Kirk Snyder is mentally incompetent

San Francisco Chronicle: The Kirk Snyder story gets just a little bit weirder, as Snyder is found to be unfit for trial, and apparently refuses to eat.

A judge has found former NBA player and Nevada Wolf Pack star Kirk Snyder not competent to stand trial and ordered that he be force-fed.

Warren County Common Pleas Judge Neal Bronson made the ruling Thursday. He says Snyder has rejected all medications and food and has been hospitalized twice.

Per Local12.com, Snyder has now been sectioned for a year.

Dude. Strange times.

When the story of Snyder's violent outburst initially broke, I had assumed - naturally, if a bit libellously - that Snyder was just a bit powdered up one night, having a crappy evening, and decided to enact revenge on the man whose dog pissed on his lawn the previous morning. Something along those lines, at least. Despite the savage and random nature of the beating, I would have rather believed that it was one bad night of coke-fuelled angst that did not necessarily indicate a pattern of violence and instability, and that maybe Kirk's real issue was just a minor substance problem that could be (relatively) easily sorted.

Unfortunately not. It would appear that Kirk Snyder really has gone a bit crazy. And that's not cool.

A search for any kind of history for Snyder turns up nothing. Snyder may have had a spat with his coach at Nevada, and he suffered from failing grades for a time, but there was nothing there to suggest that he was a future candidate for suicide watch. Nor did anything happen (publicly, at least) in his NBA career that made us wonder if Snyder would one day go on to refuse food and be confined to a psychiatric hospital for a year. And while playing in China last year, scoring big and rebuilding his resume, at no point did we think "this has all the makings of a man who's going to break into his neighbour's house and savagely beat him in full view of his wife". Just didn't pick it.



Also, while we're updating the Kirk Snyder story, here's a video of Corie Blount being sent to prison. Cheech joke and all. You have to put up with a lengthy and somewhat pointless speech from a judge who is clearly revelling in having multiple cameras filming him doing a day's work, but it's worth watching if only for the stunning bowtie on offer from Blount's defense attorney. There's a leniency plea if ever I've seen one. Had it been a spinner, Blount might have been acquitted.