No One Cares About Crazy People

by Ron Powers

  It wasn’t long after the accident before the posters began to appear around town.

  They showed up in the windows of some of the stores on the main street downtown that crossed Otter Creek. One of them was taped inside a window, facing the street, of the bank where we had our account. We closed the account and reopened it at another bank.

  The posters showed a black-and-white photograph of Amy. The caption below quoted her as advising adolescents to avoid getting into cars with drunk drivers—excellent and important advice, in itself. The poster went on to state that Amy was speaking from experience, having survived an auto crash with a “drinking” driver (unnamed) at the wheel. Hardly anyone in the town, county, or state who saw the poster had any doubt as to the driver’s identity—or to his condition when he had driven his mother’s car that night.

  Still hoping for a breakthrough with Amy’s parents, we again decided to let the matter go. We also decided not to challenge the felony indictment. We wanted to spare both Dean and the young victim the ordeal of a jury trial. We would accept whatever penalties the court handed down. We never disputed, nor did Dean, that he had been guilty of reckless driving that resulted in the crash. We were prepared to accept a fine, probation, conditions of release, community service.

  Amy’s parents requested that Dean be sentenced to three to eight years in prison.

  Three to eight years in prison. Dean lived for a year with that grotesque possibility burdening his thoughts and dreams. Three to eight years. Three to eight years in confinement, out of the sunlight, out of the world, out of the company of anyone other than convicted criminals and cynical guards, older, tougher, life-hardened men. Three to eight years without freedom. Without variety. Or discovery. Or laughter. Or love. Or music. Or dignity. Or reassurance of his worth. Or anything he cherished. Three to eight years: a black tunnel of forever to an adolescent.

  It was a possibility only in his mind, of course. No court in America could conceivably be barbaric enough to impose such a nightmare of a sentence on a boy, a new driver scarcely out of childhood, for a car accident in which no one was killed and for which no charge of intoxication was imposed.

  Or, hell, could it? Sometimes the newspaper headlines told, and tell, a different story.

  As if the sentence request might not make their level of hostility clear enough, the parents added a further rebuke to any hope of personal conciliation. It happened at a court hearing a few weeks later. As we sat waiting for the judge to appear, the girl’s father, who was seated a couple of rows ahead of us, stood up, turned, and stepped toward us. I recall for some reason that he was wearing Bermuda shorts. He was holding a small gift box. He held the box toward us. “Amy wanted Dean to have this,” he whispered.

  We did not have to open the little box to know what lay coiled inside it.

  We shielded our son from the knowledge of this gesture. But we could not shield him from the new round of persecution that greeted him that autumn.

  Dean was arraigned on September 28, 1998.

  When school came, so did the legal aspect of the aftermath. I was arraigned into court. I trembled I was so scared, and to top it off, Channel 3 news was there. I got terms and conditions of release, a curfew, an alcohol restriction, and a restriction from talking to Amy.

  In fact, a court order prohibited Dean from being in the same area of the high school with Amy at any given time. He was banned from both lunch periods, lest he cross her path, and as a result ate alone, outdoors. He was obliged to walk along separate corridors from the ones she took.

  I also knew that I was under a magnifying glass, so to speak. School was hard and I felt like an outsider. The friends I once felt comfortable talking to and hanging out with I made little or no attempt to acknowledge, nor did they to me which scared me more. When I realized that what was troubling me almost more than the accident itself was the school environment, also the most dangerous, I dropped out of regular school and began getting tutored.

  More accurately, at the end of that hideous semester—the first of his senior year—Honoree and I arranged for Dean to be released from the high school’s malignant climate and allowed instead to meet with a tutor at the public library.

  To this day I am still learning with [the tutor,] who has never seemed judgmental about me after the accident. And with whom I am very comfortable, and inspired to complete all my assignments with.

