Pete Earley

We turn to medical professionals for help. Sadly, as this email shows, some practitioners are not as benevolent as we might hope.

Dear Pete,

My adult daughter, who is in her twenties, has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Late last year, she told me she was going to harm herself. I took her seriously because she had made a suicide attempt five months earlier. Fortunately, our police department has Crisis Intervention Team trained police officers and one came to our house and skillfully talked our daughter into going to a local hospital to be evaluated.

She was transported by ambulance at about 5:30 pm. Our daughter was still waiting in the ER by 11 p.m. and became distraught. I told the staff that she needed to take her medication, SAPHRIS, because it was wearing off. But they told me the hospital pharmacy did not have SAPHRIS available. I had some in my car, but when I said that I would go get it, I was told that wasn’t allowed.

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WUSA Report About Natasha McKenna

In this news story, I push for Crisis Intervention Team training and Ron Honberg, the director of policy and legal affairs for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, asks the all important question: why was a woman with mental illness in jail rather than getting treatment. Thanks to WUSA Reporter Peggy Fox for being the only Washington D.C. television reporter who continues to focus a spotlight on this tragic story.

VOICES, a documentary film by Gary Tsai, MD.,

—tells three stories from the perspective of families and persons with mental illnesses. It’s gripping and well worth seeing when it begins being aired on PBS in May. I am enthusiastically recommending it. Like so many of us, psychiatrist Tsai has a personal reason for caring about our broken mental health system, which he explains on the film’s website.

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April 13, 2015, Shortly after 12 o’clock on Monday, Tom Jackman, an investigative reporter at the Washington Post, confirmed what I had posted in my blog earlier that morning about a January 31st incident during which Natasha McKenna was slapped by a Fairfax deputy. His reporting is based on internal incident reports that he obtained that were written by sheriff’s deputies and other jail personnel and leaked to him.

Several key facts that he revealed were first mentioned in earlier blog posts that I had written about McKenna. However, my posts were dismissed by jail officials, including one who told reporters that I was exaggerating. Another dismissed my earlier posts as “hearsay” that was “completely unsubstantiated.” 

“Pete Earley could just be making that stuff up,” he told a reporter. 

Thank you Tom for your continued vigilance and digging. You have proven that my earlier accounts were not “made up” and you have exposed new and detailed information about this preventible tragedy.

Jackman also is the Post reporter who revealed how county officials were keeping secret information about the Fairfax police shooting of  John Greer .

 

The death of Natasha McKenna in the Fairfax jail: The rest of the story
By Tom Jackman posted April 13 at 12:44 PM

In compiling the article for Sunday’s paper about the death of Natasha McKenna after she was Tasered four times, a number of items were omitted for various reasons related to space and deadlines. To provide additional context on this complicated case, here are some further important items to consider, beginning with this fact: The entire incident was captured on video.

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MY SOURCES CLAIM ANOTHER ALTERCATION STILL HASN’T BEEN MADE PUBLIC

April 13, 2005, The Washington Post  published disturbing new information on Sunday about the death of Natasha McKenna, a 37- year old woman with schizophrenia who died after being struck by a taser while in the Fairfax County Detention Center. On February 10th, I noted on this blog that the 130 pound McKenna had been shot repeatedly with a taser even though she had initially agreed to cooperate with deputies trying to remove her from her cell. That blog prompted the Post and other Washington area media to launch their own investigations.

Now Washington Post reporters Tom Jackman and Justin Jouvenal have provided the public with the first complete picture of what happened to McKenna on the day that she was shocked four times with 50,000 volts. Their story, which is based on internal incident reports, is especially difficult to read if you have a loved ones with a mental illness who has been arrested.

The internal reports reveal that McKenna was “restrained with handcuffs behind her back, leg shackles and a mask when a sheriff’s deputy shocked her four times.”

There is still more to this story, according to my sources. Before McKenna was shot with a taser, she was involved in an altercation three days earlier on January 31st after she leaned a mattress in her cell against the door to block a window so deputies could not see inside. Two deputies decided to open the door, grab the mattress, and jerk it out of the cell before McKenna could react. However, McKenna grabbed the mattress and was dragged with it out of her cell.  A female deputy reacted by striking McKenna with an open palm against her head, my sources said.

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CBS Nightly News called me this week to ask if I would talk on camera about Crisis Intervention Team Training for law enforcement. The call was prompted by the release of a video that shows police officers shooting Lavall Hall, a 25 year-old black man, in Miami, Florida.  I explained that I couldn’t talk directly about the Hall case, but I happily explained to a producer what CIT is and why it is important. I then suggested the producer call Sam Cochran, who is widely seen as the “Father of CIT,” and Mike Woody, a former Ohio police officer who is president of CIT International. 

Although CBS passed on interviewing me on camera, I was thrilled to get the call because it showed that news outlets are becoming more aware of CIT and the need for specialized police training.

The Hall shooting is an all to common example of how things can go wrong when police are called to deal with a medical problem.

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Hinton with Stevenson

Bryan Stevenson has done it again!

Anthony Ray Hinton, one of the longest serving death row prisoners in Alabama history, has been exonerated thanks to Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative  that he founded. Hinton spent 30 years incarcerated for a crime that he did not commit.

I describe in my book, Circumstantial Evidence, how Stevenson proved another black man on Alabama’s death row innocent more than two decades ago. Walter “Johnny D” McMillian was condemned to death for the 1986 murder of a white teenage girl after two witnesses testified that they’d seen his truck parked at the scene of the killing and another witness claimed that he actually had see McMillian standing over the dead girl during a robbery.  The case against McMillian seemed indisputable until Stevenson began investigating.

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