While the City Slept (14 page)

A hospital psychiatrist wrote that Isaiah’s behavior “strongly suggests he is not capable of being in behavioral control due to his mania, that his decision-making is extremely poor,” and that “his impulsivity creates an imminent risk.” Isaiah had bothered other patients, had been combative with the hospital staff, and had claimed that people there were going to hurt him. Lithium was recommended should he be hospitalized against his will. However, the decision as to whether Isaiah would be held for a seventy-two-hour evaluation was not the hospital psychiatrist’s to make.

Like other states, Washington uses a system of Designated Mental Health Professionals who are called to evaluate whether people like Isaiah—people brought to emergency psychiatric centers because of concerns about their behavior but who express profound disagreement with their diagnosis—should actually lose their civil liberties by being involuntarily committed. They have a hard job, balancing individual rights against community safety and applying a static law to dynamic mental disorders, often with little background information about the individual in question, all with the knowledge that in either direction, hold or release, there will be challenges in getting the individual care.

In Isaiah’s case, the DMHP determined that Isaiah did not meet the state’s criteria for involuntary commitment, which had been loosened and fine-tuned several times over the years but still revolved around the idea of danger to self or others. During the events that had brought Isaiah to Harborview, he had not described or evinced any intent to
imminently harm himself or anyone else. He’d just falsely claimed to be an African king with the power to fire strangers from their jobs and had been a handful for hospital staff who he believed were wrongly detaining him. So, as Isaiah’s own public defenders later wrote, “Ten hours after arriving at Harborview, Isaiah was released without medication, without prescription, and without follow-up aftercare.”

He was twenty-two years old.

—

Records suggest Isaiah returned to the financial services firm, but the police scattered him off. By the next day, he was back at his mother’s apartment, where she demanded that he begin taking medication or move out. This infuriated Isaiah, a not-uncommon reaction among people in the grip of a serious mental disorder and rejecting their diagnosis.

Detective Duffy saw this “all the time” when she was working as a nurse. There was a psychiatric unit on the eighth floor of her hospital, and there she learned that most of the time, if people don’t want to take prescribed medication, “you can’t force them. And, usually, if you finally get them on a regime, the meds make them feel quote-unquote not normal, or lethargic, or fuzzy, and so they feel that if they don’t take their meds, they feel more normal.” When, because of financial issues, her hospital lost its floor for treating patients in acute mental distress, Detective Duffy said a lot of the disturbed patients ended up on the street. “And that’s what you see,” she said. “You look out there now, every street corner there’s somebody that could use help, mentally.” Her investigations often end up involving people in this situation, either as victims or as perpetrators of violent crime. “So, I don’t know what the answer is,” she said. “More mental health facilities that are better funded? But I just don’t think it’s going to happen.” The reason: “Money.” Which doesn’t make good sense to her, because she constantly sees the high cost of inaction and lack of investment. “I don’t know why people don’t see it,” Detective Duffy said. “It’s so expensive.”

—

In Isaiah’s case, the tendency to reject medication might have been heightened by what records suggest his father had taught him: that the correct response to personal trouble is merely increased will and anything else is failure. When Isaiah’s mother, after his release from Harborview, said she wanted him to take medication, Isaiah told her to get out. Of her own home, the apartment in Burien. He told her, “You’re dead to me.”

His mother asked him what he was talking about. “Just leave,” Isaiah told her. “Enjoy your last day on earth.” His mother became scared, grabbed a pair of scissors to defend herself. “You’re no match for me,” Isaiah told her, according to a police report of the incident.

Deborah was present for this altercation and fled with Isaiah’s mother and Isaiah’s two younger siblings to the minivan. “Our family is in a whirlwind at this point,” Deborah said. Someone told Isaiah to stay put. Someone told Isaiah to be out by the next day. In response, Isaiah grabbed a backpack and his dog and left, walking past the minivan and flashing a knife with a six-inch blade as he did so.

Deborah and her mother followed Isaiah. He was headed, once again, for the Burien Transit Center and its depiction of the volcano. Isaiah’s father was summoned, and when he caught up with his son, Isaiah said to his father, “My family has forsaken me. You’ll never see me again.”

In a sense, the last part was true.

—

Isaiah having disappeared from their sight, the family called the police. The police searched for Isaiah but didn’t find him. By the next day, Isaiah was back at his mother’s apartment, smashing the windshield of her new minivan with a rock. She watched from a window of her apartment as he went around the vehicle breaking more windows, as if they were the barrier he needed to shatter to solve his predicament.

