Augusta, Maine (CNN)

Will Bruce strolls across the pale yellow and green linoleum tile of the psychiatric hospital that has been his home for more than seven years.

"So long," he tells staff members who've gathered to see him off. "I hope I don't come back."

The last time he was discharged, Will was a different man. He'd refused treatment for 2 1/2 months and gone back into the world the way he'd arrived: confused, incoherent, psychotic.

Two months later, he bludgeoned his mother to death with a hatchet. He believed she was an al Qaeda operative.

Now 32, Will feels the weight of past and future. If he screws up, he messes up everything. For everyone.

Will is part of a special state program in Maine that allows the most violently mentally ill to get treatment after crimes instead of going to prison. Inside Riverview Psychiatric Center are dozens of other forensic patients who've killed, assaulted or committed other offenses. They watch Will, and hope to take the same path toward freedom.

On this day in March, Will heads a few blocks around the corner to a 1960s split ranch, a doctor's office that has been converted into a supervised group home. There he joins seven other mentally ill residents; four, like Will, have killed.

Each remains in the custody of the state but has earned the right to live in the community by following rules, taking medication and abiding by a structured court-ordered treatment plan. The patients walk the streets, eat in restaurants, shop in stores like other residents of Augusta. Though they must report where they are going, they don't wear ankle bracelets.

But they live with the terrible burden of their actions.

"I don't think I'll ever truly forgive myself," says Will, who was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. "I should have my mom here today. I love and miss her so much. It should never have played out like this, but it did and there's nothing I can do about it now."

That's the reality of regaining your sanity: You face the awful, irreversible truth of what you've done. Forgiveness -- whether from yourself or others -- can remain elusive.

Will knows he wouldn't have reached this milestone were it not for his father. Joe Bruce gives his son space on the day of the big move, to allow him to take in the moment. But Dad checks in often by phone: "I'm proud of you, Willy."

There was a time when Joe wanted nothing more to do with his oldest son. When he thought the best treatment for his boy might be a bullet to the head. But he fought unfathomable grief and a stubborn bureaucracy to wrest hope from tragedy. To see his son finally get well.

"All of our happy days have a shadow because of what happened," says Joe. "I'm so happy for Will, but every time I feel happiness the first thing I think of is: if only they had treated him beforehand."

On this night, Will settles in his new room after dining on pulled pork sandwiches with the others. The place is barren, the walls drab. But to Will, it symbolizes progress. He marvels at a little thing like having his own bathroom.

On his dresser he has placed a photograph taken on vacation in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. Wedged between Will and his dad, their arms wrapped around each other, is his mom, Amy.

He sits down and logs onto Facebook. He hasn't posted a status update for three years, and he wonders whether he should do so now. What will those still struggling to forgive him think?

"For all my friends and family who supported me in my new transition, a warm-hearted thank you," he writes. "This begins a new chapter in my life and will be the beginning of what I hope to be a long line of successes and achievements. It has been a long road fought so far, and I do believe I've found meaning in the suffering. For my dad, I thank him tremendously and have found his strength through the difficult times something to be admired."

The nation learns about the Will Bruces of the world after the unthinkable happens: "Caratunk woman found slain; husband discovers body at home; son surrenders in South Portland" read the headline in the Bangor Daily News on June 22, 2006.

But rarely do we hear about what happens next, after the legal system has run its course. Are the mentally ill simply locked away? And if they get treatment, does it work?

Even more rare is the chance to hear from the mentally ill themselves.

The story of Will Bruce and his father provides a peek into that aftermath. It is a complicated period strewn with anger, immeasurable grief and pain. Faith and family ties are tested. Confounding legal obstacles loom. At best, the mentally ill begin a trial-and-error pursuit of wholeness that unfolds over years, even decades.

It never ends.

Often, family members bear witness to their loved one's unraveling -- and are stymied by a system that is structured for the back end, to hospitalize and treat mentally ill people after they become a danger to themselves or others.

Think of it this way: What if your doctor told you that you had cancer, but treatment would begin only after it reached stage 4.

Families often face an insurmountable obstacle when the mentally ill person turns 18. That is the age when parents can get shut out of their children's health care decisions. Doctors can no longer legally speak to mom and dad without consent. And treatment cannot be forced on a person who has the right to refuse it.

"I know that treatment works. Unfortunately, I see it after a horrific crime has happened," says William Stokes, who until recently was Maine's deputy attorney general, with his office handling every killing in the state.

Or as Joe Bruce told me: "It shouldn't take killing your mom to get proper treatment."

There are few bipartisan issues left in Washington, yet Republicans and Democrats alike insist changes to the nation's mental health system are long overdue. The debate isn't about whether reform is needed; it's about how best to implement it -- a delicate balance between treatment, civil rights and public safety.

U.S. Rep. Tim Murphy, a Republican from Pennsylvania, has proposed the most sweeping mental health bill in two decades. It's called the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act, or HR 3717. Among its key provisions: making it easier to commit someone involuntarily and allowing more parental involvement in a young adult's care.

