Eighteen years ago a female doctor ran amok with a knife and stabbed three people. She was sent to a psychiatric hospital. Released four years ago, she has now done the same again.
Doctor Noelia de Mingo suffered another schizophrenic episode yesterday and stabbed two women in a pharmacy in Madrid. One of the victims, a 46-year old, is gravely injured with a knife wound to the side. The other victim, a 53-year old, managed to escape but not before suffering several superficial knife wounds.
It was back in 2003, when the aggressor worked as a doctor, that she stabbed three people to death and left five others badly injured. She had suffered a pyschotic episode and attacked everybody she came across on the third floor of a building.
At her trial she was found not guilty of murder as she had been diagnosed by a medical expert with paranoid schizophrenia. Instead she was sentenced to spend 25 years as a patient in a psychiatric hospital. However, in 2017 she was released under supervised parole after her mother guaranteed that she would make sure that her daughter took all her medication.
Since then she has lived in the El Molar area of Madrid in the custody of her 79-year-old mother with visits to a day centre every two weeks for a psychiatric revision.
Editorial comment: now explain to the families of three people killed in 2003 by this woman that experts considered that it would be OK for her to be released.
(News: Madrid)
The problem with psychiatric patients is that as soon as they feel better they stop taking their medications. And so it goes around in circles. As a sick person she may not deserve punishment, but she and the public need to be protected, and her 79 year old mother is not going to be able to do this. She also will outlive her mother. A foolish decision to release her.