  Dean suited up for every Middlebury football game, home and away, in that autumn of his senior year. But the coach did not once put him in, and from our vantage point in the stands, it did not seem as though his teammates noticed him. In the final game of the season, on the road in southern Vermont and with the score settled, the coach at last turned to Dean and offered him a chance to go onto the field.

  I was watching at field level, just on the other side of the chain-link fence from the Middlebury bench, and I could plainly hear Dean’s response. He said, “No, thanks.”

  Still I am a dropout from society with only one and a half close friends the one being my brother, the other is still not complete because he chooses a somewhat risky lifestyle which I can’t have any part of. I don’t call anyone, I don’t go anywhere, and I worry constantly now, that if I don’t get out of Middlebury soon, I will never go anywhere, ever. I am quite ready to leave this town, and the horrible memories it has, but I am now tied down, by legal restrictions. There are less than a dozen people I think that actually care about me, so why should I stay? And I am afraid that because of certain factors Amy and I will not have the intimate chance to confess to each other the things we have needed to hear and say to each other for almost a year. So I might have to wait a few years for that step of the healing process anyway.

  That brings me to today, I have been in a blur at work with [the overflow of customers during] Middlebury College graduation week, and this last month or two has been quite busy in general. In a week I will find out where my life goes next. I wish I could take control of it again but like I said, my life is like a river and I am being swept away helplessly. I know that I am close to the end, and what happened brought tragic results. However it helped a seventeen year old see just how precious life really is, and how your life can slip away from you if you’re not careful. I sometimes feel like an old man who had the chance to go back and live his life over again. Maybe it’s because I’ve had so much therapy, and from AA I heard men who were like me and ended up dying for years or decades, in an alcohol haze. So here I am, and I was given a second chance to see the light and change my life. And so I did.

  The high school principal contributed his own final gesture of gratuitous punitive humiliation. This factotum forbade Dean the dignity of participating in his class’s graduation ceremony, although Dean had completed his requirements. And he banned Dean’s senior photograph from the 1998 school yearbook.

  The dreaded date of Dean’s sentencing neared. His days of confinement in our house began to seem as though they might last forever—or be replaced by the foreverness of prison.

  These were the days and months and events, I am convinced, that launched my eldest son into his rendezvous with schizophrenia.

  “…my life is like a river and I am being swept away helplessly.”

  10

  Chaos and Heartbreak

  As I’ve researched and written this book, I have kept files of news reports that illustrate the daily “chaos and heartbreak” of mental illness and the treatment of mad people in law enforcement, in the courts, in the jails and prisons, and in efforts at psychiatric intervention. I have drawn upon these files for use in my narratives—such as the killing by a police officer of young Keith Vidal in North Carolina in 2014, the incident that appears in chapter 1.

  These files have long since over-spilled the book’s capacity to contain all of them. Yet like the Keith Vidal story, they yield near-unthinkable examples of atrocity and malfeasance and systemic callousness toward the insane. Their litany of “civilized” society’s failure to protect
its most helpless members is itself a narrative of atrocity on a grand scale. Yet the stories result in no sustained collective sense of affront to personal or civic decency on a scale necessary for reform. The stories flare and vanish into the maw of other atrocities: mass shootings, terrorist attacks, apocalyptic political candidates. Any possible interconnections are mentioned, perhaps, then forgotten or ignored.

  I have retrieved a small sampling of these stories from my files and laid them out below, in roughly chronological order but in no special “order of importance.” They are all important.

  I have excluded accounts of atrocities, mostly mass shootings perpetrated by people suspected of being in psychotic states: at Tucson, Aurora, Sandy Hook Elementary School, the Washington Navy Yard, the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, Colorado Springs, San Bernardino, Orlando, Dallas, other venues. These have burned into the national memory and need no fresh review here. While it seems clear almost by definition that these shooters were mentally ill in most if not all these incidents, they were unavailable for diagnoses—in most cases, due to their suicides.