Murphy is a psychologist who remains adamant that a young person undergoing psychosis or other delusions would be best served by a family member who can help in the recovery. Critics charge that the bill will trample individuals' rights and cause more harm than good. Murphy remains unbowed. After the mass killings in Santa Barbara, California, in May, he said simply, "What makes these painful episodes so confounding is the reality that so many tragedies involving a person with a mental illness are entirely preventable."

Amy Bruce's death was preventable. She tirelessly sought help for her son -- even after she no longer had a say in his care.

At 24, Will Bruce became a symbol of the broken mental health care system.

Now, he hopes to stand for something else: the successful rehabilitation of the mentally ill. An example of what could have been achieved had there been treatment before tragedy.

Will is one of 90 mentally ill people in Maine designated as not criminally responsible -- known as NCR -- because they were determined to be insane at the time of the crimes. Nineteen had faced murder charges before the NCR designation; at least 10 who killed are now living in group homes or group apartments, according to newspaper accounts and records provided by the state Department of Health and Human Services.

All NCR patients are initially sent to Riverview instead of prison. There the focus shifts from punishment to rehabilitation, treatment and public safety -- with the end goal of returning the patients back into society.

That goal has met with some resistance in Augusta. In 2012, when Riverview moved its group homes off campus and into neighborhoods, residents responded with outrage. More than 150 signed a petition demanding the homes be closed, citing safety concerns.

But the program's track record has helped officials resist community pressure. In place more than 50 years, it was revamped after a patient on a four-hour leave killed a teenage girl in 1985. In the past three decades, state officials emphasize, not a single NCR patient released into the community has committed a violent felony. "The history of the experience speaks volumes," says Mary Mayhew, the state's health commissioner. "We don't have an experience of recidivism."

Will Bruce and his father let me into their lives beginning in early March, the final week of Will's stay in Riverview. He embraced the risks of stepping into the spotlight, he said, because reaching even just one person undergoing psychotic delusions could save another person's life.

Will has piercing hazel eyes, a stocky 200-pound frame and short-cropped black hair. A stern expression makes him look older than his 32 years. He collects himself before he speaks, giving well-thought-out answers. When he breaks into laughter, you get a glimpse of the boy his mom tried so hard to fix. His laugh always made her laugh.

Schizophrenics and others with serious mental illness, he says, too often "lack the insight to recognize they're ill. They don't believe it. They discard what the doctor says: It's just psychobabble, mumble jumble.

"From the beginning, I just thought it was all a conspiracy."

Both father and son know Will's release is not celebrated by everyone.

Will is not yet allowed to return to his hometown, nor does he want to visit. But some in Caratunk, a no-stoplight town with just two roads and a population of about 50 people, told me they have begun locking their doors. At a bar up the road from the Bruce house, several neighbors shuddered at the thought: How could he be out?

Joe Bruce has an answer for them.

"There's a big difference between Willy treated and Willy untreated," he says. "If there's any message to people with concerns, it's that he never received treatment before. He's living proof that treatment works."

Adds Will, "It really does. It was my mother, you know what I mean? Not a day goes by that I don't think about her."

An unframed photograph of Amy sits on a shelf in the kitchen, next to a pitcher filled with wild turkey feathers. She has short hair, a beaming smile and hazel eyes; it's easy to see where Will gets his looks.

The kitchen in the family's 1880s farmhouse was the noisy hub of the Bruce household. Amy and Joe found the place after driving through the Upper Kennebec Valley in the early 1980s. They had been living in New Hampshire but liked the idea of moving to the Maine countryside. They turned onto Caratunk's Main Street; an osprey swooped down, and the young couple took it as a sign: This was home.

The farmhouse sits on five acres shaded by oak, ash, poplar and sugar maple. It became the perfect place to raise three boys. Nothing fancy, but enough room to play and grow. Amy fixed up a workshop on the property and started a slipcover and drapery business.

The house is frozen in time, like a Depression-era Dorothea Lange photograph. Paint peels from the tin ceiling in the living room; wainscoting in the home's only bathroom buckles. Amy always talked about renovating the place, but finances were tight and the time never right.

After her death, Joe left the house for two weeks, then moved back. He thought it was the best way to heal, to cherish the good memories there. In Caratunk's heyday, when more people lived in town, there were 27 children within five years of one another. The kids crammed the kitchen, with Amy serving as host.

At her funeral, Joe began the eulogy this way: "I'm the luckiest person in the world."

They were married 26 years.

Joe has found peace in the years since Amy's death. But dark moments still intrude. His other two sons, ages 23 and 19 when their mother died, remain distant from Will. That may never change.

A few days before Will's release from the hospital, a jumble of emotions collide -- the overwhelming joy of his son's new life and the magnitude of Amy's absence. At his kitchen table, Joe weeps.

"Amy is with all of us," he says. "She is part of us. For Will, it's a struggle. He struggles and we do, too. The better Will does, the better it is for all of us. His mother would've wanted it that way."

