Michael Nash would pace through his Shelby Township trailer home clutching one of his many guns, warning his mother to shut off her phone because the government was spying on them, Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard said Monday.
The 42-year-old Nash had a history of mental health issues before he opened fire Saturday on the crowd at the Brooklands Plaza Splash Pad in Rochester Hills, Bouchard said. Early in the investigation into the shooting, Bouchard said Nash’s mother told detectives about her son’s growing paranoia, although Bouchard said the woman has since retained an attorney and has stopped talking to police.
“It appears (Nash) had been musing about different things, saying, ‘Shut your phone off. We’re being watched. They are listening to us,'” Bouchard said. “(Nash was) walking around the house with weapons, talking about them listening to him, and talking about how the government was tracking him. Clearly, it appears to me, as a layperson, he’s had some mental health things going on.”
During a Monday news conference at Oakland County Sheriff’s Pontiac headquarters, Bouchard said the shooting is an extreme example of the intersection of mental illness and violence that his deputies and police across the country are dealing with in record numbers.
A day earlier, Nash’s neighbors told The Detroit News he kept to himself and did not return friendly waves or salutations. Nash’s father died three years ago, according to neighbors and a Dignity Funeral Home funeral notice, leaving Nash and his mother alone in the trailer.
While Nash’s mother was out of state on a trip, he drove her car to the splash park about a mile-and-a-half south of the trailer they shared in the Dequindre Estates community, Bouchard said. When Nash got to his destination, he exited the car, produced a pair of pistols and opened fire with one of the firearms, a Glock 9mm semiautomatic handgun. He emptied three magazines, leaving behind 30 shell casings, the sheriff said.
Nine people, two of them children, were wounded. The sheriff said two of the victims were in critical condition Monday, including an 8-year-old boy who was shot in the head, though he was making “amazing progress.”
After the shooting, Nash left one of the guns at the scene and drove back to his trailer. As police closed in on him, having traced to his address the legally purchased pistol he’d left at the splash pad, Nash killed himself, Bouchard said. Macomb County Medical Examiner spokesman Scott Turske said an autopsy showed Nash died from a gunshot wound to the chest.
When police broke into the trailer, after first sending in a drone, they recovered 11 firearms — a mixture of pistols, rifles and shotguns — Bouchard said. He said investigators were working Monday to determine where the guns had been bought and whether they’d been legally purchased.
“We have no information on any contacts (Nash) had with law enforcement,” Bouchard said. “No arrests, no criminal history — someone told me the last time he had any contact with law enforcement was in 2016 for a traffic violation.”
Investigators continued Monday to try to determine a motive for the shooting by poring over Nash’s social media accounts, while going through his cellphone and other electronic devices, including a tablet, that were confiscated from his house, the sheriff said.
“We may not be able to find (a motive),” Bouchard said. “Sometimes, like for example in the (Oxford High School shooting), some of the devices uncovered very explicit plans: ‘Here’s what I’m planning to do, here’s why, and I’m actually looking forward to it.’ That kind of thing oftentimes presents itself when people do this.
“But we might not find anything like that here,” Bouchard said. “We’re examining (Nash’s) devices to determine if there’s anything to connect those dots. Obviously, the first question people have is, why? How did this happen? Why did it happen? And what put it into motion?”
Expert focuses on murder-suicides
University of Detroit-Mercy criminal justice professor emeritus Daniel Kennedy, a forensic criminologist who often testifies in court cases as an expert about criminals’ motivation, said people who commit targeted mass shootings “usually plan on dying afterward.”
“This is a murder-suicide scenario, whether or not any of his victims die, since he clearly planned to kill people by shooting into the crowd. I don’t think he was trying to scare them,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy said Saturday’s splash park incident with Nash is akin to Steven Paddock, who in 2017 killed 60 people and wounded at least 413 others during a concert in Las Vegas, or Michigan State University shooter Anthony Dwayne McRae, who last year killed three students and wounded five others. Both Paddock and McRae committed suicide following their shooting rampages.
“In these cases, the whole plan is to kill people and then die yourself,” Kennedy said. “There are different kinds of murder-suicides; there is remorseful murder-suicide wherein one kills his lover and then, realizing what he has done, kills himself out of remorse. Then there is vengeful suicide, where one takes vengeance on a former lover who left him, or on society because he feels mistreated. Anger leads him to take as many people with him when he dies because it is his revenge for society having caused him to be suicidal. Attacking children really hurts the society he feels has rejected or abandoned him.”
While about 5% of mass shootings are related to severe mental illness, according to a 2022 Columbia University study, about 25% of mass shootings involve people with non-psychotic psychiatric or neurological illnesses, such as depression. The flood of social and emotional problems caused by the COVID pandemic continues to overwhelm police, with officers being called to more mental health-related runs than ever, many of which turn violent.
The Oakland County Sheriff’s Office is among the many law enforcement agencies that are struggling to handle record numbers of mental health runs. Oakland County sheriff’s deputies in 2021 rolled out a program in which social workers are deputized to help deescalate some encounters with mentally ill citizens.
Bouchard told the News his office has never dealt with more people suffering from mental crises. He said when he was elected sheriff in 1999, about 13% of Oakland County Jail inmates were taking psychotropic medications.
“The last time we did a sample, out of a population of about 1,400, 70% were taking psychotropic medications,” Bouchard said.
‘Almost daily’ mental health police calls
Four years ago, former Detroit police Chief James Craig said his department was dealing with a record number of mental health-related runs. Calls for service involving mental illness in Detroit increased 10% from 7,209 in 2020 to 7,935 in 2021, according to police statistics.
That record has since more than doubled, Detroit police Chief James White said last month during the Mackinac Policy Conference.
“(We had) 15,000 runs last year regarding mental health, and we’re on track to break that record again this year,” White told the News. “… Sometimes the person is violent. … Sometimes they want to hurt themselves.”
White said his department is “looking at this as a significant crisis. That it is, realistically, none of us saw this coming. I mean, I joined the Police Department to fight crime and, ultimately, early on in my career, wanted to be a traffic cop and to see what we are.” But this year, Detroit police officers “are the primary service providers for the mentally ill in our community,” he said.
During Monday’s press conference, Bouchard said his deputies respond to mental health calls “almost daily.”
“We’re responding to numerous calls a week where someone has gone off into the woods or disappeared with suicidal iterations,” Bouchard said. “We literally have, during searches for people in mental health crisis, found an individual that was putting a rope around his neck to hang himself from a tree, and they interrupted that.”
Kennedy said people often conflate serious mental illnesses with personality disorders, although both conditions can result in violence.
“SMIs, or serious mental illnesses usually involve schizophrenia, bipolar disease or depression,” he said. “But usually in these conversations when people are talking about mental illness, they’re talking about someone with personality disorders. You can go out and kill people if you have a paranoid personality disorder, but that’s not the same thing as a paranoid schizophrenic. One may not be as serious as the other, but they both can lead to major problems in your life, including violence.”
McRae, the Michigan State University shooter, had a history of mental problems before killing himself, while Oakland County prosecutors said Ethan Crumbley’s parents were grossly negligent by failing to address their son’s mental health needs, although Crumbley was ruled competent to stand trial.
Bouchard said he’s been “begging” for years to get more resources to deal with the flood of mental health runs.
“There needs to be more focus on mental health for the community, more mental health resources with a wider continuum of care, both inpatient and outpatient,” Bouchard said. “Everybody in Washington or Lansing that’s asking what they can do to help, that’s what they can do. We could use resources and peer to peer programs, mental health resources for the community.”
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