by Emma Janson
Frantic screams of a woman – faded at first, but growing louder – overtook the calm as Mrs. Reed ran toward the lobby with medical personnel from the clinical wing running behind her. The footsteps were panicked and heavy, like those of frightened wild horses, as the group cut through the lobby to treat the causalities. Mrs. Reed’s white hair, which was usually perfectly in place, was whipping backward as she ran. Her business attire and heels neither helped nor hindered the pace at which she rushed straight over to Buck. Two of the medics helped Belinda to her feet, but she resisted and screamed that she was not leaving Samuel’s side as a third checked for a pulse on him with a stethoscope and shook his head.
“Jason! Jason!” Mrs. Reed yelled, and threw herself to her knees next to her unresponsive son, bending low enough to surround his face with her dangling white hair. She tapped his cheek as a medic was trying to dress the wound in his abdominal area. “Buck. Buck, are you in there? Don’t you let my baby die!”
“Ma’am, I need you to move. Ma’am, move out of the way so I can help him!” the medic shouted to her while she tried to look for signs of life. Her face was so close to his that the tips of their ball-shaped noses were almost touching while she scanned his face, seeing the son she remembered from eleven years ago – before his lover’s suicide had changed their lives. She sobbed as she scooted away from him. Her complete loss of control over a dismal future that she’d been forced to watch had made a grieving mother snap. She violently shook her head back and forth, making her hair seem as if the tips were reaching for an escape away from the woman to which they belonged. She jumped to her feet, wobbling on her pumps with heavy black mascara running down the tops of her cheeks.
Juana lay motionless on her back with the gun loosely dangling between her fingers and onto the floor. She was staring blankly at Buck with a distant, lost gaze in her eyes.
Mrs. Reed crawled to her, bent down, and grabbed the gun from her loose hands in one effortless swoop, and then she pointed the barrel inches from Juana’s long black curls. “He dies, I shoot. Do you understand me?” Her voice wavered through her tears. The pistol shook violently, as she had never held a weapon before in her life and the fear of what she was about to do was washing over her. Tears pushed the dark, smeared makeup further down her cheeks and then left a clean line as the path it traveled cleared away the foundation she was wearing.
Emotionless, Juana stared at the man on the floor. “He loved me. He saw me and loved me.” She mumbled with a Spanish accent while tears began to push at the edges of her bottom lids, waiting for their moment to stream down her brown skin. “Is he dead?”
Mrs. Reed shook her head violently as she screamed, scrambling her wild head of hair again which had become damp at the roots. “Don’t say that! Don’t you ever fucking say that!” Words shot spit out of her mouth as her emotional pain spilled into each heavy syllable.
Juana looked up to her with huge, childlike eyes. “Is he?” Jill winced as if the question had slapped her in the face.
The old guard interjected from behind the reception desk. “Mrs. Reed!” He aimed the Taser at her back, but he knew it was useless in this situation. “Right now, you are the one with the gun in her hands! You have the power to walk away, Mrs. Reed,” he said, hoping she would stop the madness on her own with a little push of clarity from the facts of the situation.
“You shut the hell up, Arthur. She shot my son!” She trembled harder as hot tears oozed from her eyes, through her smeared makeup and down the clean path off her chin to the floor. She had trouble holding the small firearm in position, as the torque in her arms made it seem as if she was holding a fifteen-pound weight – especially under the stiff stitching that was pulling from the sleeves of her business jacket.
Arthur was firm this time. “Mrs. Reed, your son died eleven years ago. I know you don’t want to hear that, but God damnit, it’s the truth, so walk away, Jill!” She reset her finger over the trigger in preparation for a final squeeze that would end the cause of her present pain. Buck moaned from the floor, distracting her eyes long enough for Juana to throw herself on top of him. Jill screamed at her to get off her son, but she didn’t move; in fact, she held on tighter.
