[geebee]

To try to be as charitable as possible to the journalist who wrote this line, I'd say it means that there was a moment when "we" (society and our institutions) might have been able to intervene in this man's life in order to treat the drug addiction and mental illness, and that we failed to do so, and now we have a face slasher roaming the halls of a res hotel with a knife. There is some merit in this. And when I say I agree (to an extent), I mean it, but "getting the help he needs" clearly means commitment to an institution, and ideally we'd find a way to do this before the face slashing occurs. Kind of like how we don't wait for a drunk driver to kill people before we start enforcing laws on drunk driving, even if the drunk driving is the result of a deep addiction and/or mental illness.

However, I ultimately have the same reaction you do to this sentence. The pure language of compassion shows no compassion for the victims of this crime, or the horrifying and brutal nature of this crime. It really does pinpoint the source of paralysis in a very progressive city like San Francisco. I have trouble believing that we won't reach some kind of turning point, mainly because the failure is just so spectacularly and overwhelmingly undeniable.