Law, St. Thomas Aquinas teaches, is an ordinance of reason for the common good, and justice renders to each what is due. When a person repeatedly assaults others and is then found incompetent to stand trial, both the injured and the incompetent are owed more than another dismissal and a return to the street. The parishioner struck at Holy Family was due the protection of the peace. The woman who struck her is due care she cannot secure for herself. A city that supplies neither has failed both.
On August 23, 2026, during Mass at Holy Family Catholic Church, Silia “Letty” Tuimavave struck a parishioner in the face with a hardcover hymnal, knocking the victim down. Police obtained a warrant for third-degree assault with a weapon, but the charge was dismissed, her third dismissed assault charge since July 21. A judge had already found her incompetent to stand trial that March. Only the church assault produced an ex parte civil-commitment order. Municipal Attorney Eva Gardner said it plainly: Anchorage has limited tools for people who keep committing crimes but are found incompetent.
Anchorage’s 2026 count found 1,645 people experiencing homelessness, with shelters 95 percent full. Mental illness was a suspected factor in 56.2 percent of recent police use-of-force encounters.
Alaska’s competency process is a conveyor belt with a broken off-ramp. API has only 10 forensic beds and a forensic waitlist averaging about 44 people, while “conversion” patients, found incompetent and then civilly committed for lack of a community placement, now fill much of the adult wing. In 2022, a man found unrestorable after unprovoked assaults was released, then stabbed a woman at the Loussac Library. Tuimavave is the current chapter, not a new book.
The city has added outreach teams, tiny homes, and two crisis-stabilization centers. These are real efforts, but the wrong scale and shape: crisis stabilization is measured in hours, and a tiny-home village cannot hold someone who has just used a hymnal as a weapon. Housing without locked, supervised care for people who are psychotic, addicted, and assaultive subsidizes the cycle rather than interrupting it.
Full moral responsibility, Aquinas holds, requires sufficient knowledge and the use of reason; impaired reason can mitigate guilt, and only those wholly without it are fully excused. Diminished culpability is not innocence. A competency finding measures present capacity, not her state of mind during the assault, and where intoxication contributed, an incapacity voluntary in its cause does not wholly excuse.
The decisive distinction is between punishment and protection. Punishment answers to fault, which is why a court rightly declines to try someone who cannot understand the proceedings. Aquinas also recognizes medicinal measures, ordered to safety rather than guilt, that can be just without fault. A competency finding suspends the question of punishment, not protection.
The individual is ordered to the community as part to whole, though not according to all that he is. Aquinas permits detention not only as punishment but “as a measure of precaution against some evil.” A hymnal assault after dismissed charges is the demonstrated harm that justifies supervised care over release. Where addiction is part of the picture, habits formed by repeated damaging choices cloud practical reason and leave her refusal of treatment less than fully free. Aquinas’s own example answers the appeal to her choice: a sword left in safekeeping should not be returned to a man who has since gone mad and demands it. Releasing her on the strength of an impaired refusal hands back the sword.
Mercy, for Aquinas, is compassion for another’s misery that moves one to relieve it, ordered by right reason to the true good. Justice without mercy is cruelty, he warned, and “mercy without justice is the mother of dissolution.” Mercy that returns her to the street after repeated violence is omission dressed as rights language. The community that, in the common-law phrase, stands in the place of a parent for those who lack the use of reason (parens patriae) does not fulfill that duty by waiting for the third assault.
There is also a debt owed to her. Aquinas holds that what is held in superabundance is owed by natural law to the relief of those in need. A member who cannot secure her own good has a claim proportioned to that incapacity. Ten forensic beds are not a neutral fact of scarcity; they are the measure of a debt left unpaid.
A serious system would restore a real consequence track: restoration on a timeline that does not treat the next victim as acceptable delay, or, where restoration fails, automatic conversion to a supervised civil track with a rebuttable presumption of danger after felony violence, not a fresh petition after each assault. It would build locked beds for those who keep harming others and cannot be tried, track high-harm individuals through competency findings and discharges, and fund providers on reduction of new victims rather than contacts logged. Such restraint is just only while proportionate, reviewed, and ordered to recovery.
Most people experiencing homelessness are not violent. The subset who keep assaulting strangers after being found incompetent are both ill and dangerous. A city that will not say both will keep producing the same paragraph: dismissed charge, new victim, late petition, another statement about limited tools. Until Anchorage supplies what is due, protection of the peace and care the person cannot secure for herself, the carousel continues, and the next hymnal remains within reach.
Sources
Alaska Psychiatric Institute. (2026). Occupancy and waitlist insights [Legislative presentation, FY2027]. Alaska State Legislature. https://www.akleg.gov/basis/get_documents.asp?docid=9250&session=34
Anchorage Coalition to End Homelessness & Municipality of Anchorage. (2026, May 20). 2026 Point-in-Time Count and Housing Inventory Count [Presentation to the Anchorage Assembly Committee on Housing and Homelessness]. https://www.muni.org/Departments/Assembly/SiteAssets/Pages/Committee%20on%20Homelessness/20260520%20PIT-HIC%20Presentation%20-%20Assembly.pdf
Aquinas, T. (1947). Summa theologica (Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Trans.). Benziger Bros. (Original work published 1265–1274)
Aquinas, T. (2013). Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, chapters 1–12 (J. Holmes & B. Mortensen, Trans.). Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine. (Original work published 1269–1270)
Biondini, B. (2026, September 8). Much-needed mental health resources to open soon in Anchorage. Anchorage Daily News. https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/anchorage/2026/09/08/much-needed-mental-health-resources-to-open-soon-in-anchorage/
Citizen Portal. (2026, February 5). Alaska Psychiatric Institute cites conversion patients, discharge barriers and revenue gains as top pressures. https://citizenportal.ai/articles/7409347/alaska/2026-legislature-alaska/alaska/2026-legislature-alaska/Alaska/2026-Legislature-Alaska/Alaska-Psychiatric-Institute-cites-conversion-patients-discharge-barriers-and-revenue-gains-as-top-pressures
21st Century Polling Solutions. (2026, September). Findings & Recommendations Regarding Use of Force for the Anchorage Police Department. 21cp-solutions-audit-anchorage-police-department-use-of-force.pdf
Flor, H. (2026, April 8). Anchorage opens new homeless program that pairs tiny homes with addiction treatment. Associated Press. https://apnews.com/article/anchorage-homeless-tiny-homes-addiction-treatment-e76a6df4b13054eb2e42e591c75a5828
Lindley, T. M. (2026, September 11). Parishioner assaulted at Anchorage church; Municipal Attorney says case exposes gaps in mental health services. Must Read Alaska. https://mustreadalaska.com/parishioner-assaulted-at-anchorage-church-municipal-attorney-says-case-exposes-gaps-in-mental-health-services/
Williams, T. (2022a, February 15). An Anchorage man found incompetent to stand trial for assault was released, then randomly stabbed a woman at the library, charges say. Anchorage Daily News. https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/crime-courts/2022/02/15/an-anchorage-man-found-incompetent-to-stand-trial-for-assault-was-released-then-randomly-stabbed-a-woman-at-the-library-charges-say/
Williams, T. (2022b, June 9). Charges dismissed in Anchorage library stabbing after suspect again found incompetent for trial. Anchorage Daily News. https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/crime-courts/2022/06/08/charges-dismissed-in-anchorage-library-stabbing-after-suspect-again-found-incompetent-for-trial/
