While the City Slept (26 page)

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Instead, in Washington State money for mental health care continues to be difficult to come by and, when it is found, insufficient to the need. At the same time, legislators in the state capital of Olympia have demonstrated that large sums can be allocated, even in a shaky economy, when other things are at stake. In the winter of 2013, when the Boeing Company threatened to move production of a new airliner out of Washington State, lawmakers scrambled to call a special session and quickly offered the company $8.7 billion in tax breaks and subsidies to stay. It was the largest subsidy ever granted to a private company by any state. By the next winter, a report from Mental Health America was ranking Washington near the bottom of all states in terms of access to mental health care.

In 2015, under continued pressure from mental health care advocates, the legislature began to make some repairs. Lawmakers passed Joel’s Law, named after Joel Reuter, a young, bipolar software engineer who was killed by Seattle police in 2013 after he shot at officers, thinking they were malevolent zombies. Joel’s parents, who feel their son should have been detained by mental health officials before the shooting, had lobbied for the new law. It allows family members to appeal to a judge for a second opinion if a disturbed loved one has been evaluated, deemed not a threat to self or others, and released.

Had Joel’s Law existed in March 2008—when Isaiah was brought to Harborview by the police at his mother’s urging, evaluated, and then released because he wasn’t deemed a threat—Isaiah’s mother and her family could have appealed that release, provided they had the resources to do so. Similarly, had Joel’s Law existed in the summer of 2009, when Isaiah’s aunt, Rachel Kalebu, called mental health officials to her home but those officials declined to detain Isaiah, she could have appealed that decision.

Washington’s legislature also amended its involuntary commitment law in 2015, adding some language modeled on Kendra’s Law and creating new routes to outpatient commitment (or assisted outpatient treatment, as it’s more politely known). This new language, had it existed in the summer of 2009, could also have been used to try to halt Isaiah’s slide. Still, even the prime sponsor of this particular change to the state’s law has pointed out that in order for it to be effective, significant funding for outpatient treatment and prevention services must be provided, as was done in New York. It remains unclear whether sufficient funding has, in fact, been provided; lawmakers did not fund Washington’s assisted outpatient treatment program at recommended levels, and the state’s wraparound care programs for people in serious psychological distress are not as robust as New York’s. When Washington lawmakers passed Joel’s Law, they also declined to fund it at a level certain to meet the potential need. Mental health advocates in Washington State remain concerned about its still-frayed system for dealing with people in serious psychological distress, as well as its perpetually underfunded court system.

Similar concerns can be found all over the country, often connected to crimes that echo Isaiah’s. In Virginia, in the winter of 2013, an intelligent young man who had been decompensating for some time, would not take his medication, and was fascinated with knives found himself turned away from an attempt at involuntary commitment. The reason: a lack of beds at state-funded facilities. At home, he stabbed his father and killed himself. His father, the Virginia state senator Creigh Deeds, still bears scars on his face from the attack and at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.,
in March 2014, spoke about the activism and regret his son’s death inspired. “I was face-to-face with deficiencies of a system that I and other legislators created,” he said. “I could either be lost in my grief, or I could act. I chose to act.” He admits, though, that the changes he’s been able to push through the Virginia legislature remain “modest.”

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More than a decade ago, President Bush’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health put the annual indirect cost of mental illness to the U.S. economy at $79 billion. Most of that was from lost productivity due to demands on family members, or incarceration, or early death. Since then, the costs associated with our lack of investment in mental health, both direct and indirect, have continued to mount. At the same time, cuts to the nation’s mental health care programs have spiked, with $4.35 billion cut from state mental health budgets alone between 2009 and 2012. The consequences are apparent. A study released in the spring of 2014 found there are now ten times as many mentally ill inmates in this country’s jails (over 350,000) as there are in state-funded psychiatric hospitals (35,000). It would be hard to argue that American taxpayers have come out ahead in this bargain.

Exactly how many lives have been saved by the New York bargain, which includes Kendra’s Law and the increased spending on outpatient services that comes with it? This is the problem with motivating people to support preventive measures, at either the state or the federal level. By definition, one cannot prove what has specifically been prevented from happening, because it didn’t happen. At the same time, looking backward, one can see the combined downstream effects of a lack of preventive measures and imagine a different world.

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At dusk on the Duwamish, downriver from the South Park drawbridge, the lights of the city come up in the distance. They glow from a beckoning space beyond the barges, beyond the cement silos, beyond the dry docks
where the ferries that cruise the San Juan Islands are built and repaired, beyond a ship holding a school bus and other material bound for Alaska, beyond a processing plant bearing the slogan “Where the fruit of the sea meets the salt of the earth.” The river water is brackish, though it shouldn’t be tasted to find out. In the right season, its surface breaks with the jumping of migrating salmon, and all year round harbor seals and river otters pop their heads and backs into the air, briefly, before swimming onward, propelled, too, by instinct. Ospreys land on nests set atop poles erected by conservationists to lure them back, and herons step around an area of riverbank that Boeing is proactively rehabilitating, on the long-sighted theory that significant money spent early will actually save the company money when it comes to future remediation costs. At another Boeing property, on a grimy railing above a dirty dock, a billboard from the company filled with images of lush vegetation and splashed with the promise “Future home of wildlife habitat.”

