Murderous Assault Attempt on a Defenseless Baby and Another Attempt to Beat Criminal Charges Through Psychiatric Mystification

–Richard E. Vatz

There are people who foolishly say that “I don’t believe in luck” or “I don’t believe in chance.”

The baby who was thrown out of a second story window in Reisterstown had her landing softened by bushes and thus lived.

That is good luck.

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But people who see life as determined at all levels by a lack of agency are wrong as well. The mother of the baby, Rebecca Diane Himes, as a correspondent of mine put it so clearly, “didn’t want to have a baby, so she threw her child out the window.”

Psychiatric enablers abjure simple, straightforward explanations of behavior, inveigling themselves into the criminal justice process to excuse the inexcusable through mystifying explanations of behavior, and they profit financially from such misdirection.

Ms. Himes is currently being evaluated for psychiatric incompetence, a finding that could save her from successful criminal prosecution.

On WJZ-TV, a GBMC pediatrician, Dr. Olachi Mezu-Ndubuisi, said simply that “She (Himes) did not know she was pregnant.”

A more responsible and precise statement would have been what The Baltimore Sun wrote: “Himes…told a doctor that she had not known she was pregnant before she delivered the child…”

The doctor doesn’t know what Ms. Himes “knew,” only what she self-servingly claims she knew.

Small difference? Not in the world of legal psychiatric exculpation.

Ms. Himes reportedly refused to speak to police and was, according to one doctor, in “emotional pain” and “deeply concerned.”

That doesn’t sound like a woman who is unaware of what happened, unable to understand charges or unable to aid in her defense — the criteria of incompetence to stand trial.

A warrant for her arrest had been issued, and after it was established that the mother was “being evaluated for mental competence,” according to the Sun, Cpl. Michael Hill said upon release from her evaluation the accused would be “taken into police custody.” She was charged with attempted first-degree murder.

The baby is now in the care of the Department of Social Services.

Dr. Mezu-Ndubuisi was quoted by the Sun as saying “I don’t feel it’s my place – or anyone’s place – to judge [the mother].”

How absurd: just because a violent perpetrator is a psychiatric “patient,” she surely does not deserve judgmental protection.

Except in the upside-down world of Alice in Wonderland mental health exculpation, that is.

–Professor Vatz has written for decades on psychiatric rhetoric