Tons of readers are asking me to comment on the story of Gregory Despres, the Bloody Chainsaw-Toting Freak, who crossed the Canadian-U.S. border in April carrying his entire murder kit. The Ottawa Citizen has a good overview of the story and this scary photo:

(CP PHOTO/HO/WHDH-TV) (AP)

It’s scary. It’s bizarre. Great water-cooler and cable news fodder. And I’m sure it’ll be a TV movie-of-the-week soon. But you’ll probably be surprised to read that I don’t think it’s a good story to be beating up the Department of Homeland Security over:

Bill Anthony, a spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said the Canada-born Despres could not be detained because he is a naturalized U.S. citizen and was not wanted on any criminal charges on the day in question.

Anthony said Despres was questioned for two hours before he was released. During that time, he said, customs agents employed “every conceivable method” to check for warrants or see if Despres had broken any laws in trying to re-enter the country.

“Nobody asked us to detain him,” Anthony said. “Being bizarre is not a reason to keep somebody out of this country or lock them up. … We are governed by laws and regulations, and he did not violate any regulations.”

It’s being reported that Despres was due in a Canadian court to be sentenced on assault charges and for threatening to kill his neighbor’s son-in-law. The bodies of the neighbor and his wife hadn’t been found yet. Instead of beating up on our border officials, Canadians might want to question who on their side of the border made the decision to free the psychopath on bail in the first place.

In short, the story is not emblematic of DHS’s many, many problems, which we document over at The Immigration Blog every day. If Despres were a Canadian citizen, or a citizen of any other country, our border officials could have turned him away. But Despres was a naturalized American citizen with no wants or warrants in his record at the time he showed up at the Customs Office to cross. They held him for two hours, which is usually a hell of a lot longer than many border officials hold untold numbers of known, admitted illegal aliens from around the world who are caught at the border and released into the U.S. every day.

The hero in the story is the alert Quincy, Mass., police dispatcher, who noticed Despres’ Massachussetts driver’s license number in a bulletin sent out by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, plugged it into her computer, and notified the town of Despres’ last known address, where cops immediately tracked down the suspect (who doesn’t exactly blend into the background, unless the background is a Marilyn Manson concert).

We should all be so lucky to have law enforcement officials as alert and diligent as the Quincy dispatcher. Hope she gets a raise.

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