NO PEOPLE... Attempted suicide twice, age 12!

FRIDAY, JULY 17, 2026

We advise you to pity the child: "No people are uninteresting?"   

Would that include the 12-year-old child who is described in this passage from a new AP report?

An immediate relative of David Brouillette who spoke on the condition that their name not be used said he was diagnosed with severe bipolar disorder and attention deficit disorder as a child—a diagnosis that Ashley Brouillette confirmed. The immediate relative described him as “extremely mentally ill” and said he attempted suicide twice at age 12 and was hospitalized multiple times.  

The relative said they’ve been estranged for years, after they broke off contact because they feared he would harm them. He did not respond to their outreach this week, the relative added.

For ourselves, we'd advise you to pity the child—the child who was so deeply disturbed when he was 12 years old. 

In this instance, the tragedy grows. This is the start of the AP report, no paywall, headline included:

AP Exclusive: ICE officer in Maine shooting has history of violent behavior, family and records say 

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer who shot a Colombian man in Maine this week is an Army veteran who has struggled with serious mental health issues since early childhood and never should have been given a badge and gun to patrol American streets, several of his close relatives told The Associated Press.

David Brouillette has a history of terrifying and violent behavior, according to those relatives. They accuse him of attacking women in his life over the years, and one shared a voicemail with the AP from last winter in which he told her that he thought someone should slit her throat.

Brouillette’s troubling past further challenges how thoroughly the Department of Homeland Security has vetted recruits as it went on a hiring spree to help carry out President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.   

At least 10 people have died in encounters with immigration agents since Trump launched the crackdown after retaking office, including 25-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a Colombian national who was shot and killed by Brouillette on Monday while in his car near his home in the coastal Maine city of Biddeford.   

Regarding the young man who was shot and killed, the New York Times has quoted a neighbor describing him and his wife:   

"They were always so happy and so polite. I’d be watering my flowers in front of the house, and they would stop and say, ‘Very nice flowers.’ And their little girl would wave.”  

They were always so happy. That's what the neighbor has said. 

Once again in A Moveable Feast, Hemingway once said this about his early years in Paris:   

With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. Sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life. This was the only truly sad time in Paris because it was unnatural. You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.  

That was a recollection from the earliest years, when he said that he and Hadley were "very poor and very happy." 

As we all know, when people are very happy and very young, they should get the chance to continue. Also, when people are 12 years old and are deeply disturbed, they should ideally get capable help.

In this case, it seems that no such assistance ever took hold. The AP report offers accounts of Brouillette's conduct as an adult which are truly horrific, if perhaps somewhat familiar.

These accounts involve abuse of his two wives and his children. The reported behaviors start as shown, but they become even worse:   

Brouillette, 37, told his ex-wife Ashley Brouillette late last year that he had been hired by ICE. She said that because of his long history of psychiatric issues, she thought he was having a mental health episode and she didn’t believe him. She didn’t realize he’d been telling the truth until this week, when videos began circulating online of the moments surrounding the shooting.  

Ashley Brouillette told the AP that she spoke to her ex-husband in a Facebook audio call, and he acknowledged that he had killed Durán Guerrero. Their 18-year-old daughter, Madison Brouillette, also told the AP that her father called her Wednesday and said that he shot and killed Durán Guerrero. 

David and Ashley Brouillette were high school sweethearts who got married in 2007. She said she divorced him in 2009 because he had become physically violent with her, which began after she got pregnant with their daughter.  

According to Ashley Brouillette, he once threw boiling water at her while she was holding their child—an incident her mother Avis Collins also recounted. The abuse continued after she left him, she said.

[...]   

His oldest daughter, Madison Brouillette, said she also witnessed her dad’s volatility.

“I watched my dad struggle a lot with a lot of things,” she told the AP. She said she came home from school once and he told her he had been sitting on a tree stump with a gun to his head.

Madison Brouillette is just 18. The report doesn't say how old she was when that incident occurred—and yes, the accounts of violence in the AP report get worse than what we've posted.  

This week, we've worked from a poem by Yevtushenko. "No people are uninteresting," he says as he begins:

People   

No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets
Nothing in them is not particular,
and planet is dissimilar from planet.
And if a [person] lived in obscurity
making his friends in that obscurity
obscurity is not uninteresting...

And so on from there. But who was Yevtushenko talking about? 

No people are uninteresting? Was he talking about someone like David Brouillette? 

We'll postpone that question until tomorrow. Today, we'll end with two points:   

First, journalists will speak explicitly about "mental illness" and "mental health issues" when reporting on incidents like this. They will not discuss the possibility of serious mental health disorders—the possibility of serious mental illness—in the case of major public officials, even if the official in question had to be sent off to "reform school" at the age of 12 because of his own disturbing behavior.   

(We advise you to pity the child.)

Second point:  

A phrase has been going through our heads in the past several days: "The Politics of Meaning." 

The politics of meaning! It suddenly played an unpleasant role in the discourse of the early 1990s, then disappeared from view.  

Do we need a politics of pity, compassion, engagement, forgiveness? A politics in which we all understand that whichever tribe may be our tribe, that tribe is quite often wrong too?   

Tomorrow: Who he (presumably) meant