Mental problems behind many dramatic Modesto area crimes

A few years ago, Judy Kropp spoke to a group of police officers and told the story of how her daughter's life had been derailed by mental illness.

The officers wanted training on how to deal with mentally ill people. Kropp was happy to share her family's story. They had had positive experiences with the police. Once when her daughter, Beth, was acting strangely in front of a grocery store, officers had taken Beth to the hospital instead of jail. Another time, officers visited their house and acted almost as counselors, effectively calming Beth.

"I encouraged them to keep that up," Judy Kropp said.

That 43-year-old Beth Kropp was killed in a confrontation with police last week is one of the ironies of her story. Another is that the Kropps were understanding people who provided a loving and stable home to their daughter. They confronted her illness and learned how to navigate the mental health system. By all accounts, the Kropps did everything right in their battle against Beth's illness.

But in the end, the illness won.

Beth Kropp was shot by police after she walked onto an elementary school campus hitting herself with a meat cleaver.

She joins an unhappy list of mentally ill people who've had violent confrontations around Modesto this year. In January police shot to death a mentally ill man wielding a sword. Also that month, a Del Rio man with a history of mental illness was charged with murdering his parents.

On Feb. 16, a Riverbank man who relatives said struggled with mental problems was arrested in the stabbing deaths of three relatives. Later that month, a mentally ill man with a knife broke into a Modesto radio station. He was arrested on vandalism charges.

It would be easy to blame those incidents and Kropp's death on shrinking budgets for mental health services. The county's mental health department — Behavioral Health and Recovery Services — has seen an 8 percent drop in its budget, from $79.8 million to $73.6 million, over the past five years. Clinics have closed in Patterson, Oakdale and Ceres. A program for homeless mentally ill people was cut.

But the explanation for Kropp's death is more complex, and less comforting.

"The reality is that some people have an illness that's really, really difficult to treat," said Denise Hunt, director of Behavioral Health and Recovery Services.

"And we still don't have the answers or all the treatments and cures for mental illness. I wish we did. If we had the answers, we would have the solution."

Adult chose to leave

Beth Kropp, a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, was an independent adult living in a rented room in Modesto. During bad periods, voices in Beth's head told her to kill herself. She told her parents once that the movie "A Beautiful Mind" captured what it was like to be schizophrenic.

Sometimes she would completely lose touch with real- ity. On better days, Beth attended support groups, researched medications, even spoke to groups about living with mental illness. She saw a caseworker regularly.

But in recent years she had cut herself off from her fam- ily, who had become part of her delusions. Judy Kropp said if she had seen Beth last week, she would have noticed the signs that her daughter was drifting into a bad period. But Beth wanted to live apart from her parents, who live in Oakdale.

"It was Beth's choice not to see us," Judy Kropp said. "I can't say that was the county's fault. I wish I had an easy answer. I wish I could say, if we had just done X thing it would have been better. But that's not true."