Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Movie theater killer dodges jail time

Mujtaba Rabbani Jabbar, the man who killed Paul Schrum in an Owings Mills, MD theater last June, won't serve any time in jail. He was convicted of the crime, but was found not criminally responsible and will instead be remanded to a state mental hospital.
Doctors who evaluated Mujtaba R. Jabbar for the state before the murder trial scheduled to begin yesterday diagnosed the defendant with schizophrenia and found that the disorder had left him unable to conform his behavior to the law, county prosecutor Rachel Cogen said.

Baltimore County Circuit Judge Thomas J. Bollinger ordered that Jabbar be committed to a state psychiatric facility.

"I believe he's going to be there for an extremely long time, if not the rest of his life," Cogen said after the hearing.
I suppose one could fake schizophrenia symptoms. It's not like there's a blood test or CT scan that confirms it. But it appears more likely that my earlier diagnosis of sudden jihadi syndrome was premature.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Where in the world is that pool bar in the picture? I have got to get there!

Anonymous said...

I went to school with this guy. He was in my Terrorism class senior year. Every person in that class thought he was terrifying. He would walk into class solemnly with his hands behind his back, and sit there silently saying nothing at all. Once in a while when he did talk he would defend the motives of terrorist organizations. My friends and I morbidly joked that he was going to come in and kill us someday. When I heard about this murder it creeped the hell out of me. He was so tightly wound that I suppose it was only a matter of time. I just randomly thought of him and decided to google and see what became of him. Weird.