American Madness

Thousands of people with severe mental illness have been failed by a dysfunctional system. My friend Michael was one of them. Twenty-five years ago, he killed the person he loved most.

- By Jonathan Rosen

Michael Laudor in at the author's house in New Rochelle, New York, 1976.

On the night of June 17, 1998, a Cornell campus police officer named Ellen Brewer had just begun her shift when she noticed a tall, silhouetted figure moving slowly across the engineering quad. The man appeared to be dressed all in black. Brewer felt a whisper of danger. She slowed her car, and the shrouded figure began loping toward her. He raised a hand and hailed her as if she were a taxi driver. As he drew closer, she thought he must have been the victim of an assault, perhaps in need of medical assistance.

Suddenly, as if in a single stride, the man was at her window. He lowered his face, shiny with sweat, close to hers. He was muttering incoherently; his rust-colored beard and hair were wildly matted. He seemed to be saying that he might have killed someone, his girlfriend or perhaps a windup doll. Brewer radioed in the strange encounter, requested backup, and got out of her car.

She thought again that the disoriented man, whose clothes were bloody, had been attacked or maybe had fallen into one of the steep gorges that famously intersect the campus, but when she tried to steer him out of the road, he leaped back, a large hand clenched into a fist.

The police station was all of 100 yards away, on Campus Road, and officers were already coming toward them, some on foot, others in cars. They escorted the man, whose name was Michael Laudor, to Barton Hall, the looming stone fortress that the campus police shared with the athletics department.