Double Tragedies at NAMI Convention in San Francisco

Bill Babbitt stood at the podium and said the police told him he did the right thing when he turned in his brother Manny for the possible crime against a 78-year-old woman who died of a heart attack during an invasion of her home. The police officer said to Manny, a paranoid schizophrenic, “You are not going to go to the gas chamber or anything like that.” Bill Babbitt, a tall African-American, then began to cry in front of the standing room only audience in the San Francisco Hyatt Hotel, “that was before the prosecuting attorney,” he said through his tears, “got the case, and I became an impediment to his goal of getting the death penalty for my brother.”

The jury never got much information about Manny’s mental illness. They never heard about his head injury when he was a child, after which his behavior changed. They never heard about his trauma in the Vietnam War, where he fought in five major battles including the siege of Khe Sanh, was wounded and medevaced out on a helicopter on top of a pile of dead soldiers. Bill Babbitt’s voice rose in anger. “They didn’t hear about his later diagnosis after arrest for an armed robbery of two gas stations, where he was sent to Bridgewater State Hospital in Massachusetts, the mental hospital within the prison system, and he was diagnosed with PTSD and paranoid schizophrenia. The jurors didn’t get to hear from me, his brother Bill, talk about Manny when he came to California to stay with me, where his temper kept escalating, he always talked about the war, and he heard voices.” Bill grew quiet now and tears started to flow again. “Because his mental condition never became an issue in the trial Manny was convicted of murder and received the death penalty. California executed him at San Quentin in 1999.”

Bill Babbitt was helped away from the podium to his seat at the head table where he collapsed with his head in his arms. The hall was dead quiet. The moderator introduced a tall thin faced man in glasses, Joe Bruce, whose calm demeanor was a striking contrast with Bill Babbitt’s emotion but his story was equally  hair-raising. His son Willie murdered his mother, Amy, while psychotic, he said stoically.  

 At age 15, Willie, started to show disturbing behavior. A psychiatrist diagnosed Willie as bipolar. The doctor gave him anti-psychotic drugs and these had a positive effect, but by the time Willie was 21 something was seriously wrong. Willie was talking about how the CIA had planted stuff under his skin and people were following him. He had moved into the beginnings of a severe persistent mental illness, but his family could not convince him to go for help. After an incident described carefully by Mr. Bruce, where Willie pointed a firearm at friends, Willie was sent to the state hospital for evaluation. His father described him “as if a demon entered his body, like he was possessed.”

At the state hospital the medication calmed him down and he was released from the hospital because he was no longer a threat to anyone. Joe Bruce could not believe what he was hearing. He told the doctors and the judge that his son would go off the meds as soon as he was released and would again be a threat to himself or someone else. He was told there was nothing that could be done. Willie grew worse again, attacked his father, and was committed to another mental hospital, where he stayed three months. The same thing happened all over again. It was chilling to hear Mr. Bruce tell his tale.

“I told the doctor, ‘he is going to hurt or kill someone, and in all likelihood it is going to be her,’ and I pointed to my wife Amy”. Unmedicated, many months later, Willie murdered his mother by axing her to death. Maine does not have a death penalty. Willie was found guilty by reason of insanity and sent to a psychiatric hospital. “Now he gets the treatment he should have gotten years ago that would have prevented this tragedy in the first place. Willie realizes what he did, and he struggles with it daily. I told him that his mother and I forgive him.”

These two people along with Carla Jacob, whose sister-in-law murdered her mother, and Amanda and Nick Wilcox, whose 19-year-old daughter Laura was cut down at a mental health clinic by a paranoid schizophrenic, and whose advocacy created Laura’s Law in California gave testimony at special session entitled “Prevention, Not Execution: Eliminating the Death Penalty for People with Severe Mental Illness” at the NAMI Convention in San Francisco, Monday July 6, 2009. This was part of a program by NAMI in collaboration with MVFHR (Murder Victims Families for Human Rights) to promote legislation to eliminate the death penalty as an option in cases involving individuals with severe mental illness and to advocate for better mental health treatment and services before criminal justice involvement occurs.

At this symposium, a report entitled “Double Tragedies, Victims Speak Out Against the Death Penalty for People with Severe Mental Illness” was distributed. This is an important report. It includes all the voices identified above and many more. While nothing can capture the desperate emotion of Bill Babbitt or the stoic dignity of Joe Bruce the words in this report go a long way in creating a fuller picture of the horrible pain faced by the families of victims of murder by the severely mentally ill and the terrible guilt and suffering faced by the families of the ill killers, who for years tried to get help for their loved one and found a society unwilling to help because the mentally ill person had not yet committed a violent crime.

The Twin Towers LA

As the Wilcoxes say in this report “Our prisons are now filled with the mentally ill and in many instances the only way a person can receive proper mental health care is by committing a crime.”  The largest mental hospital in America is now reputed to be the Los Angeles County Jail. It is full of people who were untreated before they became violent, but whose families were crying out for help long before the crimes happened. I know personally of one case where a young delusional man murdered his girl friend. He is locked up in the Twin Towers (the local name for the LA County Jail) awaiting trial. His family tried for years to get him help, but was unsuccessful.

 What about the victims’ families?  The death of a loved one is stated as an earth-shattering event and an emotionally devastating experience, which can release uncontrollable anger.  I myself experienced something similar when my close friend Henry Millman was attacked from behind by two teenagers in a park and had his brain mashed in. A brilliant graduate student in French and Philosophy at Yale, Henry was turned into a vegetable. I wanted to kill the young perpetrators. I went to the police station with baseball bat intent on beating the two fourteen-year-olds to a pulp. I had to be restrained. I wanted to do something to mitigate the pain and anger I felt for my friend. There was nothing I could do. The Wilcoxes dealt with their pain and anguish by filing a wrongful death suit against county, which ultimately resulted in Laura’s Law in California. They wanted the county (in this case Nevada County) to acknowledge the harm done and apologize to them, and deliver a victim impact statement. They won the case and the county complied, but reluctantly.

 The genius of this MVFHR/NAMI program was to put the two sides together, and they could hear each other’s pain and emotional trauma. They jointly came to the conclusion that it serves no one to impose the death penalty on the severely mentally ill. This conversation of the two sides is well documented in the report Double Tragedies. I recommend everyone interested in this issue read this report which is available from:

                                                MVFHR

                                    2161 Massachusetts Ave.

                                  Cambridge, MA 02140 USA

                                                          www.mvfhr.org

                                             617-491-9600 

or you can connect to the report on line at http://www.nami.org/doubletragedies