Matthew Rushin

(8-10-20)

As long as Matthew is behind bars, we are behind bars.  There is not a moment during the day that I don’t think about Matthew.. I live, eat, sleep thinking and worrying about Matthew Rushin.  …When I’m eating, I think, “what is Matthew eating.”  When I lay on my comfortable bed, I wonder what Matthew is sleeping on.  I worry about what medication they are giving him or will give him.  I don’t want him to be tranquilized, then have someone attack him while he is so vulnerable.  He’s been attacked twice.  I asked him what he did when he was attacked, and he told me he just blocked the blows; he didn’t fight back. – Lavern Rushin.

The parents of a young black man, who was diagnosed with ADHD and Asperger’s Syndrome as a child and later experienced a traumatic brain injury, are asking Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) to pardon their son and free him from prison after he received a 50 year prison term because of a three car, non-fatal accident. All but ten years were suspended conditional on his continued good behavior after the ten years are served.

It is usual for a car accident to draw such a lengthy prison term, but police and prosecutors claimed that Matthew Rushin, age 21, was attempting to kill himself when his car crossed a median in Virginia Beach and collided head-on with another vehicle January 4, 2019, seriously injuring its driver and causing that car to strike another one.

Matthew’s parents, Demetrius and Lavern Rushin, insist their son was not trying to end his life. He simply lost control of his car. They have accused the police of ignoring their department’s guidelines that describe how individuals with mental illnesses should be questioned. They also have accused prosecutors and the sentencing judge of treating their son, because he is black, much more harshly from white defendants involved in much worse traffic fatalities in their jurisdictions.

More than 166,000 supporters have signed a petition urging Matthew’s release. More than a hundred supporters marched in protest of his imprisonment and Washington Post columnist Theresa Vargas has publicized his plight. Terra Vance has written extensively about the case on the Autism website NeuroClastic, including video of the police interrogation of Matthews.

What evidence is there that Matthew was attempting suicide?

In an email, Matthew’s parents wrote that after Matthew freed himself from the wreckage of his car, he was physically detained by two witnesses. The driver of one of the cars hit in the accident angrily yelled, “Are you fucking trying to kill yourself? Are you trying to kill us?” One of the police officers said he overheard Matthew say in response, “I was trying to killing myself.”

“Repeating words and phrases are how autistic people process language, especially when under stress,” his parents note.

When the police arrived at the accident, Matthew’s actions and statements were recorded on police body cams – more than 12 hours worth. A total of 17 officers came to the accident. Three of them were not wearing body cams. Those three claimed, without evidence, that they overheard Matthew say that he was trying to kill himself. This alleged statement was reportedly overheard minutes after Matthew climbed out of a vehicle where he’d just had a high speed collision – during which he had lost consciousness.  During the 5 1/2 hours when he was interrogated by police he never wavered that this was not an attempt to kill himself.

Matthew’s father arrived at the accident to help his son, he was stopped and barred by police from speaking to Matthew.

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Church bulletin at Jamycheal Mitchell’s funeral

(8-6-20) The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has proposed a consent decree with the Hampton Roads Regional Jail Authority, hopefully closing one of Virginia’s most egregious chapters involving abuse of a prisoner with a serious mental illnesses. If approved by a judge, the jail will be required to implement numerous reforms, including better care for its mentally ill inmates, more staffing, and adherence to the Americans With Disabilities Act.

The federal government stepped in because jail and state officials covered-up and did their best to ignore the August 2015 death of Jamycheal Mitchell, who suffered from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

The question we should be asking is whether our elected leaders have learned anything and taken steps to avoid future bureaucratic blundering if a death happens in a jail.

An autopsy concluded that Mitchell had died from a heart attack caused by “wasting syndrome,” which meant he’d starved himself to the point that his heart failed. Mitchell weighed 190 pounds when he was arrested for allegedly stealing $5 worth of snacks from a convenience store. The autopsy listed his weight at death as 144 pounds. Mitchell was waiting in the jail for 101 days for a state hospital bed to become available. After his death, hospital officials admitted that his transfer paperwork had been tossed in a drawer and forgotten. Guards were supposed to eyeball Mitchell each half-hour, and once a day he was supposed to be checked by a nurse employed by a for-profit company called Naph Care. There were no notations in his medical records that showed anyone had noticed his 46-pound weight loss.

It is surprising that  Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring was credited in a Virginian-Pilot story this morning for requesting the Justice Department get involved.

