Nathaniel Benjamin Levi Bar-Jonah

[almagata]

Nathaniel Benjamin Levi Bar-Jonah (born David Paul Brown) was a child serial killer and possible cannibal.  He started murdering children while he was still a young person in Massachusetts and Connecticut but managed to avoid any long prison terms.    He eventually moved to Montana where he continued to attack pre-pubescent children.  He had no obvious preference for boys or girls.  The police in Great Falls identified him as a suspect in the disappearance 10-year old Zach Ramsay in February of 1996.  The police determined that Zach had been seen speaking with a "police officer" and that Bar-Jonah had used the ruse to coerce the boy. 

Bar-Jonah kept many coded notebooks detailing years of his abuse and murder of children. 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Bar-Jonah

[albion]

SO Jonah was evil. What is the excuse for all the courts and LE who kept letting him out?

[almagata]

I struggle with that Albion. I do believe that young people make errors in judgement and don't understand that gravity of their actions so a life prison term at age 16 is not always appropriate for a murder. In Jonah's case, I think he was just wired up wrong and there was no program that was going to reform him.

How does the prison and court system recognize that someone is a danger forever?

We have a horrible track record and process in the US for determining dangerous individuals people and involuntary commitment for these individuals. In some cases like Sandy Hook, people were very aware of bizarre behavior and in other like Columbine, there were signs but people assessed them to be adolescent extremism but within normal weirdness ranges.

In reading about Jonah, I think people were overly hopeful that he would "grow out of it" and that ended up getting many children killed.