10 October—Remember Tyree Smith? I didn’t. But Chris Powell’s op-ed column in this morning’s Republican-American reminded me.

Tyree Lincoln Smith is the guy who in Bridgeport back in 2011 killed Angel Gonzalez with a hatchet. The victim was a good Samaritan who had invited Smith into his house on a cold December night.

According to the arrest warrant, the blows to the victim’s head were “so severe that [Smith] was able to remove an eye from the man’s head along with pieces of brain matter and a piece of his skull.”

After that, Smith adjourned to a cemetery where a relative was buried and ate the victim’s eyeball and brain matter and washed them down with sake. He told the police that the eyeball tasted like an oyster. Chacun à son goût. Oyster? Yuk.

Not long afterward, Tyree confessed it all to a living relative, whom he referred to as Athena, and added that he intended to eat more people. The cerebro-optic amuse-gueule must really have delighted his palate. When Athena kicked him out of her apartment, he hopped a bus to Florida, where he was no stranger. Even though he was rather bloody, Athena evidently thought her cousin was delusional. Until she learned about the discovery of the victim’s remains over a month later.

So Smith was arrested, taken back to Connecticut, tried, and found not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect, a.k.a. insanity. The defense case, incidentally, rested largely on the testimony of a Yale shrink, who said at the time that Smith retained his lust for human flesh after his arrest and even offered to eat her, presumably in the gastronomical way. And raw.

So the Bridgeport cannibal was sentenced to 60 years in high-security psychiatric confinement at the notorious Whiting Forensic Hospital.

Fast forward to last month, when the state Psychiatric Security Review Board (PSRB) decided (ruled) that Tyree Cannibal Smith, after spending 10 years in the state’s most secure psychiatric facility, was ready to be released into the community. Kind of like a Trump commutation. So he’s now living in a Waterbury group home and is not to associate with anyone involved in criminal activity. At a group home?

“Tyree Smith is an individual with a psychiatric illness requiring care, custody and treatment,” the board’s report stated. “Since his last hearing Tyree Smith has continued to demonstrate clinical stability. Mr. Smith is medication compliant, actively engaged in all recommended forms of treatment, and has been symptom-free for many years.”

Wow! The Bridgeport cannibal had apologized for his grisly crime, after all: “I’m really sorry for what I did, that I couldn’t be myself. It really had nothing to do with the other person.” So the currently chairman-less PSRB—two social workers, a probation-parole “expert,” a psychologist, and a psychiatrist—tell us there’s nothing to worry about. It’s Connecticut.

But the point that Chris Powell makes is, what happens when Tyree Smith stops taking his medication?