An Activist Enters a Solitary Confinement Cell—and Struggles for Control

This riveting essay, written three years ago by a member of Amnesty International, remains among the most compulsively readable indictments of our most barbaric form of punishment.

By Tessa Murphy London,

14 October 2014, 16:07 UTC

Tessa Murphy is a British campaigner at Amnesty International

The breathlessness was overwhelming. Standing in that small, dark cell, surrounded by nothing but three concrete walls, a dank toilet, a small sink, a thin mattress, a concrete slab and a perforated metal door that barely let any air in, the oppressive claustrophobia was hard to control.

Isolation cell in California’s Pelican Bay prison ©Rina Palta/KALW.

This was not the first time I had set foot in a US prison, but it was the first time I had experienced what an isolation cell can do to you.

Everything about that room – the lack of windows, or natural light, or fresh air, the very thought of not being allowed any human interaction – seems to be designed to dehumanise. The basic penal concept of reform and social rehabilitation is excluded inside those three walls.

In solitary, punishment is king. The mere thought of spending more than a few minutes in that place was almost unbearable.

And then, a prisoner told me and my colleague that we were the first outsiders he had seen in 22 years.

I was surprised even to be allowed into California’s infamous Pelican Bay Prison. Correctional authorities across the US are unwilling to allow anyone to see what happens behind those thick concrete walls. And with evidence that has emerged – from Pennsylvania to Arizona, of voices crying for help – it’s no wonder. Across the US, it is estimated that nearly 80,000 people are held in long-term isolation

The authorities describe the system as “secure housing units”, “administrative segregation” and even “restricted housing.” But these euphemisms do not describe the human reality of these units.

The departments of corrections claim only prisoners who are a threat to guards or to other inmates are placed in isolation, after all other measures to control them fail. But as indicated by the tens of thousands detained, isolation cells are routinely used as punishment for minor offences such as disrespecting a prison guard or disobeying an order. In California, for example, suspected gang members can be placed in those dimly lit cells, just for having a calendar with Mayan symbols, or certain tattoos, or for being in the possession of books or other “source items” – or just for speaking to a “validated” inmate.

America’s prison isolation regime is not unusual, but it is cruel. Prisoners across the country are effectively entombed for nearly 22 hours a day in their cells, with no access to any education or rehabilitation programmes, with warehousing for the mentally ill in Arizona, with a man in Louisana who has been held in solitary since 1972. Prisoners must take their meals in the confines of those walls and are rarely given a chance to have any meaningful interaction with another human being. At all.

The only time prisoners in isolation are allowed to breathe outside air is when they are taken, alone, to a small outdoor yard, or cage, for “exercise”. Exercise is the word used by prison guards to describe the chance to walk a few steps back and forth. In California, following a hunger strike, prisoners were frequently given a chin-up bar and a hand ball, if they were allowed any recreation at all.

Some prisoners have literally lost their sanity due to the lack of human interaction – and estimated 30-50% of all inmates in solitary confinement are mentally ill or cognitively disabled, and 20% of those are severely mentally ill. Others have completely lost skin pigmentation because of the extreme lack of sunlight. And still others have taken their own lives after having little else to fill the time but stare at a wall for more than 20 hours every day.

But despite the plethora of horror stories emerging from the solitary cells across the US, the system remains unabated, and thousands of people remain entombed.

Thanks to pressure from local activists, lawmakers and organisations like Amnesty International, some states – like Colorado, Illinois, Maine, Mississippi, New York, Virginia and Washington state – have introduced some reforms over the last few years.

However, at the federal level, the US government is currently planning to expand the use of solitary confinement: the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) bought a correctional facility in Illinois two years ago, and this year’s BOP budget includes a proposal to reopen it as a federal supermax prison, potentially replicating the harsh isolation regime from its predecessor.

But how do these conditions of detention provide justice for anyone? This system prioritises retribution and warehousing of inmates over their rehabilitation and reintegration into society.

There is widespread national and international agreement about the harm caused by incarceration in isolation. The United Nations’ top expert on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment has called for solitary confinement to be used only in very exceptional circumstances, as a last resort, and for as short a time as possible. He has repeatedly requested to visit super maximum security prison facilities, but the US state department has not allowed this.