Mark Herring

It was the the National Alliance on Mental Illness of Virginia, the ACLU of Virginia, the National Alliance on Mental Illness of Hampton-Newport News, Mental Health America of Virginia, the Portsmouth Branch of the NAACP, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, and The Judge David L. Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law which called on June 6, 2016 for the Justice Department to investigate Mitchell’s death because state officials, including Herring, had done such a lousy job. I also wrote in the Washington Post about the need for a federal investigation. Herring didn’t ask for a federal probe until September 3, months after the advocates.

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Sales video promoting BOLA Wrap by Wrap Technologies

(8-3-20) Three comments about law enforcement and state prisons.

What do you do when Crisis Intervention Team Trained Officers are criticized for violence? 

Last Thursday’s blog post about four Springfield, Oregon police officers who fatally shot an unarmed young man with schizophrenia outraged many readers. What made the officers’ actions even more appalling was that all had undergone Crisis Intervention Team training and one of them was the department’s CIT trainer. None of the officers made an attempt to use his CIT training to de-escalate the situation, according to a detailed account written by Kimberly Kenny, whose brother, Patrick, was killed.  Nor were any of the officers disciplined – one was given a medal by the police union. The police department and city settled a wrongful death lawsuit out of court for $4.5 million.

Based on Kimberly’s report, I would not want these officers responding if I called the police and requested a CIT trained officer to help me during a mental health crisis. There should be some way for officers and departments to loose the right to identify themselves as CIT trained when none of what CIT teaches apparently is practiced.

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Patrick Kenny before he was fatally shot by police.

(7-30-20) Dr. Mark Muentz wrote about the importance of Crisis Intervention Team training in a Monday blog post, but what happens when officers who have received CIT training are involved in a violent incident with someone who has a serious mental illness. In today’s blog – one in a series that I am posting about shifting responsibility for the seriously mentally ill from the police to social service agencies and the medical community – we hear from Kimberly Kenny, whose brother, Patrick aka Stacy, was fatally shot by police in Springfield, Oregon.  

Crisis Intervention Training Didn’t Prevent Four Police Officers From Assaulting and Killing My Brother

Guest blog by Kimberly Kenny

The entire incident took less than five minutes.

It happened a little before 9 pm on a Sunday, near a hardware store Patrick liked to go to sometimes.

Officer Kraig Akins saw Patrick driving and ran his license plate, and then didn’t see Patrick’s car again for another two minutes, when they happened to cross paths again. Patrick was driving west on Olympic Street, Akins was on a side street and as Patrick passed, Akins pulled out behind Patrick. Akins’ lights and siren were off. Patrick immediately signaled and pulled over, probably because he was scared and hoped the policeman would drive by.

Patrick had paranoid schizophrenia and one of his biggest fears was the police. He was kind and generous and smart, and with his schizophrenia sometimes he acted weirdly but never violently.

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Photo courtesy of Pixabay

(7-20-20) I’m encouraging discussion about calls to shift responsibility for Americans with serious mental illnesses away from law enforcement back to social services and the medical community. Dr. Mark Munetz, Professor and Chair Emeritus of Psychiatry at Northeast Ohio Medical University, is co-author of the Sequential Intercept Model that is widely used by law enforcement and communities to identify key intersections when someone with a mental illness can be “intercepted” and receive treatment, especially after they enter the criminal justice system. I greatly admire Dr. Munetz who today offers his views on policing and mental illnesses. 

I’m Not Enthusiastic About Defunding The Police

Guest Blog By Mark Munetz

Funding for treatment and support of individuals with mental illness in America is woefully inadequate.  I spent my career as a psychiatrist advocating to change this.  So one might think I would be enthusiastic about the current call to defund the police and use some of the savings to increase mental health funding so that mental health professionals can respond to mental health crises rather than police.

But that is not the case.

Serious mental disorders affect approximately one out of 20 adults.  At best, half receive treatment.  Without treatment these conditions can be disabling and result in startling rates of premature death.  We know that treatment works but our systems are inadequate to engage many with the greatest needs.  All too many end up in jail or prison.  Today there are ten times as many people with serious mental illness in our nation’s jails and prisons than in psychiatric hospitals.

I have spent much of the past two decades working to address this complex problem.  While increased mental health funding is necessary to address the over-representation of people with mental illness in the justice system, it alone is not sufficient.  We also must address larger societal problems like poverty, homelessness and systemic racism. There cannot be a zero-sum game of funding for the police and human services.  We need to increase our overall funding for human services including what I call re-invented police work.

There is a model of such policing.

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