Cop killer’s mental illness went untreated
Cop killing suspect held without bond
by The Times-Picayune
Tuesday January 29, 2008, 6:27 PM
By Gwen Filosa
Staff writer
Bernel P. Johnson, 44, the man accused of shooting dead a New Orleans police officer with her own gun on Monday, appeared briefly in court Tuesday evening and was ordered held without bond.
Johnson was booked with the Monday murder of Officer Nicola Cotton, 24, who was shot dead after struggling with a man in a Central City parking lot. …
No mention was made of whether Johnson had a criminal record at the Tuesday hearing. Johnson’s only prior arrest in Orleans Parish was in 1989, when he was booked at Charity Hospital on Tulane Avenue with trespassing and simple battery, both misdemeanors typically handed at municipal court.
The Kenner police arrested Johnson four times for disturbing the peace between December 2005 and Nov. 19, 2007, a detective there said. Kenner police also arrested Johnson in 2006 for violation of a protective order.
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PROFILE OF A MURDER
The Times-Picayune
Cop-killing suspect Bernel Johnson’s journey through the mental health system taught him to manipulate it
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
By Laura Maggi
Three weeks before he allegedly killed a New Orleans police officer, Bernel Johnson, whose family described him as a paranoid schizophrenic, was forcibly committed to a mental institution by the New Orleans coroner’s office after he created a disturbance at a local bank.
“It was clear to me at that time that he was suffering from a psychotic illness,” said Dr. Jeffrey Rouse, the deputy psychiatric coroner who saw Johnson that day and ordered the commitment, which allows a medical institution to hold a person against his or her will for up to 15 days.
Yet the institution, which the coroner could not name because of medical privacy laws, released Johnson days later, an episode experts said underscores severe shortages in acute mental health care in Louisiana, even for potentially violent patients. …
Mental health cases took on a renewed urgency in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, as the city’s infrastructure lay shattered and stress levels soared. Beds were scare, providers were overworked and facilities were flooded.
A knife-wielding mental patient was fatally shot by police in a standoff on St. Charles Avenue in December 2005. In May 2006, a 46-year-old Algiers man with a history of mental problems was killed in a standoff and gunfight with police at his home. In March, a National Guardsmen fatally shot a 53-year-old frequent patient at mental hospitals after the man brandished a rusted, black metal BB gun inside his family’s storm-shattered and gutted house.
Dealing with mentally ill patients provides a particular challenge to police, one that is often unpredictable and unnerving.
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