“Stop that,” she shouted.

“Go fuck yourself,” he shouted back. She told him to leave, and he kept shouting at her, “You’re all dead.” His words suggested they were his enemies now, that in his mind, at this moment, they were what was persecuting him.

Isaiah’s mother called the police, Isaiah left, and the police searched the area again but failed to find him. After that, his mother and his two younger siblings were driven in a patrol car to Deborah’s place, where it was thought they’d be safer.

Deborah remembers how proud her mom was of her new minivan, the one she’d skipped a payment on to get Isaiah new clothes, and how much its destruction hurt her. “That was something that she got on her own without her husband,” Deborah said. “It meant something to her. And the look—I’d never seen my mom look like that before. It was so sad. I wish I could take it away.”

—

Soon, Isaiah was out in front of Deborah’s place. He’d run there from his mom’s. “All of a sudden you hear all this glass breaking,” Deborah said. He’d thrown a rock through the window of her front door. He was standing in a grass field across the street from her house, a field on the flat top of a drumlin, no water view, no dramatic relief, just the tips of the Olympics above the distant horizon where the hill begins to drop off. Isaiah was shouting, “Come on! Come on!”

“You would have thought we was gang members or something,” Deborah said. Beyond the shouting and threats, there was something very off about Isaiah. “It was like his soul was gone,” she said. “His eyes were like black.” He was jumping as he shouted. “I’ve never seen a human jump that high off grass,” Deborah said. “No trampoline, no nothing.” Isaiah had his dog with him. He sometimes described it as a service animal, and its name was Indo, a common slang for marijuana. When Isaiah’s family came out to try to calm him, he removed Indo’s leash and told the dog to attack. When it didn’t, Isaiah began swinging the leash, which had a chain
on the end, at his mother. “He had no idea who I was,” she said. “And at that point, I knew he was in a psychotic break.” The chain hit her head.

“Once my mom hits the ground,” Deborah said, “we lose it. I lose it. My kids’ dad loses it. So we’re, like, trying to tackle Isaiah. We have to get him down. ’Cause this is not my brother right now. I swear. I believe in people being possessed and all that stuff, and I don’t know what took over his body, but we’re gonna get it out. ’Cause, like, you just knocked Mom down with a dog chain, and you would never hit Mother. You would never hit Mom. I don’t know what’s in you right now.”

Deborah is a big woman and not easily intimidated. “When I was younger,” she said, “if I got in a fight, it was with a boy. I won every time.” There was a nosy neighbor watching it all unfold—“Bless her soul,” Deborah said—and now Deborah shouted at the nosy neighbor to quit watching and call the police. Then she jumped on her brother.

“I just tackle him,” she said. “I just jump on Isaiah, and I’m just laying on him.” He shouted at her to get off. He growled. He foamed at the mouth. “Have you ever seen somebody, like, you can look straight through them?” Deborah asked. “In their eyes? It was dead. You know what I mean? Like a doll . . . That’s how he looks.” Her children’s father came to help hold Isaiah down, and once Isaiah was under control, Deborah lay down near him.

“And I start rubbing his head,” Deborah said. “I’m rubbing his head, and I’m like, ‘Isaiah, why?’ Just, ‘Why?’ Just, ‘Talk to me, I love you so much, just tell me. Isaiah, what happened?’ And he just gets this joker smile on his face . . . But still that same look, that dead look . . . He’s just cheesin’. I’m like, ‘Isaiah, I love you. I’m not mad anymore. I don’t hate you right now. I’m not mad you hurt Mom.’ All I feel is just love, like I gave birth to him myself . . . And I didn’t, but I basically helped raise Isaiah, okay? So when we’re laying on this ground, it was so hurtful, but it was just peaceful. It was almost like nobody was there. And it was like, ‘Isaiah, just tell me, what happened? Why are you doing this? Are you okay?
I love you. I love you. I love you.’ And I kept repeating that. ‘I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you.’ A million times until the police got there.”

The police arrived, and two days after he’d been released from Harborview, where his mother had hoped he’d be treated, Isaiah was loaded into a police cruiser and taken to jail, where he could not be well treated and where his twisted path into, out of, and then back into the criminal justice system began.

—

The day after this arrest, Deborah and their mother went to see Isaiah. He was awaiting arraignment, charged with felony harassment and malicious mischief. Deborah asked him, “Why did you do that?” Isaiah, she said, replied, “Because you tried to have me committed. I’m not crazy. You guys tried to have me committed.”