Scratched into a nearby bookshelf is a reminder of family life in these four walls. Pen marks record the growth of three boys over the years: Willy, Wallace and Bubba.

Etched between Willy and Wallace in 2000 is one line: "Mom."

Will was the first child, and never easy.

At 4, he shoved his 3-year-old brother Bob, nicknamed Bubba, down a flight of stairs and broke his arm.

At 5, he pushed Bubba so hard on a seesaw swing that it shattered one of his brother's legs. Joe used a Newsweek magazine to form a splint until he could get Bubba to the hospital.

At 10, Will twice climbed to the top of the home's pitched tin roof and threatened to jump off. He had to be talked down.

At 15, he left a note in the home that said: "By the time you find me, I will have injected the antifreeze in my neck." Joe sprinted to an outbuilding and found Will on the ground, a syringe in his arm.

Will was admitted to the adolescent ward of a psychiatric hospital. Amy and Joe were told their son might suffer from bipolar disorder, but there was no formal diagnosis. Will was prescribed Depakote, an anti-seizure medication sometimes used for psychiatric conditions. Suddenly, he could carry on conversations in ways he couldn't before. But he complained the pills made his head hurt, and he stopped taking them almost as quickly as he'd begun -- a pattern that would persist in the years ahead.

Mom and Dad arranged for Will to meet with a psychiatrist in a nearby town. He rejected the doctor, then a second one before finding a therapist he seemed to like. But he grew more defiant, drinking heavily and smoking weed. He skipped classes and dropped out of high school halfway through his sophomore year.

At 17, Will took his GED test to qualify for the Army. He went through boot camp in the fall of 2000 and advanced infantry training at Fort Polk in Louisiana. Growing up in the country and learning his way around guns helped him earn high marks as a sharpshooter.

Joe and Amy were ecstatic, thinking he had turned a corner.

Will shipped out to Schofield Barracks, an Army installation in Hawaii. It was there, his father says, that Will got into everything from crystal meth to cocaine. One day in 2001, Will showed up at the family home. He was AWOL. He made it back to Hawaii so he wouldn't face desertion charges. He took a less-than-honorable discharge to avoid jail time for absence without leave.

By then, Will was an adult, in charge of his own health care. Mom and Dad worried about him, but he wouldn't listen to their pleas.

On Christmas Eve 2003, he was shopping with his father when he announced that government agents were spying on them from cameras inside Target. Another time, when he and a friend stopped at a convenience store, Will went to a house next door and lowered the flag to half-staff.

That's how it started out -- seemingly innocent. No harm done.

Will walked in circles at the end of the driveway, talking to people who didn't exist. He sent a bottle of homegrown maple syrup to President George W. Bush. He penned a note to Prince William; Will planned to marry a Russian princess, he wrote, and sought the prince's blessing.

By early 2005, it was clear he was in the onset of a serious mental illness. He was 23 and couldn't hold down a job. His mom and dad urged him to see a doctor. He refused. Desperate to understand her son's illness, Amy sought out the state chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, a nonprofit advocacy group. Every week, she drove two hours to Bangor to attend one of its family courses.

On a crisp spring day that year, Joe arranged a machine gun target shoot with two friends. Machine gunning is a hobby in rural Maine, almost on par with rafting and hunting. By day, Joe worked for Maine's Department of Transportation. At home, he operated as a certified gun dealer, selling everything from shotguns to rifles to machine guns.

He loaded up Amy's station wagon with an AK-47, M-16 and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, and began to drive off.

Will flagged him down and asked if he could come. Joe never thought of his son as a threat, even if his behavior was becoming more unpredictable. Still, something didn't sit well about this. But it was too late; Will hopped into the car.

The four drove about 25 minutes until they reached a thickly wooded area where Joe set up a firing line. The two friends shot the AK-47. Joe gave instructions about the proper way to handle the gun.

The three of them stood talking in a semicircle. Out of the corner of his eye, Joe noticed his son pick up the AK-47 and insert a loaded 30-round magazine. Will approached the group, the gun pointed at the ground. He then cocked the bolt and was ready to shoot.

Willy, what are you doing? Dad said.

Snake eyes possessed his son. Dark circles that weren't there on the drive out appeared beneath his eyes, like he was demonic.

Will was in the throes of psychosis, and he was about to carry out an execution. He looked at one of the men and shouted: Do you touch little boys?

The man thought Will was joking and gave an awkward laugh. Will turned to the other guy and ordered: Tell me, do you touch little boys?!

He motioned with the weapon like Come on, step over here. He then backed up a few feet. Panicked, Dad moved between Will and the others.

WILLY! WILLY! he shouted. WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

Will snapped out of it for a second. He turned downrange and fired the 30 rounds. Then he handed Joe the gun, almost with a look of defeat, like he knew he'd done something wrong.

