If you still think there’s no crisis in mental health department, you are probably blind, lying, or a psycho. Our country is going through the issues that are definitely tough to comprehend, yet they do not disappear if being ignored. The price we pay for our ignorance is huge – it’s the death of thousands of innocent people.

We want to tell you one mother’s story to prove our point. Her 13-year-old son, Paris, brutally murdered his 4-year-old sister, Ella, by stabbing her 17 times.

How did it happen?

On February 5, 2007, Charity Lee was at her work when her son Paris convinced the babysitter to go home and went to Ella’s room where his sister had already been sleeping in her bed. He took a knife to kill her and shortly afterward called 911 and confessed to the murder. At first, the boy said he had a hallucination, but later, Paris told his mother he did it on purpose to "destroy" her in a revenge for drug abuse.

Reportedly, Charity had been heroin-addicted before conceiving Paris and relapsed into drug use again after giving birth to the second child. Paris was sentenced to maximum 40 years of imprisonment for juvenile murder. Although he was diagnosed as a sociopath, Paris still claims he doesn’t suffer from any mental illness. The boy has an IQ of 141, which is considered genius.

Charity has forgiven her son

The mother claims she never had any indication that he could do something like that. Charity explains that Paris was diagnosed with conduct disorder. She compares him to a shark, which makes her able to forgive her son:

In 2013, Charity gave birth to her third child, Phoenix, and Paris is not allowed to see him. You might ask where the father is. Paris’ father visited his son once when he was 16 months old. It became clear to Charity that something was wrong with him. She then discovered that the father was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Ella’s father also left the family. Then, Charity met another man and got pregnant with Phoenix. But the father’s "no longer in the picture."

Not long after Ella died, Charity started a nonprofit organization to prevent violence, called ELLA Foundation. It helps people through education, criminal justice reforms, and victim advocacy. Charity has forgiven her child and tries to help other families.

Factors that could have led to this tragedy

Paris committed a horrible crime. But there’s always a reason for such thing. The mother chooses to blame it all on the disease making him some kind of a predator, and that is understandable. However, the disease doesn’t come out of the blue. There were at least three extremely serious factors that could’ve affected the boy:

1. The first factor is inherited issues with mental health. The boy’s father had paranoid schizophrenia.
2. The mother’s drug addiction (the father also could’ve been an addict).
3. The family lived without a father figure. Studies show that children from one-parent families have less stable mental health.

Sure, we cannot fully blame the mother for her child’s crimes. But we should learn something from such horrible tragedies to prevent them in the future, shouldn’t we? And Charity has certainly made a few crucial mistakes in her life, which we can try to avoid.

Like a coin, one issue can have two sides to it. We should be able to see both.