Richie Incognito Asked the Funeral Home to Remove His Father's Head

Yesterday Nate brought you the story of Richie Incognito getting arrested for disturbing the peace and making threats after “acting erratically and making the employees feel incredibly uncomfortable” at his father’s funeral. And Nate correctly said that is disturbing behavior, Incognito is clearly a man in crisis and we should all hope he gets help. Then afterwards, there was this development:

TMZ – Richie Incognito was violent, incoherent and emotional before he was arrested at a funeral home in Arizona — with one witness saying the NFL lineman asked the staff to “cut his dad’s head off for research purposes.” …

When staff confronted Richie, he began “punching caskets and throwing things.”

That is not a man in crisis. That is a man delivering a cry for help through a megaphone into the mic at a Five Finger Death Punch show. That is not a man who needs help in the sense we think of it, counseling, treatment, meds and so forth. That is a man who needs to be committed. Put in a facility and placed under 24 hour watch. As they put it in the mental health statutes in the Massachusetts court system where I used to work, Richie Incognito is a danger to himself and others.

It’s a goddamned tragedy what has happened to Incognito. When his personality quirks were limited to victim-free antics like breaking his teammates’ balls, firing his agent via Twitter, retiring from the Bills and then saying he was not retired, he was amusing as hell. But when you’re at your dad’s funeral asking for his head, that’s the darkness that’s been inside him being exposed to the world. And apparently the darkness is getting darker all the time.

At this point, we don’t know what his issues are, whether it’s mental illness, CTE, substance abuse or what. All we do know is his family posted his bond. And all we can hope for is they will follow up with the all out commitment to solving his problems he needs. His life depends on it.