Joe's heart pounded. He had two machine guns in his possession -- and a son in psychosis. He put the guns in the rear of the wagon and Will in the front passenger seat. The two friends sat in back, a barrier between Will and the arsenal.

Joe mashed the accelerator. At home, he called authorities. A state trooper arrived.

Will sat mostly silent at the kitchen table, rocking back and forth. He pointed to a light bulb overhead. It's bugged, he said. It's bugged.

He was hospitalized in a psychiatric facility under court order.

When he was released a few weeks later, Will walked out the door and dumped his pills in the parking lot.

He would be back in the hospital within several months after attacking his father and splitting open his cheek. He believed his dad had stolen a box of military patches worn by soldiers in Desert Storm.

You've disobeyed the orders of senior officers of the CIA, Will shouted.

He was sent to Acadia Hospital in Bangor in January 2006 for psychiatric evaluation for the purpose of a commitment hearing. He was then ordered to Riverview, the state psychiatric hospital, for up to 90 days.

Amy and Joe didn't know how the treatment was going; their son ordered doctors not to communicate with them. Amy visited him for the first time in early April. She brought treats from McDonald's and begged him to take medication. He refused.

On April 20, 2006, Will was released. Untreated.

On the wall of her workshop, Amy kept the phone numbers of the Maine State Police and a crisis hotline. But she never stopped reaching out to her son.

When he showed up at his grandmother's home in Essex, Massachusetts, after his release, Amy drove four hours to pick him up. Before they left, she made up the guest bed where Will had napped.

Under the mattress she found a butcher knife.

Amy and Joe stayed up late the night of June 19, 2006, talking for hours about Will.

They wrestled with the feeling that had gnawed at them for two months: I can't believe they let him out.

Amy suggested Joe talk with Will's caseworker the next day. Joe had grown worried that Will might harm his mother. She reassured him the minute she suspected anything she'd sprint from the home. That was the plan.

The next day, Joe phoned Amy repeatedly while he was at work. He also called the caseworker several times. Hours passed with no word from either.

A torrential storm moved in during early afternoon. Rain pelted the ground so hard it bounced two feet into the air. Power was knocked out throughout the region. It was about 4 p.m. when Joe arrived home.

It was dark inside, eerily quiet. Joe noticed what he thought was coffee spilled on the floor. But then the clouds parted and sunlight flooded the windows.

The splotches weren't coffee.

When Joe discovered Amy's body in the bathtub, he ran from the home to the front yard, fell to his knees and unleashed a primal scream. Then he moved into a state of hyper vigilance. He went back inside, studied the crime scene, grabbed a shotgun and called 911.

"He got out of Riverview. They committed him and let him out, and said there was nothing they could do for him. He won't take medication and they won't give it to him," Joe told the dispatcher. "The freaking nuts are the ones making these f---ing laws. My wife, she was one of the most beautiful people in the world."

The dispatcher tried to calm and reassure him: "OK, you are doing great."

"I'm all right. I'm -- my other kids, the rest of the family, the lives that are going to be ruined because of the lunatic goddamn laws," he said. "We told them that he's going to kill somebody. They say, ‘Well, he seems OK now so there is nothing that we can do.' "

A handwritten note to her son would later be found in Amy's wallet.

"I want to fight with you. I want to cry with you. I want to apologize to you. And I want my Willy back. I will not give up on you. Ever," she wrote. "Please, please, please try to realize that your father and I are doing the best we can. We truly don't know what else to do. You've got to help us, Will. I know you have reason to doubt our ability to protect you from harm, but please give us a chance."

Will was held for almost four months, in two county jails, until a judge found him not criminally responsible in a trial that lasted about an hour. It was mostly a formality -- all sides agreed he was insane. He was sent to Riverview on October 16, 2006.

He remained in psychosis, off and on, for more than a year after the slaying. A psychiatrist noted his state of mind: The patient believed he "was performing only his patriotic duty (his mother was thought to be an enemy agent)."

Not only was Will severely schizophrenic, but he suffered from anosognosia, meaning he was unable to recognize he was ill.

Joe fought his own battle of survival. Coffee spills triggered flashbacks of blood stains. A bee buzzing by his head felt as loud as a jet. He wandered around aimlessly at work. He lost 35 pounds.

One of Amy's closest friends was a nurse who made Joe promise that he'd see a therapist. PTSD kills, she said, but it's very treatable.

"I knew what she was saying because I still had two other sons to live for."

He and Amy had planned a trip to Alaska for more than a year. Joe decided to take the trip with his other sons. They hiked mountains and fished for halibut, trying to lose themselves in the outdoors. But the trip was a mistake, the shock too fresh.

"I thought we'd go in her honor, but the fact she wasn't there was with us every second."

By the time Joe returned home, he could hardly function: "It was like being emotionally skinned alive."

He sought the help of a specialist in post-traumatic stress disorder, but it would take two years to tamp down the anxiety.

On the horizon was a different struggle he never foresaw.