  Some readers will probably recognize a few of the incidents described below. Yet to read or re-read them sequentially is to be bombarded anew with evidence that something is wrong at the foundations of our society.

  Among stories of mentally ill people shot or beaten to death by police on the streets—or, in this case, in the foothills—the vile fate of James “Abba” Boyd ranks as one of the most excruciating in my files. The deadly confrontation occurred about six weeks after the Keith Vidal killing.

  I am able to describe this act of defilement in detail because the defilement was recorded: recorded, with the deadpan surreality that marks so much of “sane” American life, by one of the assaulting officers. The officer had been issued a small digital recording device, attached to his helmet, and dutifully kept it active through Abba Boyd’s long ordeal. This was a variation of the “body cam,” which this incident helped transform from a marginal law enforcement tool into a central artifact of our culture. Less than three years after its dramatic emergence, the body cam is spreading not only through police organizations; it is a hot item among civilian consumers, a deus ex machina on the half-shell. The body cam (along with its cousin the cell phone camera) has managed the dubious achievement of obliterating the taboo against witnessing a human death on the screen.

  More importantly, though, these devices have served to provide society’s most defenseless and preyed-upon members—the insane, urban minorities—with the most effective counterweight yet invented to the tyranny of the gun.

  Both these functions were on display in the killing of James “Abba” Boyd.

  Boyd was a thirty-eight-year-old homeless man with a history of paranoid schizophrenia. At the time of his mountainside execution he had been wandering for several days along the Amya foothills outside Albuquerque, sleeping amid the rocks and sagebrush with little covering except what he carried in a knapsack. Boyd was an outlaw: he had not obtained a camping permit from the city, thus violating an ordinance.

  Boyd did not carry a gun, but he had a couple of knives and a history of punching police officers who tried to remove him from places where he didn’t belong. Those who knew him said he was not a violent man except when confronted while in the midst of a “break”—a virtually universal reaction among those in psychosis. Boyd suffered from delusions, believing himself at times to be, variously, a one-man federal agency, and God. He had no wife or children. He’d spent short periods in jails and psychiatric hospitals, but no apparatus existed for keeping him under treatment or from injuring others or himself.

  In early 2014 Boyd had provoked the annoyance of a man who lived in the open country where Boyd often roamed. This man had called the police several times to complain about Boyd. The afternoon of March 14, 2014, a squad of officers, armed with assault rifles, pistols, flash grenades, and an attack dog, tracked Boyd down in the foothills near a boulder where he had been camping. As reinforcements made their way to the scene, these early responders ordered him to “surrender.”

  “Don’t attempt to give me, the Department of Defense, another directive!” Boyd shouted. He was clutching a pair of knives. The team, assault weapons at the ready, edged toward him. One team member, a thirty-year-old officer named Mikal Monette, who’d had some training in crisis intervention, tried to talk Boyd into a peaceful surrender. (The department did not send out a full crisis-intervention team. Budget cuts—another pandemic form of maltreatment toward the mentally ill—had reduced the number of available specialists.) As the journalist Colleen Heild reported in the April 16 Albuquerque Journal, the two talked for about an hour as the number of police slowly increased. Their topics ranged from PlayStation games to whether Boyd could have a meal at Denny’s. A still photograph accompanying Heild’s article shows Boyd, near the left of the frame, looking through dark glasses at the men who would shortly shoot him to death. He stands slightly slumped, a big man in a faded blue shirt. The lower half of his body is concealed by a boulder, but his right hand, nearer to the camera, holds a small object that gleams in the fading sunlight. He faces five men in police blue, about ten yards from him. Two are aiming rifles at him and one a pistol. The officers’ postures recall nothing so much as a group of Union infantry preparing to fire upon an advancing Confederate brigade.

