Mother of victim questions vigilantes

BY BEN SCHMITT
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER

Lynette Taylor has a question for Detroiters, in fact, for the country.

Does street justice justify the killing of a mentally ill person?

The person Taylor referred to was her son, 23-year-old Johnny Donalson Jr. of Detroit, whom she said suffered from bipolar disorder and paranoid schizophrenia.

Donalson swung a metal pipe at passers-by on a west-side Detroit street last week and attacked a 16-year-old Detroit girl, before falling victim to a drive-by shooting, police said. The gunman has not surrendered. The act prompted reaction from across the country, many in support of the killer.

"Don't you think for a moment that I condone his behavior," said Taylor, a retired executive secretary for Hostess Bakery. "But that wasn't him. That was his schizophrenic mentality and I wish someone would have called 911 or tried to help him before killing him."

How Donalson got to that street corner and that state of mind is a tale that leaves his parents heartbroken and angry at the stigma attached to mental illness.

Taylor, who lives in Mt. Clemens, describes her son as a borderline genius -- a former honor student at Cass Technical High School and talented artist.

She said drug use -- possibly marijuana laced with something stronger -- triggered what is known as a psychotic break when her son was in his late teens and led to his mental condition.

Donalson bounced in and out of mental health institutions, leaving after mandatory stay periods expired. He shunned his medication -- the psychotropic drugs Congentin and Haldol.

Before his diagnosis in 1999, his parents' concern over Donalson's drug use caused them to send him to Boysville, a juvenile-welfare agency in Clinton, now known as Holy Cross Children's Services, where he stayed in 1996 and 1997.

"He spent 18 months there and thrived," Taylor said. "It was a beautiful environment and I think the happiest, healthiest period in his life."

After returning, Donalson spent a few months at Denby High School. He was two classes short of his diploma, his mother said, but she pulled him out after he got in a fight and his life was threatened. He then got his GED in 1998 with his mother's urging.

He enrolled at Wayne County Community College with a plan to pursue engineering, but lost interest and dropped out.

In 1999, Donalson was hospitalized at St. John Riverview Hospital in Detroit and diagnosed with the mental conditions, his mother said. He would rebound during periods on the medication, and got his own apartment on the city's east side. He held various jobs, Taylor said, including at First Independence Bank, as a bulk mail handler for the U.S. Postal Service and a cashier at a video store.

Taylor said she had her son committed to Riverview after he struck his girlfriend.

"He was never the same," she said. "He was always thinking that someone walking down the street was following him or was about to hurt him."

Donalson also was committed to Oakwood Hospital in Dearborn earlier this year, and he checked out after his mandatory stay. Taylor said she placed her son in a group home for mentally ill people in Detroit, but he left and got his own apartment at Van Dyke and 7 Mile.

Tammy Seltzer, staff attorney at Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law in Washington, D.C., said there has to be more behind what led Donalson to attack strangers with a pipe.

"It turns my stomach to think that someone would see a person in obvious mental distress and would think the appropriate response would be to shoot them," she said. "The public's perceptions of people with mental illness are so warped that they don't even resemble what's true."

Taylor said she's unsure how her son got to the west side on Oct. 22, which is where his life came to an end at 7:45 a.m. at Northlawn and Plymouth.

"I may have done the same thing if I saw a person beating a child in the same street -- I surely would have done something to stop it," she said. "But as a mother, I'm hurting because I do know that he had a problem with mental health. And I just wonder if a witness or someone over there knew the same thing."

Taylor also called for the shooter to step forward.

"People are using my son as a poster boy case for vigilantism and the right to carry guns, but this is not the right case," she said. "I thank God that he didn't kill anyone and we don't have their blood on our hands. But someone has his blood on their hands."