The only way to honor Amy, Joe decided, was to follow the guidance from her undelivered letter -- to not give up on Will. Joe wanted to make sure his son was forced into treatment this time. But to do so, he would have to become Will's guardian.

He would need a state-certified assessment of his son, a diagnosis and a prognosis showing that Will was incapacitated and could not act in his own interests.

That wouldn't be hard to get, he thought. After all, Will had killed his mom and the court found him insane. Wouldn't those facts support Joe's request?

Joe contacted the psychiatrist whom prosecutors used to deem Will insane. He refused to help; he said it would be a conflict of interest.

Next, he asked members of his son's legal team about using their expert. They told him they represented his son, not him.

On January 4, 2007, Joe called Dr. Robert Sena, Will's treating psychiatrist at Riverview; the psychiatrist told Joe he would not help declare his son incapacitated.

My son IS incapacitated! Joe said.

At the height of his own PTSD struggles, alone and in despair, Joe downed two bottles of Bordeaux a night. It felt like nobody gave a damn about his son.

Even with what happened to Amy, Joe couldn't learn what was going on inside Riverview.

"It was like the front door was bolted shut."

His quest for the needed information dragged into weeks, then months. Finally, a hearing was set for February 6, 2007. Joe told Piscataquis County Probate Judge James R. Austin about the roadblocks he'd encountered. The system seemed rigged to prevent him from being involved in his son's care.

Two days later, Austin sided in Joe's favor, noting the legal Catch 22 that hindered the father's efforts.

"The proposed guardian finds himself in an unenviable position," the judge wrote. "He is unable to produce a report because he has no legal authority to obtain one, and he cannot secure a guardianship appointment because he has no medical report to support it. Given the extraordinary circumstances of this matter, this court believes a guardianship for a period of 90 days is appropriate."

Within a week, Joe had his son's medical records -- 1,400 pages. He returned home and sat in Amy's favorite wicker chair, turning page after page. Anger and outrage overcame him.

"This patient … would be dangerous to others if released from the hospital," Dr. Jeffrey Fliesser wrote on March 27, 2006, less than a month before Will was released.

He refused medication and his paranoid delusions were intensifying, the records showed. He made obscene gestures at staff and told one, "I got your number." He had threatened to suffocate another patient.

It was strongly advised Will not be released.

The more Joe read, the more baffled he became. He'd expected the records to contain the proof he needed to show Will was not competent to act on his own behalf. He didn't expect them to reveal that the hospital had released Will knowing he might cause harm. Why?

On another page, Joe paused. Patients' rights advocates -- those who fight for the rights of the mentally ill -- had taken up his son's cause. Stationed inside state psychiatric hospitals, the advocates act independently of the state and federal government and are there to protect and advocate for patients. They can sit in on treatment meetings if a patient asks, and they can provide legal services. That's what they did in Will's case. They questioned the veracity of the psychiatric assessments and suggested the hospital would keep him until he completely melted down.

At a treatment meeting on April 6, 2006, the records showed, patient advocates were coaching Will on how to answer questions aimed at determining whether he should be allowed to go into the community on short-term passes. "They want to see that you can play nicely in the community. Just say yes," one advocate told Will, according to notes of the meeting.

By then, Fliesser was no longer Will's psychiatrist. Will had moved to the care of Dr. Daniel Filene.

When Filene asked Will if there were any risk that he would not return to the hospital while on leave, the advocate said to Will: "Just say no," according to the records. Will responded with: "No."

Fliesser, who told CNN he was removed as Will's doctor because his contract with Riverview was up, is now in private practice in St. Augustine, Florida. It's "very upsetting" for any psychiatrist to learn that a former patient has killed, he said. "We're healers fundamentally. We don't want anyone in the community to get hurt. We don't want the patients to get hurt. So, it is devastating."

Filene declined to talk about specifics, but he told CNN the Bruce case "is one of the saddest things that I've encountered in my career."

Joe had never seen medical records before, not even his own. Nor had he ever heard of patient advocates. It was as if he were watching in slow motion the buildup to Amy's death.

Will was released on April 20. His discharge summary noted the hospital had missed the deadline to file paperwork to extend his court-ordered stay. Doctors explored holding him involuntarily under emergency procedures but felt Will would not "meet criteria" of dangerousness, the records showed.

"Thoughts were largely logical and coherent with occasional subtle psychotic content of a paranoid and grandiose nature," the discharge papers said. "He denied auditory or visual hallucinations. He denied suicidal or homicidal ideation."

But the records note this key fact about the untreated paranoid schizophrenic the hospital was about to set free: "He had no insight into even a remote possibility that he may have a mental illness."

Stunned, Joe placed his face in his hands and cried.

YOU SONS OF BITCHES! he screamed.

The fight to become Will's full guardian became a protracted legal battle that went on for more than a year, even after Joe had gained temporary guardianship.

In January 2008, Dr. Robert Fisher, a Riverview psychiatrist, provided an evaluation for the court that said Will remained psychotic, "profoundly delusional" and dangerous. On April 15, 2008, the judge awarded Joe full guardianship.

