This is Hidden Killers Live with Tony Bruske, Stacey Cole, and Todd Michaels.

Let's move on to another case here. That also involves mental health.

A Kentucky sheriff walked into a judge's chambers, locked the doors, and fired nine rounds into the man that he'd known for years.

That part

was caught on camera. But according to newly filed civil lawsuit documents, the two weeks leading

up to that moment looked like a textbook mental health crisis. And almost everyone around

Mickey Stein saw it happening. Rapid weight loss, days without sleep, paranoid claims that unnamed people were

threatening his family, and the day of the shooting, witnesses say he was making phone calls

trying to reach his grandmother, who'd been dead for three years. So we talk about warning signs,

about intervention, about what happens when someone spirals towards violence in plain sight,

this case hands us a brutal case study.

Psychotherapist Chavon Scott is here with us to help break all this down.

The court documents describe Steins as experiencing severe insomnia,

the rapid weight loss, extreme paranoia, and the very strange

behavior. In the two weeks prior to the shooting, from a clinical standpoint, what is that

constellation of symptoms suggest to you might be happening? Acute psychotic mania. It is classic

mania. And this can happen in people who are typically

high functioning. They're not, you know, the low functioning person with schizophrenia, you know,

it can come on quickly. There may have been a history of it or there may not have been.

Did he have the classic bipolar disorder with episodes of depression?

And sometimes the depression can be relatively mild.

But that would be my guess because the insomnia, the weight loss, the paranoia, the psychotic

...