Violent crime is a real issue in the US and elsewhere. But incarcerating people for years and even decades in solitary confinement should not be the way forward for any country purporting to respect human rights. A prison management tool that has been lambasted by human rights bodies and is increasingly challenged by penal experts and others is costly, ineffective and inhumane.

The US should focus its energy and resources on ensuring conditions of detention are compatible with its obligations under international law and standards – that the penitentiary system works for the social rehabilitation of prisoners, instead of perpetuating an abusive and cruel regime that is an affront to human rights.

This op-ed was originally published in The Guardian.

For more information visit our news article Entombed: Life in the USA’s cruel isolation chambers

FREE TYLER WEST, AND ALL THE TYLER WESTS!

Remarks to the Cambridge NAMI

Thank you, Cambridge NAMI, for inviting me here. And thank all of you for coming tonight.

Schizophrenia has struck hard at the Powers family. In 2002, our younger son Kevin experienced the first of several psychotic breaks that worsened over three years despite intense counseling, hospitalization, and a regimen of medication until the voices in his head instructed him to take his life in our basement in Middlebury, Vermont, in July 2005, a week before his twenty-first birthday.

He had secretly stopped taking his medication several weeks earlier; and we are pretty certain that the voices, in the form of anosognosia, had a hand in that decision as well.

Kevin’s first break, by the way, attacked him just across the Charles river, at the Berklee Academy of Music. Kevin was a brilliant guitarist, as well as a kind and witty and untroubled young man: a golden-haired, blue-eyed burst of sunlight.

Sometime after that, Kevin’s older brother Dean started showing symptoms as well. He had his own series of breaks over a period of years. Dean has survived and stabilized, and is living with us at age 35. Honoree and I believe that Dean was spared a deeper psychosis thanks in part to an enlightened psychiatrist in our state.

This doctor understood the hazards of trusting a young sufferer to remain on oral medication voluntarily. So he arranged for Dean to report once a month to a clinician who would administer his antipsychotic med by way of a needle. For those of you who are interested, the medication is Haldol. If Dean missed an appointment, the doctor, as well as Honoree and I, would know about it.

In nearly four years, Dean has not missed an appointment. He has recovered much of the gentleness, the charm, and the intelligence that we’d thought had disappeared forever in the early months and years of his affliction.

You can find a lot more of the Powers family saga in NO ONE CARES ABOUT CRAZY PEOPLE. And you can see lots of photographs of Dean and Kevin, and listen to the wonderful guitar music they made together, on my blog, which is the title of my book, all one word, plus “dot-com.”

Now, I didn’t come here tonight to plug my book; or really to talk about my family. I offer you the information I’ve just given as a way of establishing my bona fides: the qualifications that have made Honoree and Dean and me eligible for citizenship in what I call the “sub-nation.” The mostly invisible realm of the seriously mentally ill and those who care for them. People such as you.

“Serious mental illness,” as most of you know, refers not to simple depression, or neurosis, or alienation from society. “Serious mental illness” refers to incurable, genetically delivered brain disease: schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder; and, to a lesser degree of consensus, autism.

I come here tonight as an advocate. Advocates for mental-health reform are almost always people from the “sub-nation.” Beyond our borders, the country at large remains mostly oblivious to who we are. (We are their neighbors, quite often.) The country remains uninformed about the medical nature of the afflictions we battle. The country remains unconcerned about the abuses that victims of the disease suffer at the hands of untrained police, clueless judges and jail wardens, budget-cutting politicians, and moralists of all stripes who conflate insane behavior with bad character. To some extent, the ironic title of my book is accurate: Nobody cares about crazy people.

And this is what motivated me to become an advocate, above and beyond my family’s personal experience: I’ve been stunned by the education I received after my book was published last March.

I had thought I knew how bad things were. I wrote about how bad things were.

I didn’t know how bad things were.

Not completely. Not down at Ground Zero. Not in the daily life inside the sub-nation, where abominations pile up and travesties of justice go uncorrected and mothers of insane children plead for help and even mercy that fall on the deaf ears of bureaucrats and doctors and law enforcement. No matter how loud they shout.