The medics, trying to attend to Buck, pried and pushed the Mexican away as best they could with their blood-soaked gloves. Buck writhed in pain as the commotion around him escalated. The medics began to panic while trying to save his life. They, too, began to shout at Juana to let go, and yelled at the guards who were repositioning themselves in their first real attempt to help pull her off.
Belinda begged and pleaded for everyone to stop as she tried to break herself free from the restraints the medics had placed around her so that they could dress her gunshot wound. Arthur tried to repeatedly shout over everyone, demanding that Mrs. Reed walk away.
The screaming and yelling over the bloody, twisted chaos clogged the ears of everyone in the lobby, until the twins’ laughter grew louder from the same hallway that Samuel had taken his last angry steps along. It pierced through the commotion in an awkward, uncomfortable manner that seemed unnaturally sinister. The medics continued to render aid to Buck and Belinda as everyone tuned their ears to the sounds of the cackling of the elderly twins. There was something eerie about the silencing effect it had throughout the lobby. For a moment that lasted far too long, everyone’s eyes were fixed to the frumpy figures waddling toward them in utter joy with their mouths wide open and their heads thrown back as if the funniest joke in the world had just been told. Arthur, who just wanted to retire in peace, quietly held his left hand up and waved his open palm and sprayed out fingers in a motion that was supposed to tell them to stop as his eyes returned to the gun in Jill’s hand.
From the twins’ point of view, he was ducking down behind the reception desk while holding his Taser in his right hand and saying hello with the other. Ute Schmidt grabbed her sister’s fat fingers, and tugged her to encourage their skipping into the lobby as they giggled like devil children.
Once they skipped down the remaining length of the hall and were about two steps into the lobby, they stopped to take in the epic scene that shocked them both into the first silent pause anyone had ever witnessed them experience. The twins viewed the blood and the tears of everyone in the lobby, and then analyzed the situation in a ten second visual scan.
A strange wave of lingering burnt gases from the firearm gently billowed past the twins’ noses and then faded as if it had never been there, the smell soon replaced with the biological scent of blood and exposed body fluids. “Und vee are the crazy ones?” Ute looked to her sister, who mirrored her rolling eyes.
Hilda, still holding Ute’s hand, shouted to Jill. “Frau Reed, drop it so doctors can save his life if he’s not already dead.”
Jill looked down to the human on top of her son and tossed the gun to the floor near a young guard who frantically secured it. Arthur shook his head in relief but wondered why she’d chosen to succumb to their demand and not his. Juana released her hold on Buck when she heard the weapon hit the floor, and then she scooted away so that medical personnel could prepare him for emergency transport.
Ute sniffed and lifted her nose in the air like a dog. “Love is in the air.” The twins smiled at each other as they began to playfully dance.
Their actions mesmerized everyone, and no one who was watching could take their eyes off the twins while they laughed and swirled around, this time in a circle with their hands latched together as the pivotal point. It was only a few seconds later when Hilda broke free from the playful dance to skip her old frumpy body to the center of the lobby, where she stopped in front of Belinda and rubbed her fat belly in a teasing display of insanity.
“Love made that pretty frauline!” Belinda was shocked, and immediately grabbed at her stomach with her available hand. Hilda laughed hysterically and pointed to the bandage around her shoulder that was seeping, and then to the dead man on the floor. She turned and bent over Mr. Jenkins
, who finally seemed at peace as he rested in a pool of bright red arterial blood. “Love sent you to das bonkerhaus. Love sent you home.” She faked a creepy, overly exaggerated sad face as she held her hips while hovering over the body which had once housed two men. Then, assuming Mr. Jenkins was going to heaven, she pointed to the sky. Ute, who was giggling uncontrollably, kept shaking her head up and down while she let her less dominant sister dance around the tragedy of the room in a sick display of insane truth.
Hilda shimmied around the medics as they counted to three in unison and then hoisted Buck onto the stretcher. She pushed her hand and arm between the medics as they lifted Buck, to push the pad of her fat finger onto the center of his forehead. He didn’t respond in any way to her intrusive touch. “Die Liebe hat dich zerschmettert,” she whispered.
