Beheading horror on North 13th Place: We can stop it

• Residents of a modest north-central Phoenix neighborhood have lived for years with a volatile mentally ill couple
• In the most recent legislative session, a bill to address issues with the criminally insane never came to a vote
• Neighbors and police will have to deal with the horror of what they found Saturday

In legalese, they are people deemed “not competent, not restorable” — which means they are, and likely always will be considered mentally incompetent in the eyes of the courts. And, so, not responsible for any crimes they commit.

You could say the same of state policy regarding our treatment of the criminally insane.

MORE: Beheading sparks questions about mental illness

It is a non-policy that is more criminally insane than the desperately mentally ill people the state refuses to hospitalize against their will, if necessary, and treat.

Residents of a modest neighborhood in north-central Phoenix just discovered the abject horror that can come of a state policy that neglects such people. People who, by virtue of their chronic mental illnesses, are set free, despite having committed serious, often violent, crimes.

On Saturday, police discovered the beheaded corpse of 49-year-old Trina Heisch in an apartment a neighbor described as “a bloodbath.” The neighbor who discovered the carnage was greeted at the door by Heisch’s husband, whose own arm had been severed at the elbow, apparently by his own hand. He also had gouged out an eye.

What that horror-stricken neighbor witnessed at the little apartment complex on North 13th Place was not an isolated, grisly incident, but the almost-predictable culmination of a slow-moving, years-long nightmare.

Heisch and her husband, whose name police have not yet released, had been in and out of mental-health treatment centers for many years. Both have violence-strewn histories. As recently as March, Heisch was accused of attacking her husband with a knife. In 2003, she was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder.

Their chronic conditions fairly begged for someone to keep them off the streets.

Because it costs money and takes willpower to act, however, our Legislature declined. As recently as this year’s legislative session, lawmakers decided that finding a way to organize and fund such a system would be too costly. Too bothersome.

So, they did nothing. And, today, the residents of a small apartment complex on North 13th Place are struggling with the horrific consequences of what our elected leaders failed to do.

Mental health care officials describe the current system as a virtual “get out of jail free” card for often-violent, sick individuals who cannot be held accountable for their crimes and who cannot be held against their will for any meaningful length of time.

For at least the past seven years, law enforcement officials in Arizona have submitted proposals to the Legislature to address treatment of the chronically, criminally mentally ill. This year, Senate Bill 1315 never got a vote of the full Senate. It just disappeared into someone’s desk drawer.

The horror of what happened on North 13th Place does not stop with a gruesomely-murdered woman and her self-mutilated husband.

The horror and fear began years earlier among neighbors forced to call police countless times in response to irrational behavior and pitched family battles. It extends to the police who, on Saturday, had to step into that charnel house.

And it spreads like a suffocating kind of fog over a community that has the means to prevent such horror, but won’t.