A St-Laurent man who continued posting threats on social networks like Facebook and Twitter even though he was under a court order not to do so has pleaded guilty to criminal harassment and to threatening the police officer who arrested him.
Dennis Markuze, 43, a man who often uses the alias David Mabus when he makes threats, appeared before Quebec Court Judge Jean-Claude Boyer at the Montreal courthouse on Thursday where he entered a plea to three charges in all, including a breach of his probation.
There is much more there if you want to read it, but the gist is, he couldn’t keep from making threats. Having been on the receiving end of some (well, hundreds, but a fraction of what PZ got) of those threats (only a couple since his first arrest), this story is important to me, but really because I agree with Tim Farley (who is one of the recent victims of Mabus’s attacks, leading to today’s ruling):
I sincerely hope that investigation will finally result in Markuze getting the treatment he clearly needs.
Sentencing is set for November 21.
For the record, the memory of Mabus that is burned into my consciousness is purely an accident of circumstance; he once (of many times) wrote to me that my family would all be killed… and it happened this time that I read it while sitting in the hospital where my brother was, where my brother soon died. I know Mabus could not have known, and had no role at all to play, but this unfortunate timing means I can’t just ignore him. I want him in treatment.
Oh, Cuttlefish, I’m so sorry about the brutality of the timing.
I really hope they enforce some proper treatment here, but he needs more than treatment for substance abuse and whatever clinical delusional problem he has. He took being an arsehole to a criminal level.
Hmm, well, as we saw recently with the young Mr. Rodger, all the therapy in the world won’t help if the patient doesn’t want to change. I suspect Mr. Markuze does not, and I also suspect the Canadian criminal justice system is not prepared to keep him locked up until his head is on straight. So I’m afraid we’ll be seeing him again.
You can be an asshole and mentally ill. But these things don’t necessarily go together. With Mabus one is tempted to assume that they do in fact go together. I agree, hope is there that he can be medicated enough to not bother bloggers anymore, but I’m not holding my breath given the track record of the authorities there so far. Some things just can’t be fixed by pills.
November? Sentencing is in November?
That’s quite a long way away and in the meantime if he continues to offend?
Oh well, I guess its good that although the justice system has worked exceptionally slowly it has somewhat worked. I too, hope Dennis Markuze gets the treatment he needs and stops his attecks on all the various bloggers and commenters he has been harrassing for so long.
PS. My condolences to Cuttlefish for the loss of his brother and hope this isn’t too triggering. That really sucks and can only begin to imagine how awful it must have been.
He’s obsessed. He’ll never, ever, stop.
StevoR:
Yeah, November is a ways off. Hopefully the reasoning behind waiting is good*, although that still seems excessively long. Then again, the System can be like that.
*Apparently they want to make sure that cocaine and alcohol abuse are the only issues under consideration. This may be a positive turn, in that they may opt for something beyond another round of “treat and release”. Already, he cannot use substance abuse and his mental state as a defense for his actions in event of a trial, so maybe this is moving in the right direction. If nothing else, he needs more stringent monitoring while on probation.
Folks like this and habitual drunk drivers are a real source of despair. Is there anything short of locking them up for life or amputating their arms that will keep them from re-offending? Perhaps someday there will be some sort of implantable chip to control these behaviors (there is one for OCD.)
Even in Canadia, threatening a cop tends to evoke a Judicial Frown – n’est-ce pas?
He’s shown up on a couple secular/atheist forums recently as well. (as in, within the past week.)
I seem to remember from messages past from Mabus that his rantings tend towards the apocalyptic, delineating All the bad things that will happen to Atheists from whatever vengeful God he believes in. When he starts threatening individuals, either on line or in person, is when he finally gets arrested.
If he lived in the U.S. he would be declared schizophrenic, or bi-polar, treated for a much shorter time than a month, and released with instructions to fill and take his meds. They don’t even release you with the actual medication in our state. Of course in the U.S he’d be responsible for paying for part of his in-house treatment and meds, which he probably couldn’t afford. Then he would not take his meds or would take them and sabotage them with alcohol and cocaine again.
I’m concerned that he might eventually decide that he, himself is God’s avenger, and pull a mass killing at one of the Atheists conventions. Of course in Canada, hopefully, he would not have easy access to a gun.
His other fate, had he lived in the U.S. would be to eventually get thrown in jail or prison with all the others who are mentally ill, since there are no places for them in the mental health care system.
He did show up at the AAI convention in Montreal in 2010 and tripped the fire alarm in the hotel. I was in a group of people talking to PZ Myers at the time and there was speculation that Mabus might have been involved. It later turned out he was.
@machintelligence
I remember that incident and it is definitely concerning. It’s an escalation from mere internet harassment and might herald further escalation down the line. That’s why it’s so important that this man gets some help.
This is way beyond being an asshole. Any half-way reasonable person would have gotten the hint from the first trip to the court house. The fact that he’s continuing, even in the face of a court order, shows that he’s simply not in control of himself.
I wondered that too. From the article:
So basically, they’re evaluating exactly how screwed up he is before deciding what to do with him. Seems fairly reasonable.