Three Years Later

Good grief, where is the common sense, the decency, the moral fortitude and intelligence when it comes to releasing from custody the most disgusting murderers whose crimes are unfathomable and beyond the pale. A man whose mental instability is well known. Who planned the murder of his three young children.

That he was responsible for murdering them is a known, but he is excused because he has a mental disorder.

Does that mental disorder make him less responsible for having planned to murder them in the expected and temporary absence of their mother? Does releasing this man from custody in a psychiatric ward back into the community equate with the dreadful crime he committed?

Does the community, let alone the country and its system of justice gain something of value knowing that this man who stabbed, strangled and suffocated his 10 year old daughter and 8 and 5 year old sons has been excused from full responsibility because of a mental disorder?

Allen Schoenborn, father of three, killer of those same three, not to be found responsible for his heinous act because of mental impairment. To release him from custody, theorizing that he represents no further threat to anyone in the community sounds rather cavalier. For one thing, it trivializes the dreadful act he committed.

There are three bright, beautiful children whose lives were viciously stolen. Their mother left bereft of their living presence, free to grieve their absence for the rest of her life. And the rest of her life may be briefer than imagined, since her husband, the father of their children, murdered those children to exercise his power over his wife.

Darcie Clarke, the children's mother was living in Coquitlam, British Columbia when the B.C. Review Board made their determination to have her former husband released. Into the local municipality. Her sorrow is still raw, her children dead three years. The man is as he was, and now he is free to live out his life as he will.

And that may very well include murdering his wife now as well. And then he can be found not criminally responsible for that act, due to mental incapacitation.

Upon which the board members who had him released should volunteer to invite this man to live with their own families on a rotating basis, as a generous act of compassion.