For Will, those days before treatment are mostly a blur. He worked out relentlessly his first year in the hospital, believing he might be contacted by the CIA to carry out another covert operation. He was dubbed a "2-to-1," meaning he had to be escorted by two staffers at all times because he was considered such a threat.

Will credits Fisher and his father with turning his life around. Fisher strongly believed the antipsychotic medication Abilify would greatly improve Will's condition and asked Joe for permission to prescribe it. He said they could see if Will would take it willingly, or he could administer it with a needle against his will.

Dad told the doctor to go for it. Will agreed to take the medicine without resistance.

"I started to come out of the fog of being in psychosis for so long," Will says. "Within a week, I was starting to recover. Like truly recover."

It was like getting socked with a cold bucket of water. His whole belief system disintegrated: Mom was no longer a terrorist, and suddenly, he had to grasp the gravity of his actions.

Will sank into a deep depression. He contemplated suicide. He dreamed of burning in hell, "like my body was melting." He was despondent. Just seeing his father became excruciating because he had to confront what he'd done.

He took to pen and paper. "I'm so sorry for what I did. I have just started to realize how mentally ill I really am," he wrote his father in late 2008. "I'm having a very hard time coming to terms with it. Part of it is because of the burden of what I did."

"I love you very much and I'm very sorry for what I did. I know it's too much to ask for forgiveness. I really miss Mom. She would be here helping me get through this."

His father remembers the first phone call he got from Will after he went on the medication. It was as if someone had finally given him back his boy.

"I knew I was talking to Will, my son," he says. "It's hard to describe, but when he was in psychosis you couldn't have a conversation with Will. He would talk, but he wasn't there."

Fisher died of pancreatic cancer in May 2011. Will spoke at a memorial service at Riverview, sobbing throughout and thanking the doctor for never giving up on him.

Finally accepting he had mental illness made Will receptive to other therapies that helped with thoughts, moods and behaviors. He learned how to decrease self-destructive impulses and use more positive coping skills.

One 14-week group session called "Are you ready to change?" helped him realize the severity of his illness. "You start to contemplate it. Then, you move on to the action where you do something about it."

As Will's health improved, he was able to petition the court for leaves from the hospital, initially with a staff member, then on his own for four hours. With a judge's approval, he took classes at the University of Maine at Augusta. He also worked jobs around the hospital: buffed the floors, mowed the grass, cooked hamburgers at the staff cafe.

There were slip-ups. He got busted smuggling Skoal Wintergreen tobacco into the hospital and distributing it to others. That resulted in being stripped of various privileges. Just last year, he twice told the hospital he was one place with a friend, when he actually went somewhere else.

He was ordered to receive individual psychotherapy with the unit psychologist, who helped him understand the "thought process that leads to rule breaking; his feelings and how they inform his behavior; and the impact of his behavior on others," his medical records state. "He has also gained greater insight into his criminal thinking."

His most important therapy came from a closed group session that included only those who had killed family members.

"Our struggles are very similar, as far as having to confront family members and to confront yourself," he says. "I'm now an advocate for facing emotions. I never used to do that."

Will stands in stark contrast from his release in 2006. He is outgoing and cordial, introspective and thoughtful. If he stood next to you at a coffee shop, you'd never suspect his past.

His current court order allows for an eight-hour pass with family members and four hours for personal excursions outside the group home, up to 20 hours per week. He must take his medication, 25 milligrams of Abilify, in front of staff at the group home every day.

He is not allowed to drive a vehicle. He cannot own or possess a firearm or other weapons. Drinking alcoholic beverages or consuming illegal drugs is not allowed. Curfew is 11 p.m.

He returns to Riverview to see a psychologist almost every week and a psychiatrist once every two weeks. He meets once every three months with a community treatment team, which includes a psychiatrist, psychologist and other mental health professionals who help him set goals and work with him on controlling anxiety.

Members of his treatment team denied repeated requests for interviews. But progress notes by his psychiatrists, provided to CNN by the Bruces, show that Will's transition into the community has gone smoothly. "The patient is cooperative. There is good eye contact. Speech is coherent and non-slurred. Thought content reveals no delusions, no suicidal and no homicidal ideation," one psychiatrist wrote on August 4, five months after Will's release. "Plans will be to closely monitor the patient's mood and behavior in the community."

If he violates the treatment plan or "if there is probable cause to believe that he has committed new criminal conduct," according to terms of his release, all of his freedoms can be revoked and he can be sent back to Riverview.

Will says he's worked too hard to let that happen. He goes for jogs, rides his mountain bike and reads to relax. "It's real important that I succeed."

When Will moved to the group home, a caseworker said Will was the 11th person he had helped return to the community. None has been ordered back to the hospital. Keep the number strong, he told Will.

"That kind of stuck with me," he says. "I don't ever want to go back there. Dear God, you have no idea."

