Mom knows anguish of calling police to deal with mentally ill son

Mom knows anguish of calling police to deal with mentally ill son

By Diana Griego Erwin Sacramento Bee Columnist November 11, 2004

Mary McNeil's body shook involuntarily in fear at the kitchen table earlier this week as she read the sad story of Ricardo Zaragoza's last minutes. She did not know Zaragoza, the 40-year-old mentally ill Elk Grove man who died Monday after a struggle with Sacramento County sheriff's deputies.

She didn't have to. His story, she said, rang all too familiar.

A man diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia gets into danger. Erratic, scary behavior follows. The family rightly panics.

Like Zaragoza's mother, McNeil, 53, has called on law-enforcement officials to help on the three or four occasions her grown, mentally ill son's behavior spiraled too out of control for her to handle. Like Zaragoza's family, she could only hope that the officers who came had the finesse to deal with a person immersed in a mental health crisis.

Calling was always a gamble. She understood that. But sometimes not calling was a bigger gamble yet.

"These are the no-win decisions the family of a mentally ill person must make on those rare instances that everything just boils over and falls apart," McNeil said. "It's heart-wrenching.

"My son is someone who functions quite well 99 percent of the time. He's not like everyone else's son maybe, but he's content in the life he has, and we get along fine most of the time."

Then there were the really difficult times, the events that became too big to handle. Like the time her son's illness convinced him the cat was a ferocious dragon. Her son grabbed a dull table knife and planned to use it.

McNeil had hidden the cat in a closet until police arrived, and her son was trying to pull the door, which was locked, off the hinges to get at the cat.

"You'd think I could disarm a man with a table knife, but let me tell you that can be scary and more dangerous than it sounds." Her son was in the middle of switching medications when this event occurred. "This is a man who loves animals, who wouldn't otherwise ever hurt a cat," his mother said.

So what are officers to do in dealing with someone who is potentially dangerous but also ill - so ill in that brief slice of their lives they really have no control over their emotions or actions? Can we really expect street officers, many of them young, to be mental health experts, too?

Ricardo Zaragoza reportedly walked out of the room saying, "I am not a criminal," when officers tried to take him in for a mental health assessment after his family reported he was tearing boards off a fence at 12:20 a.m. Monday. By 1 a.m., having been zapped twice with a Taser gun, pepper sprayed and handcuffed following a struggle with police, which the family described as overzealous, he was pronounced dead.

Would pairing mental health workers with officers on psychiatric emergency response teams help, as some have suggested?

Miami seems to think so. There, in just 20 months, crisis teams that include a mental health worker have responded to more than 3,600 calls involving a mental health component, with improved results and zero tragedies such as the death of Ricardo Zaragoza.

I'm not saying it's the end-all answer, but such programs, or some version of them, are ideas that Sacramento officials should be exploring. The funding for such a program potentially could come from Proposition 63 mental health money recently approved by California voters.

In dealings with her son, McNeil said she has witnessed both compassionate officers who knew how to defuse a situation, and officers who became "tough guys" when her son failed to respond quickly enough to commands. "There definitely is a wrong way and a lot of right ways," McNeil said. "Things that work and things that only aggravate the situation."

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County hopes to create psychiatric crisis teams

By Ed Fletcher -- Bee Staff Writer November 10, 2004

Mental health advocates have often said law enforcement officers need to be better trained to deal with people with mental illnesses.

After an Elk Grove man diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia died while Sacramento County sheriff's deputies attempted to take him in for observation Monday, their proposals may carry more weight.

"It doesn't sound like the deputies that were out there were specially trained deputies to deal with mental illness," said Rusty Selix, executive director of the California Council of Community Mental Health Agencies. "Certainly, that is the first step."

But the county's top health officer would take it one step further, pairing law enforcement officers with mental health officers to create psychiatric emergency response teams.

While mental health advocates stopped short of saying better training or the presence of a mental health professional would have prevented Ricardo Zaragoza's death, they clearly believe such steps would be helpful in similar situations.

"The mental health professional brings an expertise that is very beneficial in de-escalating conflicts," said Jim Hunt, director of the Sacramento County Department of Health and Human Services. "The chance for further escalation is greatly reduced if you have trained mental health professionals there."

Hunt said he had sought funding to establish psychiatric emergency response teams, but money was not available.

He said, however, that with the recent passage of Proposition 63, such teams will likely be in place by this time next year.

The program would cost the county about $1.5 million annually, he said.

The proposition, imposing a 1 percent surcharge on incomes exceeding $1 million to aid mentally ill children and adults, would help tens of thousands of people and aid programs like the one Hunt wants to bring to Sacramento, proponents said.

Ernesto Zaragoza, Ricardo's younger brother, said he was glad that the incident has people talking about mental illness.

He said the family did not consider Ricardo dangerous, trusting him with children and to live with his aging parents.

"He is giving people a pause to look at this illness," Zaragoza said. "It's not something that we hid. He is leaving a legacy even in his death."

Source: Sacramento Bee

This 'Mental Health E-News' posting is a service of the New York Ass'n of Psychiatric Rehabilitation Services, a statewide coalition of people who use and/or provide community mental health services dedicated to improving services and social conditions for people with psychiatric disabilities by promoting their recovery, rehabilitation and rights. To join our list, please click on the E-News Subscription button.

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