Another Tragedy

From the February 22, 2008 Spokane, Washington Spokesman-Review:

Bryan Kim, the mentally ill teenager convicted by a Spokane jury last month of murdering his parents, will spend the rest of his life in prison with no possibility of parole.
Before his sentencing Thursday by Spokane County Superior Court Judge Tari Eitzen, Kim rose and asked for the 44-year sentence his public defender had proposed as an alternative to life behind bars – a request Eitzen denied.
...

Katherine Dillman, Kim’s maternal aunt, asked in her letter for mercy for her nephew. She criticized the Spokane County prosecutor’s office for not accepting a plea bargain that would have kept Kim out of prison, and she criticized her dead sister as a “very controlling individual” who charged Bryan for rent, food and his medicine for bipolar disease.
M. Rose Stowell, another maternal aunt, lashed out at the jury for seeming to ignore Kim’s “documented history of mental illness.”
“This is a young man who fell through the cracks, did not receive proper treatment or diagnosis, causing him to spiral out of control,” she wrote. Stowell asked Eitzen to place her nephew in a safe environment with treatment and consistent medication.

I'm not sure that this qualifies as a deinstitutionalization failure; there isn't enough information to say for sure, one way or the other. But I find myself wondering how long Kim's parents had been struggling with an out of control kid.