Joe Bruce stands near the phone on the kitchen table. Voices boom out of the old silver-and-white Radio Shack model. One woman says she has a son who also killed. Another mom has twice been assaulted by her son. Still another keeps a journal for the day she believes her son will kill her. "He is a walking time bomb," she says.

In almost every case, their boys are over the age of 18.

These are Joe's comrades -- families who have suffered trying to raise a seriously mentally ill child. They've joined the conference call from California, Washington state, Virginia.

From all over the country.

Almost every one of them is a pillar in their community. They are active with groups like the National Alliance on Mental Illness; most were pushed into action because they couldn't get help for their sons.

Their aim is to get mentally ill patients treatment before tragedy strikes. And that is exactly what they call themselves, Treatment Before Tragedy. During the call, they sign off on articles of incorporation in Virginia to make the organization official.

Most mentally ill people are more prone to be attacked than commit a violent act. That's a fact driven home by mental health experts. But it can serve to make families like the Bruces feel marginalized because their loved ones are the outliers.

Joe believed he would rob Amy's legacy if he kept quiet. He sobered up and poured his efforts into mental health reform. "When somebody turns a machine gun on a couple of people and he can't even meet the standard for treatment," he says, "then it's like: Why are we pouring billions of dollars into this system?"

He testified at the Capitol in Augusta for changes to Maine's restrictive privacy laws; he fought for lessening restrictions on laws pertaining to medication over objection; and he pushed for an assisted outpatient law that requires seriously mentally ill patients to adhere to a treatment plan as a condition for living in the community. More recently, he went to Washington to speak on behalf of the mental health reform bill sponsored by Murphy, the congressman from Pennsylvania.

His relentless activism remains on display. "If I could've listed a thousand things that I thought I might be doing later in life, this would never have made the list," Joe tells the group. "The fact that we as family members are doing this, in a way I resent it. That we have to form this organization to get something done."

He struggles to breathe.

"I know that Amy, if she could've been here with us, she would've loved every one of you."

Will slides on his blue polo in preparation for work. Getting a job on the outside was one of his top priorities, and he's proud that it didn't take long.

That's not to say it came without a challenge. He wondered how much to reveal about the past or whether he should check the box on the application that asks if you've committed a felony. (Technically, by law, he didn't. But it still will show up on any background check or Internet search.)

A well-known tale among NCR patients is the time the local news outlets did a story on a killer who had moved out of the hospital and was hired by a big-box store. People picketed, and he got fired.

Will decided to be transparent. He landed one sales job, only for it to be rescinded shortly after the offer. The hiring manager called him and told him not to be so honest. "I was bummed," he says. "But I didn't want to lie to them and hide it."

The psychiatric hospital doesn't assist in the job hunt, but guys like Will learn by word of mouth about businesses friendly to forensic patients. He heard managers at a local Kmart had a sympathetic ear, and he filled out an application for a stock boy position.

Store manager Ryan Colgan invited him for an interview. "I told him everything," Will says, "my story, my situation." Colgan was shocked, but he was captivated by Will's "willingness to change and to grow and to become a better person."

"I didn't think twice. I don't judge the history. I judge the man," Colgan says. "Just the fact he's trying to get a job, trying to rebuild his life. Sometimes, you just need a break. Somebody needs to give you a chance."

Will stocks shelves and helps customers haul big items to their cars. He enjoys the interaction. He makes $7.50 an hour and logs about 20 hours a week. He receives disability benefits to supplement his income but doesn't like being dependent on the government. He hopes he can one day work a full-time job to support himself. His court order restricts him to working no more than 24 hours a week.

Will has been an exemplary employee, Colgan says.

Working in the real world, says Ann LeBlanc, director of the State Forensic Service, is a big step toward rehabilitation. "You have to learn to deal with other people. You have to manage that successfully," she says. "And that's one of the strongest ways that these NCR patients are able to demonstrate that they're ready to move on."

Building relationships is another sign of normalcy. Will has been dating a woman for two years, and she has been a particularly strong guide in helping him navigate his new life.

They connected through Facebook, and she visited him in the hospital. She knew Will's mother and admired her free spirit. She sees that in Will, too. She accepts the whole of him. People need to understand, she says, the untreated Will was a different person, someone lost in a different realm.

"Everybody has a past to a certain extent," she says. "It's not who he is. So I don't even think of it when I look at him."

What does she see?

"I like that he's motivated. He's intelligent. He's refined. He's fun to be with."

She asked that her name be withheld because her family isn't aware of the relationship. The two talk about the possibility of getting married, but that's a ways off. "I'd have to talk with dad -- you know, can't have a guardian and get married at the same time," Will jokes.

He turns more serious and says he's determined to honor his mother by fulfilling his goals. "I know my mom, and she'd just want me to be happy."

His girlfriend adds, "She'd be proud that you're working and going to school."

He hopes to finish his degree in justice studies at the University of Maine at Augusta and move on to law school. He wants to be a lawyer because he can relate to people going through rough times.

