White House Shooter Oscar Ortega-Hernandez

Oscar R. Ortega-Hernandez:
Can you tell if someone is schizophrenic just by looking at a photo of them?

 

Washington Post

"An Idaho man pleaded guilty [on September 17, 2013] to opening fire on the White House in November 2011.

No one was injured, but two members of President Obama’s family were there when Oscar R. Ortega-Hernandez began shooting, according to court documents filed Wednesday. Ortega-Hernandez admitted firing eight rounds from a semiautomatic assault rifle into the second and third floors of the White House.

The 22-year-old had been scheduled to go to trial in federal court in Washington on charges that included attempted assassination of the president. Instead, he pleaded guilty to using a firearm during a crime of violence and to damaging the White House and putting “lives in jeopardy.”

He faces up to 27 ¹ / ₂ years in prison, according to federal sentencing guidelines. [He got 25 years, and he has to pay $94,000 in restitution to repair the damage to the White House.]

... 

In the months leading up to the White House shooting, Ortega-Hernandez had become agitated [and paranoid], authorities said. He told friends that the federal government was seeking to control Americans by implanting global positioning chips in children, according to the plea agreement. [He was also worried that the government was using fluoride and aspartame for the purposes of mind control.]

Acquaintances told authorities that Ortega-Hernandez had told them that he “needed to kill” the president and that Obama was “the antichrist.”  

In October 2011, he recorded two videos of himself in which he called for a revolution, according to the statement of offense signed by Ortega-Hernandez. He then drove 2,200 miles from his home in Idaho Falls to Washington. 

On the evening of Nov. 11, he stopped his 1998 Honda Accord on Constitution Avenue NW shortly after passing the entrance to the Ellipse. He began firing a semiautomatic rifle equipped with a telescopic sight.

Driving away moments later, Ortega-Hernandez lost control of the car and crashed near the ramp to the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Bridge. He fled on foot and was arrested at a hotel in western Pennsylvania after a five-day manhunt."

 NYT

"Family members and others said that while Mr. Ortega was behaving increasingly strangely — he read a 45-minute speech at his 21st birthday party in October that veered from supporting marijuana legalization to detailing the threat of secret societies to expressing frustration with American foreign policy in oil-producing countries — he never seemed violent.

They said that he could not have truly wanted to kill the president, but that he may have wanted a larger audience. He read his speech to anyone who would listen. In September, Mr. Ortega made a video in which he asked Oprah Winfrey to let him appear on television with her.

“You see, Oprah, there is still so much more that God needs me to express to the world,” he says. “It’s not just a coincidence that I look like Jesus. I am the modern-day Jesus Christ that you all have been waiting for.”

Mr. Ortega’s behavior and the age at which it appears to have begun to suggest that he has “a textbook case” of schizophrenia, said Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, who researches the disease and is the founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center in Arlington, Va.

Dr. Torrey recalled working at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, a psychiatric treatment center, in the 1970s and 1980s.

“These folks often end up in Washington as what we used to call ‘White House cases,’ ” he said. “A White House case classically is someone who comes to the guard at the White House and says they have a special message for the president, or they try to go over the wall. We’ve seen dozens. They almost always have paranoid schizophrenia, and they almost always respond to medication.” Among the patients being treated there is John W. Hinckley Jr., who shot President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Mr. Ortega, he acknowledged, is accused of going much further than pestering a guard or climbing a wall.

“I can guarantee you that in his mind, it all makes perfect sense,” Dr. Torrey said. “If he’s Christ, Obama’s the Antichrist.”"

How did this guy not get a Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity acquittal? He should be in a forensic mental facility, not a federal prison.