Harger: The courts knew him, the police knew him, Western State Hospital knew him, now a woman is dead

Mark Alexander Adams appeared in a King County courtroom this week, charged with first-degree murder. Prosecutors say he deliberately drove his car into an 88-year-old woman in a Bellevue parking lot, killing her.

Later that same day, they say he followed a skateboarder, hit him, then circled a Tacoma gas station and sped into a group of pedestrians. One man flew over the hood.

The driver reversed toward him as he lay on the ground.

In court, Adams identified himself as the King of Monaco and the Supreme Allied Commander of the United States Armed Forces.

Do you think for a single second this case is going to trial?

The system knew who he was

Court records show he has a protection order against him for threatening his elderly mother with a knife. He was committed to Western State Hospital in 2016 after a violent crime. While there, he escaped. He was caught. Eventually, he was deemed well enough for release.

And now a woman is dead.

How we got here

There was a time in this country when we committed people involuntarily and called it treatment. It was often neither humane nor just. The institutions were frequently brutal. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest didn’t come out of nowhere. Reform was absolutely needed.

What replaced those institutions wasn’t a better system. It was largely nothing.

We decided the answer was to empty them. And the people who needed the most intensive, structured, long-term care ended up on our streets. We called that progress.

Walk through any homeless encampment around here, and you will find some of the people there in a serious mental health crisis. Screaming at things that aren’t there. We step around them and tell ourselves we are respecting their autonomy. Meanwhile, they are suffering, untreated, in the rain, with nobody asking anything of them and nobody helping them get better.

This is not an isolated failure

There is a man notorious on Capitol Hill with a 1999 manslaughter conviction for killing a toddler in his care. He has been arrested repeatedly for violent assaults. Axe. Spiked glove. Breaking into apartments. Each time, courts find him incompetent to stand trial. Each time, he is released. Police have largely stopped arresting him because they know how it ends.

There is another man in Ballard. Over a dozen misdemeanor cases since 2022. Assaults. Threats. Theft. Case after case dismissed. Incompetent to stand trial. Back on the street. Repeat.

Most people living with mental illness are not dangerous. The people we are talking about are a much smaller group. Severely and chronically ill, often without insight into their own condition. We know who they are. The courts know who they are. The police know who they are. And the system keeps releasing them because we have no place to put them and no legal mechanism that keeps them there.

What a real system looks like

We can build humane facilities. Comfortable ones. Places where seriously mentally ill people receive real care, real structure, real treatment, without being warehoused or abused.

Places where the measure of success is not how quickly someone is released, but whether they are genuinely better. Sustained improvement. Real progress. And reasonable confidence they will stay that way.

Not a system where someone walks out, stops taking their medication, and we start the whole cycle over again.

We are occasionally shocked when someone gets killed

An 88-year-old woman went to her YMCA last Saturday and didn’t come home. The man accused of killing her had been telling us for years exactly who he was. We just kept letting him go.

At some point, compassion has to mean something more than releasing dangerous people into a community that has no idea what’s coming.

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