By Mort Kahn

I am the father of Daniel Kahn, who was shot and killed by the police on July 31 in Springfield.

First, as a baseline, people with mental illnesses were once babies, loving children, energetic and eager-to-grow-up teenagers, and young adults with their whole lives ahead of them. They did not wake up one random morning and make a decision that they wanted to have one or more mental illnesses. With that in mind, we should look to change how we see these tormented souls.

The real story is how we as a nation look upon the mentally ill, the homeless and how we treat them because they don’t act like us and they don’t talk like us and they don’t think like us, so we are fearful of them; however, we do absolutely nothing to help them long term like we do for heart or cancer patients.

Anything written or said about people with mental illness or, in my son’s case, multiple mental illnesses, should drive the feeling of sympathy to the reader or the listener. In doing this, we are far less likely to get a bad outcome for the people who are mentally ill and for ourselves in the general public.

We should also attempt to drive a sympathetic feeling towards the mentally ill into our police forces so that they don’t mistake what to them appears like defiance and what truly is mental illness. Then we might be able to have better outcomes and less shootings. Mentally ill people need non-mentally ill people to help keep them alive in critical situations.

So at a high level, why did this happen to my son Daniel? Everywhere my son went to get help was voluntary on his part and through the direction of every member of our greater family. This assistance helped him to thrive for short periods of time of between one and three months. Then, either Daniel removed himself from the mental health assistance and medication, thinking that it was OK for him to start up with life again, or the program that he had enrolled in cut off his support for various reasons. In both cases, Daniel would quickly become homeless and without medication and without any psychological support or direction.

Each and every time this occurred, Daniel would end up losing everything that he had either purchased on his own or that his family provided for him. Clothing, toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, shoes, important identification cards; anything that a typical person would need to sustain a healthy life would be either stolen or lost by simply moving from place to place or park bench to park bench or street.

Why did Daniel attack two Springfield Police officers?

Eight or so years ago, when my son was in the Harris County, Texas, jail system, we would receive communications from Daniel that he had been raped on more than one occasion. 

It was difficult to determine whether these events were actually taking place or part of Daniel’s mental illnesses. At some point these events must’ve been taken seriously by Harris County because many months after my son was early-released from jail by the court, two police officers came to my home looking for Daniel to see if he wanted to follow through on his documented complaints.

By the time these two officers arrived, Daniel was long gone from Houston. It was always Daniel’s position that the police only cared about what people said about him and what he did, but not what other people did to him. It is presumed that Daniel developed a great distrust for police officers.

When the two Springfield police officers approached Daniel for what was likely a breakdown, he likely assumed that they were going to arrest him for something and take him to a jail where he would be, as Daniel would say, raped and raped and raped again. 

Daniel most likely took the position that he would not allow anybody to put him back in jail, so he decided to fight. The two Springfield police officers would’ve had no concept of Daniel’s great fear.

I want to take the opportunity to remove a possible social stigma we may have toward mentally ill people in that the root cause of their mental illness must have been a poor upbringing or lack of discipline. By providing the information below, we again have the opportunity to think differently about mentally ill people, because in many cases, they grew up just like us.

Daniel grew up in an upper middle class house. He had his own bedroom and a shared game room with his other siblings. He had his own bike, ate balanced meals other than snacks and he went to private school during grade school. He did have the occasional altercation, but we wrote that off to Daniel’s desire to be Superman and defend people he knew from bullying. Daniel was the defender of those who could not defend themselves, and that caused him some grief in life.

When the time came, Daniel had his own car, and when he wrecked it, after a bit of consequence time, he wanted a motorcycle, and I got him a street-legal powerful motor scooter instead to go to work and school. In school and at summer camp, Daniel was widely accepted by all and involved in literally everything. He loved people and he loved interacting with people and could make you laugh, a gut-wrenching belly laugh, in short order because he had an extremely good wit about him. Daniel‘s kryptonite, like some young boys or teens, was coming home to do his homework. Daniel’s grandmother helped him to learn how to do quality homework and also provided him with Kumon-method instruction.

After high school I got him his own apartment next to Houston Community College — in walking distance, in hopes that he would get his first two years of college under his belt. Everything was paid for, his apartment, electricity, furniture, food, you name it. Unfortunately, this is when my son began showing signs of some mental illness and found his way into the drug culture. He wasted the entire first year doing drugs and not much else.

In several of his text messages a month before he died, Daniel would reflect back on that time and say that he made some huge mistakes in that part of his life, and that he had everything going for him and completely wasted it.

Daniel did not grow up in an impoverished home or in lack of discipline and rules or defined bedtimes. He had standard times for dinner just like all of us in the house. He did scoot out of the house a few times at night, but was rather ingenious about it. He would disarm the alarm sensor on his window by taking the battery out and climb down the second story window putting his foot on a dryer vent on the outside wall of the house and climbing out, presumably to go visit his friends or girlfriend. I only found out about it when I found the dryer vent on the ground. I didn’t like it, and I think he lost his cell phone privileges for two months or so, but it was pretty creative. If my father were alive, he might add a paragraph or two about similar things that I did as a teen.

Daniel had his own cell phone, and when he broke the rules and used it at the wrong times, it was taken away from him for a short period of time and then given back to him so he could try again.

He definitely required more monitoring and discipline than the other three boys within the household. 

Daniel was not a product of an unstructured life or one without discipline and or consequences or one of poverty. Daniel simply developed, over time, multiple mental illnesses that he did not decide to have. They just occurred.

I make all of these remarks in an attempt to remove the stigma of how most of us think about mentally ill individuals as we walk by them.

Mentally ill people don’t act like us, they don’t talk like us and they don’t think like us, and because of this we are fearful of them and walk at a quick pace to ensure there’s a distance between us and them. Then, as we walk away, we stigmatize them and suggest that all of this is their own damn fault.

Daniel had a bright life ahead of him, and where some people develop heart conditions and other others develop cancer and others have a birth deformity, Daniel developed multiple mental illnesses of no fault of his own.

Why do I share all of this information with you? It’s to begin the process of helping people to develop a sympathetic position towards the mentally ill.

Sympathy will drive change into how our society can help these poor souls who did not choose the tormented life that they live.

Consider the potential cost of providing care for the mentally ill, and in some cases involuntarily, against the cost of the injuries they can cause to innocent people, the cost in our court systems, the cost in our jail systems and, most importantly, the cost to society who no longer feel safe anymore, anywhere.

If you truly want to be part of the change, do what I have done along with every other member of our family and friends. Write your senators and your representative and continue to badger them to make a change.

We are the solution.

 Mort Kahn is the father of Daniel Kahn, who was shot and killed by the police on July 31 in Springfield, Oregon.