Deborah’s next step was to call back the doctor at Harborview and tell him what happened. “But he wouldn’t take none of my calls,” Deborah said. She admits she wasn’t being her most polite self. “I’m not gonna lie,” Deborah said. “I have never been so ghetto in my life. I was cussing. I was cursing. Because I was so mad.”

Like her mother, she asked, “Why do you have to wait until someone dies, or gets critically hurt, before they do anything?”

Offered a brief sketch of the history and the current state of the law, she said, “I get that. I can understand that. ’Cause I sure wouldn’t want to be committed just because someone thought so.” And then, “Jesus, what are we gonna
do?”

F
ifteen days later, Isaiah, wearing a red prisoner’s uniform, his hands cuffed behind his back, stood before the King County Superior Court judge Brian Gain. The date: April 14, 2008. Through a glass window at the back of the courtroom, his mother and Deborah watched as a deputy prosecutor immediately requested that Isaiah be sent to Western State Hospital, the state’s main psychiatric hospital, for an evaluation. Isaiah’s public defender said she’d spoken with Isaiah about the likelihood of this happening, and he’d told her it was fine.

Isaiah began shaking his head.

“I did not agree to that,” he said, in a clear and slightly perturbed voice. “I’m not crazy. I don’t feel like I need an evaluation.”

—

A few days earlier, as Isaiah waited in jail for this hearing, the last item in his parents’ divorce had been settled. Isaiah’s mother was now on disability, his father no longer required to make support payments to her. Whether Isaiah’s high school tuition debts were ever paid remains unclear, though at this point it didn’t matter much.

It had been about six years since the divorce began, and about the same amount of time had passed since the Family Court social worker recommended Isaiah get counseling. Over that time, the paperwork on his parents’ divorce had become a stack nearly a foot high, and no counseling had
occurred. Now, finished with its dealings with Isaiah’s parents, King County Superior Court was turning to the matter of the new charges against their son, whose relatively thin stack of paperwork would soon eclipse theirs.

—

Judge Gain, whom Isaiah was now standing before, was the chief judge at the Regional Justice Center in Kent, a city just south of Seattle and just north of Auburn Adventist Academy. He has salt-and-pepper hair and at times sports a thick black beard and mustache befitting a mariner. In the right cap, he could be imagined captaining one of the countless fishing vessels that sail annually out of Seattle’s protected harbors to the frigid waters of Alaska in search of cod and halibut. He served in the army in Vietnam, graduated from Loyola Law School in Los Angeles in 1972, and worked variously as a public defender, a King County deputy prosecutor, and the city attorney for Bellevue, just east of Seattle. All judges are elected in nonpartisan races in Washington State, and in 1992 he ran for and won a spot on the King County Superior Court bench. During that campaign, he emphasized his work on behalf of crime victims and said he considered himself part of the community’s continuing response to domestic violence. He also said he considered it his job to safeguard civil liberties, impartially apply the law, and “treat all litigants with dignity and respect.” He’s faced five elections since 1992 but has never been challenged for his seat.

A typical day in Judge Gain’s courtroom could bring as many as fifty new defendants like Isaiah, part of a heavy churn that feeds concern about an underfunded, overstretched judiciary. It’s a concern mirrored in other states, but it’s been particularly acute in Washington State, which, at the time Isaiah was standing before Judge Gain, ranked last in the nation in terms of state spending on local courts.
Less than one half of one percent of the state’s budget goes to court funding, leaving individual counties trying, with uneven results, to cover the remaining costs. To help ease the burden this system creates, the chief justice of the Washington State Supreme Court, Barbara Madsen, has at times volunteered as a first-appearance judge. “If you have five minutes with these defendants, you’re doing good,” she said in 2011 on a state public affairs show. “I was just sort of praying that nothing happened that would prove that I made a mistake on a release decision, for example.” She wondered how the full-time judges do it, comparing it to air traffic control. “If the planes crash midair, it’s because you didn’t see the blip on the radar screen,” she said. “It’s really kind of terrifying, honestly . . . So few resources, so little time, and so many criminal defendants.”

—

Judge Gain wouldn’t speak about the specifics of Isaiah’s case. He said he saw “no benefit.” But he did say, in two letters to me, that cases like Isaiah’s are “a particular challenge.” Here, at this first hearing with Isaiah, he had a twenty-two-year-old defendant who had not yet been convicted of any felony and who didn’t, at this moment, want a psychiatric evaluation. The defendant was being accused of serious violence and threats of violence, but in a court of law these are only accusations until proven.

