(3-22-16) An Eastern State Hospital employee was “astonished and distraught” when she opened a desk drawer last August and discovered that a Virginia judge had ordered Jamycheal Mitchell to be sent from a Portsmouth jail to the mental hospital to be evaluated.
The judge’s order had been issued more than three months earlier but had been overlooked in that desk drawer until she discovered it — five days after Mitchell had died of a heart attack caused by starvation while in jail.
That disclosure is one of several troubling admissions revealed yesterday when the Virginia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services finally released an edited version of the investigation that it conducted into the August 19, 2015 death of Mitchell, a 24 year-old, African American inmate with a serious mental illness who’d been charged with petty larceny and trespassing after stealing $5 worth of snacks from a convenience store.
Last week, I posted a blog that questioned why three Virginia agencies responsible for investigating the Mitchell tragedy hadn’t made public their investigations. The DBHDS released copies of its 29-page report, minus the identities of the employees who investigators questioned, without comment based on separate Freedom of Information requests filed by Sarah Kleiner, an investigative reporter at Richmond Times Dispatch, and by me.
When called by reporters for comment, I said that I was “furious and outraged” by the report. “Jamycheal Mitchell was lost in plain sight because of incompetency and indifference. This kid died because no one in that jail and no state mental health official did anything to help him. Shame on them. Imagine if he was your son. Now there will be lots of finger-pointing and lawyering up, but no real changes. That’s been our sad history in Virginia. This is because officials will blame the victim, as they did in the Natasha McKenna case, and legislators will not put any more money into mental health services.”
What did the internal investigation reveal?