Affidavit to the judge who could release my father into homelessness and restart the cycle THIS Monday...

Your Honor,
I am writing this in the hope that you will consider my perspective prior to my father's dismissal hearing. While I absolutely agree that my father will not gain competence to stand trial for his criminal charges within the five-year period following his arrest, I am extremely concerned for his well being if you make the decision to dismiss his charges and release him. Without supervision, my father will continue his decade long pattern of homelessness, non-compliance with medication, commission of criminal offenses, arrest, jail, mental hospital, institutional release, and repeat. I am extremely concerned because my father is in imminent danger on the streets as a non-medicated sixty one year old with paranoid psychoses, incapable of independent functioning or managing activities of daily living. I love my father and want him to be safe and not incarcerated in jail or prison, where someone as mentally ill as he does not belong.

My father has been homeless since 2001, literally roaming the United States. He-or police officers, social workers, mental health personnel, or attorneys- have contacted me from no fewer than fifteen states over the last decade. He has been arrested too many times to count for loitering and other (usually minor) offenses only to be placed jail, then transferred to psychiatric hospitals, and released…sometimes with no structure at all, and sometimes in group homes where he is compliant at first but then decompensates and disappears. When institutionalized and on anti-psychotic medications my father does improve, but he is always released before adequately stabilized on his medications given legal constraints of the system designed for the mentally ill in contemporary American society, along with institutionalized constraints such as limited resources i.e. infinitely more demand than supply.

Despite being awarded full legal custody of my minor brother Ian in 2011 two years after my father’s psychotic break (I was twenty-one years old, he was nine) and raising him to adulthood while successfully earning a doctorate in Criminology from Ohio State University, I tried to help my father several times throughout the years to no avail. One example of many follows:

My father was arrested for a criminal offense in Iowa in 2006 and admitted into a psychiatric facility there once they realized the severity of his mental impairments. I was able to get him transferred to Columbus, Ohio and institutionalized at Twin Valley State Hospital under an Involuntary Baker Act. The hospital was unable to get him stabilized on his medication because it takes so long and had to release him because he was no longer considered “an imminent danger to himself or others”. Unfortunately, my father IS a danger to himself; they just take his word for it, note the slightest improvement, and push him out for others waiting for a bed at the state hospital. I became his SSI payee (he has been on disability for paranoid schizophrenia since before I was even born) and got him an apartment.  I also went to court and had a legal guardian appointed to be in charge of his medical decisions to make the process of hospitalizing him easier in the future if/when he stops taking his medication and becomes paranoid and psychotic.

Within two weeks of the above reference release, my father was off his medication, trashed the apartment I had set up for him, and disappeared. For the next two years, I sent his money twice a week via Western Union to more than thirty different cities around the country. Then he disappeared again. I thought something terrible happened to him and terminated my responsibility as his payee. Thank G-d he was okay...incarcerated again. In the meantime, the guardian terminated his responsibility because his jurisdiction is only in Ohio and my father “doesn’t stay in Ohio, he just roams, so I can’t help him.”

Fast forward to now. Since my father was transferred from Lee County Jail to a hospital and put on medication, he has been doing better than I have seen him since his psychotic break in 1999 (there were two off and on years before he truly became homeless). When I first started speaking to my father, he was mumbled and incoherent. While he is still not stable by any means, he can carry on somewhat of a logical conversation. From what I gather, he is no longer emaciated and has gained quite a bit of weight.

A long term structured environment  for my father may be the last and only hope for getting back the father I once knew- hospitalization for an extensive enough period to potentially stabilize him. To be honest it may end up another failed attempt and disappointment, who knows. However, I will say that releasing him now is inevitably failure. My father’s social security disability funds are on hold given his institutionalization. This is a current roadblock to his resources, but more pertinent is the fact, supported by considerable longitudinal evidence that I can and am more than happy to provide, that my father is completely incapable of managing his own funds, finding housing, taking medication or taking care of himself and his basic needs. His voices tell him not to take his medication so in an unstructured environment my father stops taking them and sooner or later is roaming the streets once again, psychotic and an imminent danger to himself. He is sixty-one years old and I am relatively sure he cannot take much more of this lifestyle.

If nothing else please make sure my father is in a safe place until the social workers can place him in a group home and get his funds back in order. This is not enough to keep him stable but better than dumping him on the streets. Will it be a failed attempt? Based on personal experience, likely so, but at least then there is a bit more of a chance.  My father will likely end up in the Lee County criminal justice system again, or in jail in another jurisdiction in short order, or worse if he is not in a structured environment long term. I got my father into a group home in Columbus once and, while he was off of his medication within a few months or so and then gone again, that was a few more months where he had a roof over his shoulders and food in his stomach. That is not the best case scenario but at least it is not the worst, at least at the present time.

One last thing I want to note: Before my father’s initial “breakdown”, he played a pivotal role in raising my brothers and me, taking care of my mom given her mental illnesses throughout my childhood (and even during her “nervous breakdown” a few years prior to his own psychotic break), as well as caring for his mother in law with Alzheimer’s’ who was moved into our home. He adequately managed all of this for years before he could not take it anymore. A psychologically healthy individual may not have been able to do this. He had a severe psychotic episode before I was born in the late 1970s but given that it was prior to Reagan’s deinstitutionalization policy changes, he was hospitalized for an extended period and not released until adequately stable, medication compliant, and capable of independent living. Then he was stable for 19 years! This is why I hold out that last little bit of hope that my father can get well enough to enjoy the later years of his life to some degree, rather than die alone on the streets or in jail.

Thank you so much for your time, I am sorry I cannot be there in person. I can and will provide documentation to support all of the above and more, if needed.