My post-publishing education began when I stumbled into a domain where I could hear those desperate voices. I’m sure that many of you here tonight got there ahead of me.

I got there through the kindness of a reader of my book. She invited me to join a Facebook site dedicated to private and confidential conversations among the caretakers of the schizophrenic, the bipolar and the autistic. Nearly all of these site members are mothers. Go figure.

The rules are few, simple, and strictly enforced: no judgmental posts. No hostility or abuse. And no reposting of any material on the site without permission of the writer.

I have visited this site nearly every day; it’s called the Circle of Comfort and Assistance Community; and its founder, the educator and advocate Deborah Fabos, has given our sub-nation a precious resource.

I read these testimonies with shock and astonishment. I read them with a sense of grief. And I read them mounting outrage. I am keeping files of them written by mothers who have given me permission. I’ve used their stories in previous blogs, and this evening I am giving you a sneak preview of tomorrow’s blog. It is essentially the text of this talk. Its focus is on a family that is among the unluckiest, most damaged, most neglected, and most desperately in need of intervention and justice of any that I know of. And I know of a lot of such families.

This is the family of Dan and Kimberlee West of Fruitport, Michigan. Their story is one of frantic struggle: a struggle to rescue their schizophrenic stepson, Tyler West, from more than six brutal months in the Muskegon County Jail. Much of this time in solitary confinement. He has been severely beaten by a violent cellmate, and is in imminent danger—as we gather here—of another beating by another cellmate. The charge that landed Tyler in jail, and for which he has not yet been tried, is at once laughable and heartbreaking in its pettiness and meanness.

Here are some features that should make the Wests a poster-family for all that is wrong with our courts and criminal-justice system as they affect the mentally ill. And if I have anything to do with it, they will be.

Dan and Kimberlee West are pillars of the Fruitport community. They would be pillars of any community. They have four children of their own; they’ve taken in three other adopted children besides Tyler, and they have served as foster parents for several young refugees from the Middle East. Kim teaches Sunday school and volunteers for projects around town.

Tyler is about 5 feet 5 inches tall, and weighs about 150 pounds. His mother calls him a gentle boy, and a psychiatrist who evaluated him describes him as “sweet.” He plays five musical instruments, composes music, and is talented in computer design. His joys in life so far, and there have not been many, include playing timpani in his school marching band.

Tyler West has struggled with mental illness since birth. Dan and Kimberlee adopted him at age 7, knowing that he had already been diagnosed with pervasive development disorder, sensory processing disorder, and ADHD.

But if the life inside his head was a nightmare, the life outside it was as well.

Tyler is dark-skinned, and so his new schoolmates thought it would be a good idea to call him “nigger” and beat him up for it. He is small, so they called him a fag, and they beat him up for that too. Tyler does not process information easily and has trouble putting words to his thoughts, and that made everybody mad, so they beat him up for that as well. The beatings lasted through his high school years. His mother believes he has received more than a dozen concussions.

His diagnoses grew more severe: mood disorder at age 12. Autism and bipolar disorder at 16. The psychotic symptoms started showing up less than a year later. He has admitted to hearing voices. He has made several attempts at suicide, at least once by hanging himself. His parents took him to emergency rooms fifteen times in 2015 and 2016. At one care center, they pleaded for a long-term commitment, but they were denied, even though a psychiatrist admitted that Tyler could not understand the consequences of his actions. At another, a county-financed quote “wellness center,” Kimberlee and Dan begged for a civil commitment, through an assisted outpatient treatment program known as Kevin’s Law.

Brace yourselves for the “wellness” folks’ reply. They said they didn’t know how. And Tyler’s lack of critically needed treatment and medications continued.

So now we come to the sad part of the story:

At age 16, Tyler vanished for a few hours with a 14-year-old girl. The girl’s parents filed charges of statutory rape, even though a doctor found no evidence of sexual contact and both of the young people denied it. The Wests entered a guilty plea to spare Tyler the ordeal of a trial, because by then Tyler was speaking in gibberish and lapsing into catatonic states. His attorney was later allowed to withdraw the plea. Yet the imprint of this episode

Shortly after that, police found Tyler in a neighbor’s garage. Despite clear evidence of psychosis, a judge decided that the boy was sane, because he had taken his shoes off before entering. One could of course argue exactly the opposite.