Ute giggled at first and then laughed out loud before mocking her words in English. “Love has shattered you! Love broke you! Kaput!”
Mrs. Reed mumbled to herself for them to please stop, but her plea was dismissed as Ute retracted her hand and spun her body in a delightful and yet wobbly twist, stopping in front of Mrs. Reed. She gently placed her curled index finger under Jill’s quivering chin. With a raise of her arm, she lifted Mrs. Reed’s face and stood on the balls of her feet within her orthopedic shoes. Ute’s beady eyes, surrounded with aged and spotted skin, offered no solace in contrast to the gentle tone, with which she spoke as if she genuinely cared. “Dance in the eye of the hurricane.”
There was a pause of deep reflection before Hilda moved her hand to let Jill’s face fall to her chest again in profound sadness.
As they began to wheel the stretcher away, Hilda swayed her body as if she was dancing to a lovely orchestral melody with one arm crossed over her torso and the other stretched out, holding hands with an imaginary partner. Ute laughed euphorically as she frantically clapped her hands and side-stepped left then right to her sister’s rhythm.
Juana, sitting with a fixed catatonic stare on the floor, did not look up to see Hilda dancing; nor did she observe the change in her fluid arm movements that now signaled a more jagged and posed jerking to a new song. As Ute mocked traditional American Indian tribal dances, she howled and cackled in laughter. She then began to bounce in place and grunted as her sister pretended to inhale smoke from a fire – one that originated within Juana. While the twins continued their imaginary drumming beat, Jill tried to follow the medics, but was unable to look away from the Schmidt twins.
“Your fire is not purifying! Your. Love. Burns.” Ute’s German accent was thick, but it didn’t get in the way of her clearly saying each necessary word while her sister continued to grunt and howl.
Distracted by the twins, Jill stumbled into the stretcher which the medics had stopped at the archway to the hall. One was checking for a pulse deep in Buck’s neck while another tried to listen for breathing and watch for the rise and fall of his chest. By the look on their faces and the way they slowly moved their hands away from his skin, Jill knew his physical life had finally come to an end. Like Mr. Jenkins, he was finally free.
Immediately, there was a wrenching in her gut that made her feel like she would vomit at any moment. The sadness propelled her forward into a slow walk to her son. She had to see that he was gone before she would believe it. Jill placed her right hand gently onto his chest and pressed down while closing her eyes. The dance of the Schmidt twins faded into background noise as she searched for the strong beat of her son’s heart. Her logical side knew it wouldn’t be tapping at her palm, but the reality of it somehow numbed her. When she looked up, the green color in her eyes was muted like dying grass when the summer’s too hot for its delicate blades. She was distant, with an emotionless face. As the twins laughed and shouted in mocking ceremonial chants and loud irregular screams, Jill turned and walked to the young guard who was mesmerized by the twin’s theatrics. She slid the gun from his grip as easily as if he’d been giving it to her and turned to aim the gun at Juana’s forehead.
There was a scream that didn’t come from the Schmidt twins then, and suddenly everyone stopped moving. Juana didn’t flinch as she lunged at Jill grabbing the gun out of Jill’s hands and turned it on Jill. “Is your fire worth the fade?”
Jack, who’d entered the lobby during the commotion but had slipped out undetected, returned with his own pistol in hand. “Hey! Was yours?” And as he yelled, he pulled the trigger. The single bullet in the chamber had been meant for his own broken heart. Instead, the bullet entered the body of Ignacio, killing him and the alternate personality who’d animated it.
In the wave of silence that hushed the room, a whimpering woman began to sob. Jill repeatedly asked, “Why did you do that?” as she looked to the floor with tears falling upon tears. “I would have…” She trailed off. The guards, with no training on this kind of emergency were too shocked to move. Jack carefully lowered the smoking barrel of the pistol to the floor and looked around the lobby with guilty eyes that begged for understanding from the those who remained in the lobby and the judgemental walls between them. Jill was shaking uncontrollably as she stood by his side now, unable to control the tears or the string of mucus falling from her nose.
