Close ‘fatal gaps’ loophole: require reporting of mental health records to NICS
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Recently, we lost our beautiful daughter, Katherine Anne Bell Meier to suicide. She was no ordinary woman; she was a professor of Religious Studies at Arizona State University where she earned her own Master's degree. She completed an ABD doctorate at UC Berkeley and Graduate Theological Seminary in Berkeley. She worked in India for Chlorophyll. She traveled extensively for her Los Angeles-based company, Initiative, as their Global Director for Culture and Data.
But last year in the fall, she had two back-to-back car accidents that totaled both of her cars, two weeks apart. In one of them she sustained a head injury. This year in May, she began to have symptoms that initially appeared to look like depression. She became psychotic and tried to kill herself in late May. She was placed on a California Welfare and Institutions 5150 HOLD in hospital for 12 days, followed by 30 more days in residential care. Over the summer, the experts treating her in Southern California told us they believed that it wasn’t depression at all. It was some injury to her brain that wasn’t showing up on an MRI or EEG. She was beyond their scope of treatment.
Katie came to Montana to live with her father and I in late September, eventually giving up hope, despite her twice-weekly therapy treatments in Missoula and talks with her psychiatrist. She didn’t bathe, brush her teeth or change her clothes for the last six weeks of her life. She slept, ate and watched TV. She said she didn’t even know how to kill herself, so we believed her.
Near the end of her life, she seemed happier when she spoke on the phone to her sister, Erin, in Finland and her boyfriend in Oakland. She asked for keys to the car to take a drive the next day. That was the day she drove into Polson, bought a handgun, parked at the top of Polson’s cemetery with the car running and the lights on for several hours looking out over the Flathead Lake and the Mission Mountains, finally shooting herself with that handgun at 11 o’clock.
We would like to thank our neighbors, the Kaaps, who found dear Katie the morning after her death; Coroner Rick Lenz, who performed the terrible duty of notifying us, along with Sheriff Don Bell the morning of Oct. 23. Thanks, too, to the police who reported to the scene and took Katie’s remains to Lake Mortuary for us.
We did follow up on our daughter’s horrifying death to try to understand how a woman who, unwashed and disheveled as she was, could have presented at a gun counter and have been sold a handgun. We talked to the District Office for Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in Colorado and then to the Missoula branch of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, the organization that was formed after the terrible Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy. They both said that Katie would not have been allowed to buy a gun for five years in most any other state because of the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), but Montana does not report the records of the adjudicated mentally ill in NICS. Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America will be working toward closing the “fatal gaps” loophole regarding mental health records in the 2017 legislature. You can believe that I, as Katie’s mother, will be an active volunteer in that effort when the time comes.