The prosecutor was presenting the defendant as so mentally ill that he needed to lose certain civil liberties and be involuntarily committed, but, as Judge Gain wrote in his letter, “resources for the criminal justice system to address mental illness are extremely limited.” In addition, he said, “Western State Hospital is already stressed because of lack of resources and the volume of cases they are asked to examine.” Like the Designated Mental Health Professional at Harborview, Judge Gain was in the position of knowing that whichever way he sent Isaiah, hold or release, there would be challenges in getting him care.

—

Judge Gain asked to read the charging documents. They were handed up, and as he began reading, Isaiah suggested he wanted to fire his public
defender, a woman named Mary Ellen Ramey. Two jail guards stood close behind Isaiah, one wearing blue plastic gloves. Isaiah then turned to Ramey, who had been keeping her distance from him. “Was I unclear?” he asked. She replied, in essence, that he was. “I said that I did not want an evaluation,” Isaiah said. “I’m saying it now, again.” There was a full minute of silence as Judge Gain read through the details of Isaiah’s alleged violence and threats against his mother and sister, the release from Harborview, the smashing of the minivan windows, the promises of death, the swinging of the dog chain, his mother falling, his sister tackling him.

“Mr. Kalebu,” Judge Gain asked, “are you required to take some medication?”

“I am not,” he said.

“Have you been prescribed medication?”

“I have not.”

Judge Gain paused for a few seconds. He scratched his left ear.

“Have you ever received any treatment for mental health issues?”

“I have not.”

Another pause as Judge Gain read further into the charging documents, a pause that lasted another full minute, after which Judge Gain looked up and said, “I’m going to send you down to Western State.”

Isaiah said he wanted his mother, who was still watching from behind the glass window, to speak. The guard with the gloves moved closer still. Judge Gain denied the request.

“I have a question,” Isaiah said.

“Yes, go ahead,” Judge Gain replied.

“When I appeal all this, and it gets bumped up to a higher jurisdiction, who do you think they’re gonna rule in favor of?” He laughed a little at this, as if chuckling at the judge’s stupidity. “What do you think’s gonna happen?”

Isaiah’s mother stood, put her hand over her mouth, pressed close against the glass separating her from the courtroom.

“They’re going to want to know what your mental health issues are,” Judge Gain said.

“Exactly, exactly.”

Isaiah was smiling now, head cocked, confident, as if he’d put the judge in checkmate. The guard gestured silently to the judge, asking whether the judge wanted him to physically remove Isaiah from court.

“You can appeal if you’d like,” Judge Gain said.

“I will,” Isaiah said. Then, leaning toward the judge, he added, “My best recommendation for you is to start saving all of your money, liquidating all of your assets, because by the time we’re done, you won’t be able to buy and sell shit.”

The guard’s gesturing became more intense.

“Mr. Kalebu,” Judge Gain said, “anything else you’d like to tell me?”

“No, that’s about it.”

“You just confirmed that you need to have somebody tell me what your mental health issues are.”

A thirty-day evaluation was agreed upon by the judge and the lawyers.

“Thirty days it is,” Isaiah said. “See you guys in a month. That’s plenty of time to save up, right? Better sell your house. Better sell your car.”

“We’ll see you, Mr. Kalebu.”

The hearing concluded, clocking in at almost exactly five minutes. The guard began pulling Isaiah away.

“Better sell all your stuff,” Isaiah said. “I ain’t gonna lose!”

—

Western State Hospital is on a groomed campus that’s a roughly seven-minute walk from the community college Isaiah had dropped out of three years earlier. Once at the hospital, Isaiah was a “constant behavioral management problem,” according to a report written by a state psychologist, Dr. Gregory Kramer. Isaiah was angry, demanding, threatening, “but not violent.”

In Dr. Kramer’s opinion, he was also inappropriately focused on
wrongs done to him by his family. He paced constantly. He jumped on and off a table with no explanation. He was placed in restraints for two days, during which time he verbally harassed a female staff member assigned to monitor him. When asked the date, he said it was March 29. It was as if time had stopped on the day his mother confronted him about the need to take medication. In fact, it was a month later, April 30, 2008.