  The helmet cam recorded what happened. At length, on the recording, James Boyd raises his hands, palms upward in a kind of shrug, and turns to his right to pick up his knapsack. There is yelling. One of the officers fires a flash grenade that lands at Boyd’s feet with a loud pop and a burst of white smoke. Such grenades are nonlethal, designed (cluelessly) to startle the target. At the same moment a police attack dog, a Belgian Malinois, is released to rush at the man.

  Boyd, curiously, doesn’t seem to panic. He extends his hands down toward the dog. He half shoulders his backpack and turns to his left in an apparent decision to walk away. Three officers, two of them aiming rifles, close on him, yelling, “Down! Get down on the ground! Down now!” The nearest gunman is barely four feet from Boyd when the shooting starts: about eight bursts in rapid succession. Boyd falls on his face in the opposite direction of his assailants. His heels spasm a little. The officers shout more commands. Then they fire more rounds into the prone man. One bullet rips through his shirt, and a shred of it flaps briefly. Another catches him in the small of his back, causing a similar flapping in his trousers near the belt. Boyd’s right hand is on the ground near his head and his left arm is under his torso, but the officers scream for him to “drop” the knife. The police release the dog again, and he worries at Boyd’s backside with his teeth. The helmet cam captures it all.

  The shooting stops, and the police chat among themselves for a few moments, striking attitudes of disengagement weirdly typical of officers—and perpetrators as well—in the seconds following use of lethal force. Then an officer leans down to the mortally wounded man and tugs harshly at his left arm. At length he yanks it free, and everyone crowds around to see what is in Boyd’s hand. From the video it is not clear what, if anything, he had been holding.

  At length, the officers transported Boyd to the University of New Mexico Hospital, about half an hour distant. He died there the next morning after surgeons had amputated his shattered right arm and removed a lung in their efforts to save him. The helmet-cam video was released to the media on lawyers’ demands. It unleashed days of street protests and some violence by Albuquerque citizens who had seen thirty-seven people shot down by their police department since 2010 alone, twenty-three of them fatally. Three-fourths of these were mentally ill.1

  All this attracted the attention of the Justice Department, which launched an investigation that lasted sixteen months. In April 2014 the department accused the Albuquerque police of “a pattern… of use of excessive force” against suspects that often violated their constitutional rights. “Force” included, besides gunfire, kicking, punching, and viol
ent restraint. Many of these victims, the department stated, were mentally ill and often nonthreatening.2

  A district attorney for Bernalillo County indicted two of the officers, Keith Sandy and Dominique Perez, for murder. Their trial was scheduled for the fall of 2016; as of this writing, it has not begun. In July 2015 the city agreed to settle a civil lawsuit brought by Boyd’s brother Andrew for $5 million.3

  Should a mentally ill suspect (or any suspect) survive an encounter with police, their next stop, quite often, is the modern-day equivalent of Bedlam. The American prison system is an archipelago of barbarity. In many important ways its assumptions and practices bespeak the Middle Ages. This is to some extent inherent in the very fact of a prison system and of the timeless callousness, either inborn or inculcated, of its wardens and guards. In any case, the consequences of imprisonment, to the human mind and body, are incalculably more debilitating than most people care to imagine. Or than an ethical society should tolerate. Or than is necessary.

  Contrary to public perception fed in part by incendiary political rhetoric, crime rates have been consistently declining since reaching a peak in the 1980s, and now resemble figures from the mid-’70s. In 2014, violent crime alone declined by 4.6 percent from the previous period.4

  Prison populations have been declining as well, but at a slower rate than crime. The year since 2009 saw the first reversal in population size since the mid-1970s, when draconian sentencing, galvanized by the “War on Drugs,” led to an increase of inmates from 300,000 to a peak of nearly 1.6 million. State and federal populations, by standard consensus, totaled just under 1.4 million in 2016, though some advocacy groups have put the number as high as 2.3 million.5 In fiscal year 2014, overcrowding in federal prisons was at 39 percent above capacity in medium-security facilities and 52 percent above in high-security ones.6