Tyler did 90 days in the Muskegon County jail. Ten of them were in solitary confinement. After that, Tyler’s reasoning capacities were pretty well shot, and so was his reputation with the Muskegon police and court system.

This brings us to the wee hours of February 16 of this year, when Tyler’s fragile world came fully crashing down.

Sometime in that night, Tyler, in yet another state of psychosis, wandered across the family lawn and onto the property of another set of neighbors. This couple was sleeping upstairs. Tyler opened an unlocked door, walked over to a sofa, and fell asleep himself. When the neighbors discovered him, the wife insisted on calling the police, and Tyler was arrested on a charge of home invasion.

Back to the Muskegon County jail for Tyler, where he has remained ever since—more than six months. He is awaiting a trial that always seems to need getting postponed, or continued, or otherwise put off. The latest promise is a jury trial set for November 28th. If he survives. He has been moved back into a unit that houses violent offenders, and his new cellmate is awaiting trial on charges of armed robbery. For no particular reason, he has had four additional visits to solitary confinement: in many experts’ opinion, and mine, the most destructive, barbaric, unnecessary and probably unconstitutional form of legal torture available in the United States. During his last stint, he could be heard beating his head against the wall.

Kimberlee and Dan West are at the point of nervous exhaustion. As Kimberlee said in a recent email, “Ty still is not well. He is having chest pains because they refuse to give him acid reflux meds. I believe has a staph infection on his foot. We have bought every cream known through the commissary. Not one works. [The nurse] refuses to look at it. He needs antipsychotic meds that work. They refused him an MRI for his head injury [suffered in the fight]. No psychiatrist has looked at him. The [jail] doctor serves 600-700 inmates. He is there only on Fridays.”

Kimberlee concluded: “Presently I believe it is God’s grace that has kept him alive.”

Pardon me for sounding irreverent. God seems to need a little backup. It is up to us to provide it. We sure as hell can’t count on the State of Michigan. Michigan is possibly the most benighted state in the Union when it comes to enlightened mental health care.

Tyler West psychiatric the minute he entered the Muskegon County Jail But as we’ve seen, this jail has no mental health officers and no crisis intervention teams. In fact, Ty should not have been sent to jail at all; he belongs in a psychiatric hospital. But good luck with that. Michigan is a national leader in psychiatric bed shortages. Experts believe that fifty psychiatric beds for every hundred thousand people is the minimal acceptable number. Michigan offers ten beds per hundred thousand. That is about 680 beds for five thousand patients in psychosis.

About twenty years ago, the Republican governor of Michigan, like so many clueless governors, decided that his state had too many mental hospitals and not enough patients to fill them. He started shutting them down. In the six years leading up to 2003, he closed 12 of the 16. Today the number is down to nine. The state saved a lot of taxpayer money. And it now provides the sixth-lowest number of psychiatric beds per capita in the nation. Michigan is hardly alone, of course. America has a collective shortfall of 95 thousand such beds.

But what the Michigan system lacks in psychiatric care, it more than makes up for in vengeance. Michigan has 93 county jails, with a total inmate capacity of more than 18 thousand. Most of these people have not been convicted of anything. Like Tyler West, they are awaiting trial. About two thirds of them have some form of mental illness. And they are not getting help. No treatment. No meds. But lots of pain.

We are talking here about one of the most obscene facts of American life and American public policy: the criminalization of mental illness. This criminalization is built of many shameful parts. One is fiscal greed: shut down those expensive hospitals and don’t waste money on jailhouse shrinks. Another is denial: Tyler West took his shoes off, so he had to be sane when he entered that garage. Still another is plain human cruelty: build more jails, and throw psychotic kids like Tyler West into them and put ‘em in cells with violent criminals, and let’s see what happens.

But there is one element that underlies all these shameful parts and makes them possible. That element is ignorance.

Widespread, ironclad, and probably self-willed ignorance. Ignorance not only among the public, the electorate—but ignorance among those who have the responsibility to know better: federal and state legislatures. Judges. Jail wardens. Police departments. Professional caregivers.

