who tried to stop him, according to court records cited by the York Daily Report. Charging documents said he planned to decapitate the ex-girlfriend and to go to war with state police, Pennlive.com reports. He also had a plan to bomb state police barracks, police said.

The article is here.

Thursday, October 11, 2012

Prof whom Holmes allegedly threatened appears to be his psychiatrist Read more: Prof whom Holmes allegedly threatened appears to be his psychiatrist


By John Ingold and Jeremy P. Meyer
The Denver Post
Originally published September 29, 2012


The University of Colorado professor whom Aurora theater shooting suspect James Holmes allegedly threatened appears to be Holmes' psychiatrist, according to a court filing made public Friday.

In the filing, prosecutors assert that Holmes and Dr. Lynne Fenton ended their doctor-patient relationship after Holmes made threats to someone, who reported those threats to the CU police. Later in the filing, prosecutors appear to indicate that the person who contacted police was Fenton. In both cases, though, the name of the person contacting police is redacted.

"The relationship was terminated after the defendant made threats directed towards (redacted), who reported the matter to" the police, the filing states. Later on, prosecutors write: "[T]he defendant's professional relationship with (redacted) had been terminated after she reported threats to the CU police."

The entire article is here.

Friday, August 17, 2012

Campus Threat-Assessment Teams Face Complex Task of Judging Risk

By Beth Mole
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Originally published August 10, 2012

In science-fiction movies like Minority Report,psychics could identify future murderers before they ever picked up a weapon. But the task of predicting the future and thwarting violence by identifying students who are likely to do harm is, in reality, complex, difficult, and full of pitfalls.

Many American colleges set up teams after the 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech to monitor campus incidents and, they hope, intervene before a potentially violent member of the community snaps. But those entities - which go by such names as threat-assessment teams, behavioral-intervention teams, or caring teams - face many challenges. Mental-health disorders often develop among young people in the traditional college-age years, but it can be difficult if not impossible to assess the extent of a person's illness early on.

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Many campuses lack ready access to mental-health experts who can authoritatively assess the risk of violence, and some experts say the assessment teams rely too little on those authorities.

At the University of Colorado at Denver, a threat-assessment team reportedly was alerted to a university psychiatrist's concerns about James E. Holmes, a former graduate student there. Mr. Holmes, who withdrew in June from a Ph.D. program in neurosciences at the university's medical campus, in neighboring Aurora, is accused of killing 12 people and injuring 58 others in a movie theater there last month.

News reports have said that the threat-assessment team did not meet to discuss Mr. Holmes because he had announced his intent to withdraw from the university.

The entire story is here.

Thanks to Ken Pope for this information.