Will and his father sit on a bench together in a hotel banquet room, surrounded by bright lights and four rolling cameras. Just a few years ago, it would have been impossible for Will to sit still for an interview. He'd have smashed the cameras. Or worse, heard orders from top-secret government agents to attack the interviewer.

Asked about that scenario, father and son nod: It would not have been pretty. "You wouldn't have gotten me in this room," Will says.

He prefers to remember the good times, piling into the family station wagon on vacations to Nova Scotia and stopping for Tiger Stripe Ice Cream. That was before everything went so awry. Before paranoid delusions consumed him and wrecked his family.

When we come to that part of the interview, Will bawls his eyes out, burying his head between his knees, unable to speak further. Tears swim in the eyes of his father. Silence consumes the room.

After a long pause, Dad breaks the stillness. He reassures his son that it was his illness, not Will the person, that acted that day.

Forgiveness, Joe tells me, didn't happen overnight. There was no magic, eureka moment. It took time, a gradual process of working through grief and post-traumatic stress while grappling with conflicted emotions of paternal love for an ill son.

"It was a struggle," he says. "I understood that it was the disease. I knew that what he'd done was not his fault."

But it didn't make it easy to accept.

Will remains steeped in a personal struggle, managing feelings of guilt about the past while trying to look forward. He says in retrospect he wishes he had taken his medication when he was hospitalized before the killing, or that it had been given to him forcibly. Abilify was one of the medications suggested all those years ago.

But he was so sick he could not string together a coherent thought. How was he in any state, he wonders, to make logical decisions about his health?

"Killing my mother is something I'm going to regret for the rest of my life and trying to forgive yourself for something like that is not easy to do," he says. "I look back on it and think, Jesus, had I just taken some medication."

Hearing Will articulate his thoughts and show such remorse is proof of how far he has come, Joe says.

"I've watched his struggle with his treatment. I've watched him work so hard. He's gone through ups and downs. We both have. He's continued to progress. He's made me very proud."

Father and son know one thing out of their control is the forgiveness of others. Will understands many people, including family members, will never accept him. He respects that sentiment, as hard as it may be.

His mom's sisters stopped all communication. Yet one of Amy's brothers has stood by Will, visiting him regularly and seeing him through his treatment. "I worry about meeting my maker one day and facing him and my sister and having to account for why I turned my back on Willy," says Wally Bruce. (Amy's maiden name was the same as her married name.)

"My sister didn't give up on him. And after having some time to reflect on it, I said, ‘If she didn't give up on him, then I'm certainly not going to turn my back.' "

Will's two brothers wrestle with a range of emotions -- the memories of an untreated Will still raw, their feelings constantly in flux.

His middle brother, Bob, 31, the one whose arm and leg Will broke, is glad his brother has received the treatment he so desperately needed. Returning to the community, Bob says, is vitally important for the rehabilitation of forensic patients. He knows that. He sees it every day as a pulmonary and critical care doctor in his second year of residency in Washington state. "But from a more personal standpoint, it's hard to think of that."

"I guess I spent too many years either actively fighting with him or afraid of what he might do," he says. "There's a lot of pretty unpleasant memories growing up with him."

At his mother's funeral, Bob stood in the pulpit and told those in attendance of the need to forgive Will. "The irony is, as time passed, I often feel like I'm the last one in the family to be able to forgive him. That's something I still can't bring myself to do," he says. "That's honestly something I struggle with daily."

He visited Will just twice over the last eight years, once in November 2006 and the last time in the spring of 2013. The latest visit was mostly out of a sense of obligation, Bob says, because he was moving away to the Pacific Northwest. Whatever was discussed, he says, has mostly been purged from his memory.

"It was a tough visit, of course."

Will's youngest brother, Wallace, 27, has forgiven him, but is not comfortable with the idea of him living in the community. He saw Will multiple times over the years in the hospital, but stopped last year because his emotions became so intense, partly because of his brother's impending release. Wallace lives in Los Angeles. He spends summertime in Maine and plans to see Will later this month.

"I would love to say with 100% certainty that I'm OK with Will living in a group home. But the fact is I'm not. There's still a part of me that thinks it's a horrible idea.

"Having seen what happens when he's not on medication," Wallace says, "that's a hard thing to shake."

Both brothers admire their father. They know their mother would've wanted him to advocate for Will, and it's helped give their father a mission. Both believe it is good for their brother to tell his story, that it could help others with mental illness.

Will respects his brothers' opinions and their distance. He knows reconciliation may never come. "That's the toughest thing," he says. "I can't expect them to forgive me. I haven't forgiven myself yet. I just try to live every day the best I can.

"It would be so much easier for them to say they hate me, but they don't. And that gives me hope."

Will knows he will deal with these issues forever. There are times when he feels overwrought with guilt. "At the end of the day, I killed my mother. There's a part of me that feels I should be punished for that."

He asks himself, Why should someone who did what I did be able to walk free?

Sometimes, his mother appears in his dreams.

"Will, I forgive you," she whispers.

He awakes crying.