Every category I just mentioned had a chance to help save Tyler West. And all the Tyler Wests in all the hellhole jails in this country.

Every category failed.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am angry.

I’ve felt angry and helpless since Kevin died and Dean was stricken. It’s taken me a while to figure out what to do with these feelings, but I’m getting there. The book was one step. My advocacy is another.

I challenge you to join me. Join me in focusing the anger we all feel, and shrugging off the helplessness.

I challenge you as individuals and as members of Cambridge NAMI. And I call out a challenge to national NAMI, to frankly get off your butts and work hard to make Tyler West a national symbol: a symbol of all that is defiled and broken in our country’s mental healthcare system.

Write letters: write to Michigan governor Rick Snyder. To Circuit Court judge Timothy Hicks. To Muskegon County Sheriff Michael Poulin. (These names will be in the text of my talk on tomorrow’s blog. Noonecaresaboutcrazypeople.com.

We will secure justice for Tyler West. And when we’ve accomplished that, we will move on to the next Tyler West. And the next, and the next. You may follow my blog for the names and stories.

I challenge all of you to join me. And for those of you who may doubt the value of our effort, I will close with the words of a man who used to live and work around here:

For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.

Thank you.

More Voices From the Sub-Nation: the Mentally Ill Remain Imprisoned in the Dark Ages

The mothers of America’s mentally ill children continue to find their voices of fierce witness at the ignorance, arrogance, and brutalization of the insane that are the norms in our hospitals, courts, and jails. (Yet, again I ask: why is it nearly always and only the mothers?!) I defy anyone to read the testimonies below and not emerge trembling with outrage: outrage at the often lethal ineptitude with which police and judges and wardens and even doctors increase the damage to our most damaged citizens and those who love them.

Except for the first of these messages, a mesmerizing cri de coeur written and posted by Laural Fawcett, these accounts have been written for private Facebook sites. I quote from them with permission of the authors.

UPDATE ON SHAYLON: IT’S NOT REALLY GOOD NEWS by Laural Fawcett

September 12, 2017

Okay, so here we go again on the merry-go-round of horrors. I have an update about Shaylon. It’s not really good news.

Shaylon, my son, has had a number of psychotic episodes which led him to harm himself and others. Severe visual and auditory hallucinations caused him to leave home and end up on the street. He recently spent a year-and-a-half in jail (he was released in June 2017) because he thought a pedestrian passerby was attacking him and trying to set his feet on fire. This occurred in San Francisco where he often ends up when he is hallucinating. For some reason he, and many others like him, are drawn to San Francisco. I kind of don’t blame them. It’s a pretty nice city to be in.

I just finished my training as an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT). I have a new job but, essentially, I’m homeless and couch surfing until I get into permanent housing somewhere. It’s not the easiest thing to do here in the San Francisco Bay Area where my son has been incarcerated and denied appropriate housing and treatment.

In the last couple of weeks, I showed up at Shaylon’s two court hearings. (He was picked up for failing a probation check-in.) What a total, farcical, miscarriage of justice and waste of my time except for the precious opportunity to get a glimpse my son. He was medicated but obviously in psychosis and not well.

The judge repeatedly said, “We don’t want you here. You don’t belong here and you need to stay away from San Francisco.” He didn’t speak to other criminal defendants, prior to my son, in such a condescending manner. In fact, other defendants were offered programs and assistance. My son was told, “We can’t keep monitoring you.” My son’s probation officer was reassigned and his new probation officer wrote up a travesty of a report asking him to be extradited to Fresno. The courtroom erupted in laughter when the judge said, “Contrary to popular belief, Fresno is not a foreign country so we cannot extradite him.” Neither treatment nor acknowledgement of my son’s medical diagnosis were offered. Compassion was in short supply but immature snickering and cruel comments were plentiful.

The court told Shaylon to leave the city — permanently — and ordered him to be released to the streets, again, at an unknown time. I was ignored and marginalized even though the public defender tried to alert the court that I was present on my son’s behalf as advocate and caregiver. I wasn’t allowed to speak.

I had to travel to Fresno that day to finish my old apartment walk-through to end tenancy and get my much needed deposit back. But my needs and my son’s needs were not considered.

