| On July 26, 2025, a man walked into a Walmart in Traverse City, Michigan, and stabbed eleven people, ranging in age from 29 to 84. Miraculously, all of the victims survived. As far as we can tell at this time, he had no prior connection to any of the victims or to the Walmart where the stabbing took place, and the victims apparently had no connection to each other. Police describe the attack as “totally random.” | | The criminal legal system now has to ask itself one of two questions: What does society do with a man who stabs eleven people for no good reason, and what does society do with Bradford James Gille? The two questions are not at all the same. Gille is the (alleged) assailant. Though he was restrained by people at the scene and arrested shortly thereafter, he was not identified by authorities for several hours. During that interval, we knew almost nothing other than the bare facts of the crime, at least as initially reported by witnesses. In other words, we did not know what happened in Gille’s life that brought him to that store on that day. We only knew that a nameless man had stabbed eleven people for no good reason. What does society do with that person? | | But even before he was identified, when he was just a man without a name who had stabbed eleven people, I knew there was a story to be uncovered. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew it was there, waiting to be unearthed, and that the story would complicate the picture. That story would summon to life a human being, and not a nameless avatar of random, senseless violence. I knew it not because I am clairvoyant or particularly wise, but because a story is always most apt to be found precisely in those crimes that seem most incomprehensible. Crimes like this—a random stabbing of complete strangers, unknown to each other and to the assailant, in the middle of the day in a public place, with no precipitating event—just don’t happen without a back story. | | And so it was. Within hours of when Gille was identified, reporters began to unearth his long history of mental illness, which apparently began when he was in his mid-teens and experienced some form of psychotic break, perhaps because he smoked some contaminated marijuana. According to his brother, Bradford “never came out of it. He couldn’t even go back to school it was so dramatic of a change and such a dramatic shift.” For the next 28 years, the family has struggled unsuccessfully to find long-term psychiatric care for Gille. “There’s nothing available and there has been nothing available,” his brother told the local press. “There’s only temporary spots for him and he would … get medicated for a little bit and start doing really good,” and then the doctors would release him. His mother told reporters she has lost track of the number of times he has been institutionalized and released. | | And soon after he is released, his psychosis catches up with him. “He’s fine when he’s on his medication,” his mother explained. “The problem is, his illness tells him that he is fine and doesn’t need to take his medication.” So, he’d stop taking his drugs, decompensate and eventually disappear. He’d vagabond around the country, homeless or itinerant. His family would lose touch with him until the inevitable news that he was once again in police or psychiatric custody. On one occasion, they were called “in the middle of the night from the police in Pennsylvania that he’s running down the highway naked.” | | In 2002, a defense attorney successfully defended Gille on an assault charge and said it was clear even then that he was mentally ill and in need of intervention. In 2007, his mother was interviewed by a local reporter and traced her son’s frequent run-ins with the law to his diagnosed schizophrenia. In 2016, he was arrested at a local cemetery after he tried to dig up the casket of a man who had died two months earlier. He told police the man had been buried alive and that he was trying to rescue him. His mother said he thought the man was his father, who was very much alive. Gille was found not guilty by reason of insanity and confined to a psychiatric hospital. Two days before the stabbing at Walmart, the local police secured a court order to take Gille into custody because he was a danger to himself or others but they were unable to locate him. At the scene, a witness described him as “wild-eyed.” | | This is obviously not the whole of the story, and from these few snippets, we still don’t know what happened in Gille’s life that brought him, knife in hand, to that Walmart in July 2025. But it is enough to assure us that there is a story waiting to be discovered. Perhaps the story implicates an over-worked, under-funded mental health system or the current limits of psychiatric knowledge, as many people have speculated. Or it might involve Gille’s genetic history, the circumstances of his childhood and early adulthood, or the contaminated drugs he ingested as a teen. But above all, it reveals the fragility of the human condition, since no baby is born mentally ill and no child asks to suffer from schizophrenia. A forgiving society must insist that we uncover that story before we pretend to know what should be done with Gille, and that we judge him not as some incomprehensible monster but as one of us. | | *** | | By long experience, I have learned not to ask the first, and frequently the last question in a case like this: What does society do with a man who stabs eleven people? Or with a man who shoots and kills four strangers in a skyscraper, as Shane Devon Tamura did two days after Gille’s attack. Or with anyone who commits what seems to be an act of senseless, ruthless violence. These questions simply have no meaning to me—they are utterly incomprehensible—since they imagine that society can intelligently decide what should be done with people without first considering their humanity. The questions are literally dehumanizing, and their very formulation is abhorrent. They are questions that must never be asked. |
| In the spirit of thoughtful conversation, if you have any reactions to this or any of my essays, feel free to share them with me at [email protected]. |
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