A few patients who’d initially scurried away during the beginning of the drama began to carefully return to the lobby as a suddenly quiet calm bounced between the walls. They were curious to see who’d pulled the trigger and began to whisper when they saw Jack holding a gun.
Jack stared at the cross on his son’s motionless chest for a moment, and then briefly at the deceased head guard. His eyes, already filled with tears, looked to Mr. Jenkins who had once saved a little girl from a blazing fire, and to Belinda, with a bullet hole in her shoulder. Ignacio’s body was slumped, lifeless on its side, only a few feet from Jack’s hysterical wife. He was ashamed to think that he and Jill had failed to provide Buck and their patients with normal, safe lives.
But he was wrong.
EPILOGUE
It was the middle of the day and a television in the lobby of the mansion was airing channel 8 news. The volume was low but audible and the seating around it was inviting. Yet, no one was watching it. A woman and her son walked passed it to set comfortably on the newly installed patio. The sweet smell of the vineyard was in the air and much more alluring than the broadcasted story.
A year ago, two patients, one staff member, and a guard were fatality wounded and one patient was seriously wounded at Northern Lights, a mental health facility in Jefferson County. The community was stunned and left with a lot of questions and theories. You sent these questions to us here at WKTN Channel 8 News and on social media. We wrote about the losses of the families in this tragic event and, on the one-year anniversary, we wanted to share some perspective on what lead to the carnage and what has happened since.
If you have never heard of Northern Lights or its extraordinary residents, you can most likely research it and find words like groundbreaking, innovative, or pioneering. That is because the facility, run by Jack and Jill Reed, implemented nontraditional methods of treatment. The facility, funded predominately by private research groups, treated many patients with serious conditions as well as those less severe, non-permanent residents. However, the focus was on patients that suffered from the same condition; Dissociative Identity Disorder, otherwise known as DID or multiple personalities.
In the investigation that followed the incident, the assessments of researchers found, oddly, that the treatments the patients received, that lead to the tragedy, actually accomplished the mission of the facility. Patients benefited because they did not live on a steady plateau of previously charted ground. They were allowed to feel, fail, succeed, grow, and live without margins. This freedom and flexibility, within treatments, was deemed commendable yet risky. Some would argue that although ground-breaking, it was the lack of stricter, more structured methodologies that led to four untimely deaths and the ultimate shut down of Northern Lights.
Aside from their
unprecedented treatments that the medical community at first dubbed as self-guided, and their unique clientele, the building itself has a history. Mr. and Mrs. Reed renovated a vineyard mansion for their permanent residents. Some of the upgrades included a state of the art monitoring system, specialty treatment rooms, and an overhaul in electrical systems. A section of the mansion was also secured for specific patients harboring hostile intent. Unfortunately, the shooting last year could not have been prevented no matter how much effort the Reeds put into the upgrade of safety systems or in the treatment of their staff and patients.
One of the six residents, that became a part of this devastating event, was Jason Reed, Jack and Jill’s son, who began showing signs of DID twelve years ago. He was the reason the couple established Northern Lights. In a press conference last week Mrs. Reed spoke to the people of Jefferson County to thank them for their support on the anniversary of her son’s death.
“Our son Jason and his alter “Buck” wanted a different kind of care for mental health patients. We did our best to accommodate that for him, for them, and for us. Thank you for your support.”
The Reeds were able to make the conversion back to a bed and breakfast with the help of volunteers in the community who heard their story. The conversion took eight months to accomplish and it will open next week, under a new name, that will be unveiled at the opening ceremony.
Among the other deceased patients from the tragedy, are a security guard, whose family has asked us not to name; Sam Jenkins, a sugar mill worker of Ohio who is survived by his daughter Gloria Semer and grandson Aaron and Ignacio Cheyez of New York whose mother made national news as the gang leader of the Quinceñera Fifteen Fire Starters. When asked about the fatal outcome of Northern Lights, Mrs. Reed had this to say.