Now, once again, Shaylon’s whereabouts are unknown.

The public defender’s department is saying that the probation department is responsible for providing access to treatment and housing services. The probation department is saying that the public defender’s department is responsible for providing treatment and housing services. Meanwhile, no treatment or housing services are being provided by either. Behind the scenes I discuss how to implement said services with my son’s prior assigned probation officer. It remains to be seen.

Why are people with neurological brain disorders being incarcerated? Why isn’t my son getting treatment for his psychosis?

Medical professionals and others should be asking, “What is the purpose of the health care and mental health care systems?” In my opinion, the purpose of the healthcare system, and this weird, dangling, anomalous part of it called the “mental health care system,” is to bring a person to optimal health. That can’t be done in the criminal justice system.

Some of the scariest, most dangerous patients I deal with, as an EMT, have dementia or Alzheimer’s. They’re medically fragile, confused, and unpredictable. They require tremendous amounts of care and resources, and can wreak havoc on the healthcare system and those who try to work with them. We don’t let them wander the streets in misery. We don’t discriminate against this population the way we do the seriously mentally ill.

I stand alone. I’m indignant about the injustice against a person, with a grave disability, who happens to be my son. The court forces me to abandon him to street-life hell and homelessness. The court is telling Shaylon to disappear. He’s being stripped of his humanity.

Below are some portions of other messages that I have been receiving and archiving for inclusion in a blog on this theme:

From Roseann Pruett:

My daughter, Beth, is in her fifth month [in solitary confinement] at Madison County jail, Edwardsville, Il. [The warden] says he wants to find her a bed but I don’t believe that any longer! John Q. Public has no idea. No hope left…I believe they will end her life one way or another. Court cancelled many times. I could go on and on. My beautiful paralegal daughter, mother of 3, grandmother, sister to 4 others. Oh, yeah, did I say her twin brother was in there 5 yrs. ago. Beat him to a pulp! Would gladly exchange places with her! If only she could get the medical attention she needs so desperately. I’m out…

The mother who writes below is living in isolation somewhere in America. She fears reprisals if her name is attached to this.

I lost my son on January 2, 2008. He is one of the thousand people killed every year by law enforcement. He had been placed under the auspices of Telecare corporation¹, after many years of hospitalization more than a year before he was killed. I had a strong disagreement with the doctor in charge of the local Telecare. He put [my son] on an antidepressant. I told him that my son was a classic paranoid schizophrenic and should not be on an antidepressant. He said, “With the cocktail of antipsychotics he is on, he needs something to wake him up in the morning.” My son was conserved by the county so the doctor didn’t need to listen to my wishes. I learned after his death that ALL of the patients, upon being transferred out to Telecare, had been re-diagnosed schizoaffective by this doctor.

From what he had to say I realized the man loved making cocktails and did not want anything like a Bipolar or schizophrenia diagnosis to interfere with his fun. Within Telecare my son was at two different well supervised places so I did not understand that the next house was to be different. I was told he had graduated from their program and did I want to hold him back? They had supposedly been teaching him to shop and cook but he was severely ill. He could participate in the training, (2 months worth)! But he was in no way able to access food when they put him into a place that did not offer food or anyone supervising (even though they called it a board and care). It was the week between Christmas and New Years. My son must not have been home when they delivered his med package for the week. They put it on top of the refrigerator in the shared kitchen and forgot to check to see if he was taking the nine different medications, (13 pills), in his S.M.W.Th.F.S. Box to be taken twice daily. Four days later another patient told the Telecare employee that my son needs to be 5150ed. That was ignored. On the fifth day they realized he had gone off his meds and they decided to cover it up. THE upshot of all that was he went into the knife drawer, (sharp knives in a house of unsupervised mental patients)? He walked around the backyard with the knife and the other patient later told the police that they were not scared of my son but scared for him. He was scared too as he sequestered himself in his locked room. A patient had gone to the office two blocks away. A very deadpan employee called the cops and, (I have the cd), told them my son was chasing other patients with a knife. Which was not true. A cop, who later explained that he was into SWAT techniques and went to workshops in SWAT on his weekends, was the first responder and set off the incident by jumping the gun. Or taser I should say. My son was then immediately shot four times with a glock and then tased for an additional thirty seconds straight while they screamed at him to put his hands behind his back so they could handcuff him. He was lying on the floor clutching at the mortal wounds on his torso. I only regret that I was not there to stand between them and him. Please feel free to ask any questions. It’s hard to describe this stuff so I almost can hear the monotone I usually go into while describing his death. I am still committed to telling the story to those who want to know.

