VIDEO: Grieving Dad Attacks His 3-Year-Old Daughter’s Killer in Court

A fight broke out in a Detroit, Michigan, courtroom on Friday, as a father attacked the man responsible for killing his 3-year-old daughter during a sentencing hearing.

Dwayne Smith’s daughter Jamila died after her mother, Jasmine Gordon, and Gordon’s husband, Clifford Thomas, took her to the hospital when she stopped breathing.

The couple claimed that the little girl hit her head and then fell unconscious, but experts later determined that the girl’s death was a homicide, after suffering physical abuse from Thomas.

The two were found guilty of involuntary manslaughter.

This footage shows Dwayne, filled with grief, attacking Clifford in court.

According to Wikipedia, George Bonanno, a professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University, conducted more than two decades of scientific studies on grief and trauma, which have been published in several papers in the most respected peer-reviewed journals in the field of psychology, such as Psychological Science and The Journal of Abnormal Psychology.

Subjects of his studies number in the several thousand and include people who have suffered losses in the U.S. and cross-cultural studies in various countries around the world, such as Israel, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and China.

His subjects suffered losses through war, terrorism, deaths of children, premature deaths of spouses, sexual abuse, childhood diagnoses of AIDS, and other potentially devastating loss events or potential trauma events.

In Bonanno’s book, The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After a Loss, he summarizes his research. His findings include that a natural resilience is the main component of grief and trauma reactions. The first researcher to use pre-loss data, he outlined four trajectories of grief.

Bonanno’s work has also demonstrated that absence of grief or trauma symptoms is a healthy outcome, rather than something to be feared as has been the thought and practice until his research.

Because grief responses can take many forms, including laughter, celebration, and bawdiness, in addition to sadness, Bonanno coined the phrase “coping ugly” to describe the idea that some forms of coping may seem counter intuitive.

Bonanno has found that resilience is natural to humans, suggesting that it cannot be “taught” through specialized programs and that there is virtually no existing research with which to design resilience training, nor is there existing research to support major investment in such things as military resilience training programs.

Studies of fMRI scans of women from whom grief was elicited about the death of a mother or a sister in the past 5 years resulted in the conclusion that grief produced a local inflammation response as measured by salivary concentrations of pro-inflammatory cytokines. These responses were correlated with activation in the anterior cingulate cortex and orbitofrontal cortex.

This activation also correlated with the free recall of grief-related word stimuli. This suggests that grief can cause stress, and that this reaction is linked to the emotional processing parts of the frontal lobe. Activation of the anterior cingulate cortex and vagus nerve is similarly implicated in the experience of heartbreak whether due to social rejection or bereavement.