In the world outside, the reality of the financial crisis was beginning to register, the first Bush stimulus package having passed a few months before in a $152 billion attempt to avert recession. Soon, taxpayers would be receiving “stimulus checks” to encourage consumer spending. The collapse of Lehman Brothers was five months away.

Isaiah’s aunt was contacted, and she told Western State doctors about Isaiah’s family life. “His upbringing was difficult due to neglect and abuse,” Dr. Kramer wrote in his report. “And he developed a lot of anger.” Isaiah told Western State that his childhood was “rough” and that he had “beatings” and watched his parents fight. He talked about being sent away to boarding school, about his parents’ divorce, about his father’s upbringing in Uganda and recent remarriage, about his color blindness and its consequences for pilot school, about the roughly twenty jobs he held in quick succession after that. “He reported that sometimes he quit and sometimes he was fired,” the report states. “He described his frequent employment changes as resulting from him having higher standards than others because he does not lie, cheat, or steal. He denied ever being married and reported no children ‘that I know of.’ He denied any history of significant relationships, three months being his longest reported relationship.” He said he “rarely” used marijuana, specifying less than once a week, and that he used no other drugs, though he did say he sometimes became depressed and cried when he drank too much.

“According to his aunt,” the report states, “Mr. Kalebu’s father’s cultural upbringing did not include acceptance of mental disorders.” Isaiah described his mother as a “drug addict” who abused painkillers, echoing
his father’s allegations in the divorce proceedings. He described himself as being “in the zone” the last few months and at first denied he’d been taken to Harborview. Later, he admitted he had been taken there and also admitted that he sometimes fired people. He described his mood most days as “ecstatic” and said it sometimes got him in trouble.

Like Harborview, Western State diagnosed Isaiah as bipolar but said more evaluation was needed to determine other aspects of his mental disturbance. It also stated that Isaiah was not competent to stand trial because of his rigid thought processes and that he posed “an elevated risk for future danger to others” because of his lack of insight into his mental disturbance, his alleged violence, his rough upbringing, his “early maladjustment,” his employment issues, his lack of relationships, his resistance to treatment attempts, his impulsivity, his negative attitudes, and his expected stress upon release. It recommended a process called “competency restoration,” which is essentially a prolonged involuntary commitment at Western State. It also recommended the hospital be granted authority to force Isaiah to take psychotropic medications if necessary.

Judge Gain agreed but not before having another exchange in court with Isaiah. On May 15, 2008, a hearing was held to review the Western State recommendations, and Mary Ellen Ramey, Isaiah’s lawyer, told the court she had no evidence with which to rebut them. Judge Gain said that based on the Western State report, competency restoration “is the only option I have.”

“May I speak, please?” Isaiah asked. “May I please speak?”

“Sure,” Judge Gain said.

“I feel that I am competent for trial,” Isaiah said. He then proceeded to say some seemingly contradictory things. “I feel that I knowingly committed the crime,” he told Judge Gain. Such an admission would negate the need for a trial, but Isaiah went on, sounding as if he were still hoping for a trial. “I feel like for me to explain my actions, I would like to be able to face my accusers and explain them in a rational way,” he said. “I have
valid reasons for them. And, if I go back to Western State I will not have the opportunity to explain myself. I would just simply ask for the opportunity to explain myself.”

As a legal argument, this did not make a lot of sense. Isaiah could not both admit his crime and expect to face his accusers in court. But if there is some psychological sense to be made of it, perhaps what Isaiah was saying is that his current self—this disjointed, unmedicated, allegedly incompetent, but very confident self—could see that by going through “competency restoration,” it would lose the opportunity to explain itself. It wanted to remain itself, and explain itself, now.

“You will have an opportunity,” Judge Gain said. “But I am going to sign the order.”

“May I ask why it is that I’m found incompetent?”

Judge Gain told Isaiah to talk to his attorney. The next day, while waiting in the King County Jail to be transferred back to Western State, Isaiah attempted suicide by tying clothing around his neck. He was given some Ativan, placed in isolation, and then sent for competency restoration.

—

Competency restoration is not long-term treatment. It is not psychotherapy. It was not a venue for exploring Isaiah’s deep rage and disappointment or their sources. It was not what Isaiah’s elementary school teachers thought he needed thirteen years earlier or what the Family Court social worker thought he needed six years earlier. Many of Isaiah’s statements while at Western State, particularly the ones Dr. Kramer found too focused on blaming his family, could be interpreted as invitations to this kind of exploration. But these were not invitations Western State was prepared to accept.