I would be really grateful if you would use my story. I have written extensively on it but don’t have it all pulled together. I recently got into a fb debate with someone and he found the newspaper report on my son’s death and put it up on the thread. That newspaper report made my son look like a psycho killer type. It makes my story look like I am lying to defend him. Just mentioning this because you may want to question my account too. Perhaps before you write about it you will want to ask questions for clarification. That’s fine. We have been among the ignored as my son was not of color and was not a child but was 24 and he had weighed over 300 lbs as a result of all those medications. He had been a handsome guy as a teenager and not even slightly overweight. To the extent our story can help educate I really want you to be able to use it, Ron, and thank you for wanting to.

These are excerpts from messages written by the mother of a young man, evaluated (too late) as schizophrenic by two doctors, who is awaiting trial on a charge of murder. It is a truism, and also true, that the vast majority of the mentally ill are not violent; yet the untreated mentally ill are at greater risk of harming themselves and others. “Matthew’s” schizophrenia symptoms were initially mistaken for symptoms of drug abuse, a tragically common error. This account also demonstrates the persistent, disgraceful willingness of too many prosecutors to treat the mentally ill as common criminals.

. . .In retrospect, what we were told were drug issues during our son’s junior year in high school were actually the first signs of his brain disorder.

He was admitted to the local psychiatric hospital three times from age 17 to 20. His last admittance was October 2015. He was catatonic. We thought he had taken some K2²because that’s what they told us the last time…once again in hindsight this was his first total psychotic break. After that he came home and got a job as a groundskeeper at our Country Club.

Summer came and went and things were great. On November 13. . .he took his dad’s truck without permission. . .He was acting strangely, mumbling to himself, staying up all night and day, pacing, saying strange things to the family, like, “I’m not going to let them hurt you,” and “The chip they put in my head is how they’re following me.”

On November 30, 2016, I got a call: there was an altercation at the Country Club involving Matthew. I drove there. As I approached I could see police and sheriffs and SWAT teams. Our son allegedly had obtained an unsecured rifle from the shed and shot and killed his co-worker.

. . .We are shattered. He is a wonderful, warm, highly intelligent, compassionate young man. No one who knows him can believe this. The drug screen at the jail was negative. The court-appointed lawyer met with him and called to ask us if he had ever been diagnosed with schizophrenia.

We were stunned. The answer was no, never; the doctors had always assumed drug reactions. Another lawyer met with Matthew asked us the exact same question. So, two doctors evaluated him and both believe he was in a psychotic break.

That was December. As I write, it is July. The jail has had him medicated since. He spent time in solitary, and now he in Gen Pop [the general prison population].

The prosecutor offered him 50 YEARS [in return for a guilty plea]!! We turned it down. Now we are trying to get him a bed at a secure facility, but they won’t give him a bed unless they evaluate him and I doubt the judge will lower the bond [$500,000] without a guarantee of commitment. We are hoping that we can get the bond reduced and get him the care he needs. The meds he is on are a band aid, and there is no therapy at all.

. . .He’s been told what happened [the shooting], but has no clear recollection of the two weeks prior to the incident or weeks after.

We will not let him be another statistic…

We are holding up as best as we can, I am on antidepressants.

We have been researching schizophrenia, and Matthew is “textbook.” But with the right medication and counseling he can live a somewhat normal life.

The issue is convincing a skewed “justice” system that he has a brain disorder. I recall when I first was allowed to visit him, he kept telling me to have them cut his brain out; that there’s something wrong with it. I’m frustrated by the lack of empathy within the justice system. Matthew didn’t choose this. He can’t help it. He has a BRAIN DISEASE, just like cancer or diabetes or any other disease. . .