At one point in my life, I worked as a teaching assistant for students with autism. I’ve worked with students on varying places on the spectrum. I am very familiar with the condition and I consider myself to be quite adept at working with people, especially children, who deal with it.
Though I am very well trained in the subject matter, I do not think that autism is an excuse for reckless or dangerous behavior, especially when that behavior puts others at risk. So it is with Alex LaMorie, who was a Baltimore man with autism.
Everyone knows that one of the best ways to die is to approach law enforcement agents with a weapon. I guess LaMoire did not receive that important memo. Had he known that simple concept, he would still be alive. Instead, he died earlier this month after aggressively approaching police officers with a knife.
Those poor police officers gave him every opportunity to abandon his behavior, but he made the choice to persist. That choice cost him his life. Apparently, LaMoire had a mental health crisis, becoming suicidal due to his falling victim to a scam. While I can understand that falling for a scam can be upsetting, becoming suicidal over it is silly. After all, suicide is cowardly and is a mortal sin.
Yes, he was tricked into giving very personal information and material to someone posing as a woman who was interested in him, but what would possess him to grab a knife and then stepping forward, with malice, to threaten the police officers?
I have to wonder if his intent was to actually commit suicide by cop. I say that because he dialed 911 to scream and cry like a little bitch about the scam. People with autism are not idiots, so it’s quite possible that he wanted to perish but was too much of a sniveling little coward to do it himself.
Of course, an investigation is in progress, but his family his already crying because no one has reached out to them. Yeah, well, they’re not required to coddle a criminal’s family. That is what LaMoire was, after all. Suicide is technically a crime. Approaching anyone, especially police officers, is absolutely a crime. He died a felon. That will be his legacy.
There are questions as to whether or not responding officers knew that he had autism. Well, that doesn’t really matter, does it? Again, coming at officers with a knife must be met with lethal force. Even if they did know, and some posts on Facebook allege that they were trained for situations like this, they still would have had no other option but to open fire. Sure, one could claim that they could have used non-lethal ways to deal with him, but when that knife came out, those options went out the window.
I fully support the officers’ actions. They had to put LaMoire down before he hurt them or someone else. Hopefully, they will be cleared to return to duty. They simply did what they had to do and they should not be painted as being the bad guys in this story.
LaMoire had just moved into an apartment complex designed to give people like him some degree of independence. That doesn’t really have anything to do with what happened, but the fact that he was capable of living on his own shows that he knew what he was doing when he brandished that knife. For that reason, neither he nor his family deserve any form of sympathy.
By the way, it’s technically correct to say that someone’s autistic. However, the politically correct way of saying it now is “he was a man with autism,” not “he was autistic.”
As for this story, there is no question: even with autism, LaMore was the bad guy and society is a little bit safer with him being six feet under.