A group of people who call themselves the Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition offer kayak tours along this stretch of the river in the summer, an attempt at building political awareness among those in the city who might prefer to ignore a problem that seems complex, expensive, beyond repair, too long in the making, too far from the comfort zone. Leading one recent tour, the great-great-great-great-grandson of Chief Si’ahl, Ken Workman, paddling the one oxbow bend in the river that remains untouched by the straightening. He tells of a drive to eat from the river, even though it is polluted, in order to know his ancestors. Around him, on old pilings, optimistic sorts have hung gourd-shaped nests meant to lure back purple martins that used to roost in the area, birds that were originally drawn by hollowed-out gourds discarded by the Duwamish people. The purple martins are returning to these new offerings.

In the city beyond, behind new skyscrapers and condo towers, an old, neon-lit globe that used to spin atop the offices of a newspaper called the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
. Back in 2008, before the newspaper stopped printing a few months into the financial crisis, the
Post-Intelligencer
ran the
headline “State Pays in Blood for Flawed Mental Health System.” The paper’s globe only occasionally spins now, and the neon lights up unevenly, if at all, a function of disrepair and lost purpose. It may be destined for the same museum that holds the rolltop desk Judge Hayden’s great-grandfather-in-law saved from the Great Seattle Fire of 1889.

In this city in the distance, one of the most liberal and educated populations in the nation. In this city, as well: the homeless, the deranged, the untreated, the impoverished. The educated people of Seattle would regard it as insane to tell their polluted river to clean itself. They would not ask it to pay for the accident of its birth in a beautiful location that ended up not supporting its health. Still, in their state capital, their city’s abundant tax revenues continue to be used in a manner that disproportionately hurts their city’s homeless, deranged, untreated, and impoverished citizens, a shortsighted strategy that creates the certainty of more pain that seems to arrive with sudden brutality from an unknowable beyond, but does not.

Maybe someday people will be able to stick cheap probes into vulnerable rivers like the Duwamish, or even scan the river’s surface from above, determine the exact chemical composition of the damage and its exact future course, then drop in some reasonably priced, specially designed additive to clean it all up, no immediate adverse consequences, no long-term side effects, nothing more than a matter of helpful chemical reactions fighting unhelpful chemical reactions. Perhaps. Yet without waiting for the fulfillment of science fiction, we know how to prevent a river as far gone and dangerous as this one. It is simple in concept, if difficult in human practice. Prevent harm, as much as possible, in the first place. When harm cannot be avoided, respond in time, and work to minimize its impact. Weathered signs at the marinas along the riverbank say it: “No Wake.” An impossibility to one already in the water. Also, a necessary reminder. Without trying, we are all witnesses to a crime in progress.

This work could not exist without the openness and generosity of the people most affected by the crimes it describes: Jennifer Hopper and her family, the family of Teresa Butz, and the family of Isaiah Kalebu.

It is a work of nonfiction, created using the tools of journalism—primarily interviews, public records, and documents provided to me by individuals hoping to shed purposeful light on this tragedy. In total, I interviewed more than fifty people with insight into the events the book recounts. Whenever possible—and in the majority of cases—those interviews were audio recorded. I also drew on home video, old news footage, letters, e-mails, and photographs. Among the public records used to build this work are audio and video recordings from court proceedings, police car video, police reports, prison records, psychiatric evaluations, and financial records pertaining to the cost of Isaiah Kalebu’s trial. Obtaining some of those financial records required a court order.

In all, thousands of pages of publicly available documents were used, but some sets of documents are worth special mention. The full transcript of Isaiah Kalebu’s trial, which covered everything from his first case-setting hearing in August 2009 to his sentencing in August 2011, allowed me to reconstruct those in-court moments that I missed. This was essential because, while I attended many days of his jury trial as a reporter,including the days when all key witnesses testified, I could not attend most of the pretrial hearings due to the demands of other stories.

When it comes to the psychiatric records used, it should be clear that
a particular debt is owed to the report of Dr. Maria Lymberis, whose clarity and rigor in exploring Isaiah Kalebu’s life stand apart from all other attempts at understanding his challenges and the possible origins of his behavior. I was also helped by phone interviews with Dr. Lymberis. In one of our conversations, she mentioned that she felt she’d worked well beyond what she was compensated for in this case but didn’t mind. “I consider that my civic contribution,” Dr. Lymberis said. “We have to do this. It’s very important. Once I accepted the case, I could not abandon it.”

In the preceding pages, when words are attributed to various individuals through the use of quotation marks, they are either what that person wrote in a document I obtained, what that person was recorded saying to me in an interview, or what that person was recorded as saying by a source I consider reliable (for example, an audio- or videotape or a trial transcript). In the relatively few cases in which I have modified a person’s quotation for the sake of clarity, I have taken care to preserve its original meaning. Any errors are mine.

For believing and guiding, Bill Clegg, John Siciliano, Emily Hartley, and Ben George. For essential feedback before the beginning, Dan Simon. For interview transcribing, Joseph Staten. For early and late reads and more, Angela Garbes, Brendan Patrick, Christian Patrick, David Schmader, Amnon Shoenfeld, Rebecca Brown, Judge Ronald Kessler, and Judge William Downing. For help in finding an excellent fact checker, Sydney Brownstone and Maddie Oatman. For excellent fact checking, Rebecca Cohen. For geological assistance, Professor David Montgomery. For the use of their cabin, the Otto-Stenhouse clan. For support and a powerful front porch, the Fields family in Montana. For their love and enduring encouragement, my family. For making the place where some of this work began, and for giving me room to return while finishing it, everyone at
The Stranger,
including the high command: Tim Keck, Dan Savage, Christopher Frizzelle, and Kathleen Richards. For beyond words and back, Dr. Donald Ross. And for his love, patience, and first to last readings, forever, with my deep love and gratitude, Colin
Fields.

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