It was a testy couple of hours this afternoon for prison authorities as they had to deal with a prisoner who tried to kill himself. Sometime after 1 this afternoon a prisoner broke away from a work gang and made his way to the top of a water tower inside the prison compound. Once up there he threatened to jump. Prison authorities tried to talk him down but it was not until Director of the Kolbe Foundation John Woods came that he was convinced to come down. After the intervention Woods explained that the man is plagued by numerous problems.
John Woods, Kolbe Foundation
"I got a call this afternoon that he had broken free from a work gang and climbed the tower and he was threatening to jump off and he was really trippin' out. The guy really knows me and he has written to me and he has called me a number of time so I figured if I came up and talked to him it might do some good. so he was on top of the tower, maybe 40 to 50 feet above the ground and they were scared that if he did jump, he could do some serious damage to himself.
So one of the counselors, Mr. Nicholson, was up there talking to him and then I went up and we talked to him and we kind of...he quit trippin' out once he calmed down a little bit and then we were able to talk to him and he agreed he should come down and start the whole process again, see if we could make a difference, positive difference in his life.
There are all kinds of reasons. They disrespect him, he is badly treated, and all that kind of stuff and nobody is paying any attention to him. Basically this is a good attention getter for him.
I'll try and get better counseling for him and I'll spend some time with him. He has his brother in there who he likes very very much and a sister in law and we are sitting in there and we are kind of talking about things and then hopefully we can get some more professional help and maybe get Fr. Stochl to go check with him in the morning and see if we can get some psychiatric help for counseling."
Alfonso Noble,
Will he be given any special attention because of what he has done?
John Woods,
"Yes he certainly he will. I will make sure that he is comfortable and that he feels secure and comforted because he is just having a real stressful time right now...we are trying move away from those kind of things and trying to get people to where we convince them that they need to get their act together."
Authorities refused to give us the prisoner's identity however we do know that he is incarcerated for sexual offences.
