|
Purveyor, Fine Asian Porn
Industry Role:
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: San Francisco Bay Area
Posts: 38,323
|
Quote:
Originally Posted by Rochard
If the man was homeless and suffered from schizophrenia, why wasn't the family doing something about this?
|
While I had heard that Thomas' family had tried to get him help, your question made me look into this more.
Quote:
Kelly Thomas' Father Fights for Justice
Ron Thomas, a former cop, can't understand why his mentally ill son became the victim of a violent confrontation with Fullerton police. He won't rest until he finds answers.
Ron Thomas, a former Orange County sheriff's deputy, had been expecting such a call for years. He had learned some painful lessons as the parent of someone with a serious mental illness. He knew his son's schizophrenia could be controlled at times but that it wasn't going to go away, ever. And he knew that no amount of love for Kelly could save him.
When Ron Thomas got to St. Jude Hospital in Fullerton that morning in early July, he was stunned by his son's appearance. His face and head were horribly disfigured from a beating.
"I was speechless."
Thomas wanted desperately for the Fullerton police to round up whoever had done this to Kelly.
Who would harm a 37-year-old red-haired, guitar-playing man who was clearly troubled? He'd been arrested for assault with a deadly weapon when the illness first raged at 22, but his other police contacts were for minor infractions, Thomas said.
He was a mild-mannered drifter, not a hardened criminal. From the looks of the grotesque injuries, Thomas figured it must have been street toughs who went after his son, getting their kicks by smashing his head in with a baseball bat.
But the truth was even harder for him to accept. This had happened at the hands of the police, with as many as six officers taking down his apparently unarmed son, who couldn't have weighed more than 135 pounds, according to the father.
"I don't understand that," he says now, a month after his son died following five days in a coma.
Ron Thomas was a cop himself for six years before going into the construction business. His father was a cop for 22 years. His grandfather was a career cop with the LAPD.
"Police have been a positive aspect of Kelly's life," said Thomas, who has spent the last several weeks investigating the case as if he were back in uniform.
He's seen the videos that show a portion of the altercation. The electric zap of the cops' stun guns can be heard, as can what sounds like Kelly calling out to his father for help.
"Dad, Dad, Dad!"
"It tears me up," said Ron Thomas, who raised Kelly on his own for several years after a divorce.
He's seen and heard the eyewitness accounts, he's gone to the police chief to demand an explanation, and all he's gotten is the claim that after a report of vehicle break-ins, the police came upon his son, who resisted arrest, fought back and was subdued. Six officers, meanwhile, have been placed on administrative leave.
Ron Thomas' conclusion:
"It's murder, absolutely."
He believes police knew his son, a somewhat familiar street person, and had to know of his illness. If the cops had no training for dealing with a mentally ill person, that's unforgivable, Thomas said. If they had training, they must have ignored it. And he sees no reason why it would take so many officers, or so many blows to the head, to control his son.
It's likely to be a while before there's a full accounting. In the meantime, it's understandable that Kelly's father, who still hears his son calling his name, can't sit still.
When we met for lunch in Orange on Thursday, Thomas told me there were nights over the years when he would get a call from friends or relatives who had spotted Kelly in a park or under an overpass. Thomas would get into his Chevy Tahoe, with its Vietnam vet license plate, and go retrieve his son.
"How you doin', Kelly," he recalls saying on more than one occasion. "You wanna come home?"
Kelly was better when he was on medication, Ron Thomas said. "But it's not like taking aspirin for a headache," he said.
No, I agreed, speaking from my own experience in a seven-year friendship with a man who has schizophrenia. Lots of people are helped ? saved, even ? by meds. But others resist, fearing the side effects or the attempts to control them.
Even for those who agree to take meds, it takes a while to find the right one at the right dose, and when you get all that figured out, the patient might conclude everything's fine and stop taking the medicine.
"That was Kelly," said Ron Thomas. "It's a vicious circle."
The cycle began when Kelly was 22 and landed in jail on some minor offense. A deputy called Thomas and said he thought his son needed medical attention, not criminal detention. Kelly was in and out of board and care homes over the years, better for a while, then drifting again.
In a more perfect world, there'd be more mental health outreach workers who go into the streets and steer clients back to supportive housing programs, where they can get the counseling and other help they need. Families can do only so much, and desperately need backup.
But such services are in decline in Orange County, and elsewhere, because of budget cuts that Superior Court Judge Wendy Lindley called tragic and short-sighted. Her mental health courts have diverted clients into recovery rather than churning them through jails, hospitals and prisons at great cost to the public, but she can reach only a tiny percentage of those in need.
"I have fewer places to send them, I have more difficulty obtaining housing for them, I have more difficulty obtaining resources for medication and medical needs and more difficulty finding appropriate counseling and therapy," Lindley said. "Everything is impacted."
Thomas said he may sue, and if he were to win a lawsuit, he'd use some of the money to start or support a program that can help people like his son.
"They're people," he said. "They're human beings."
|
Quote:
More Lessons from Kelly Thomas?s Beating Death
In the weeks since the unconscionable beating death of Kelly Thomas by six Fullerton, California, police officers, personal accounts from Kelly?s parents and news reports based on official court records have detailed a personal and family odyssey that is heartbreaking and devastatingly familiar.
Kelly Thomas was ill enough that over the past decade he was deemed ?gravely disabled,? and conservatorship was assumed at various times by the court and by his father. His own mother once felt compelled to obtain a restraining order ? hoping it would lead to treatment for her son.
Among the lessons of this tragedy is its reminder that victims of violent episodes stemming from untreated severe mental illness are very often the victims of illness themselves. Our Preventable Tragedies Database only scratches the surface of violent deaths that shouldn?t have occurred, but it currently contains nearly 900 reports of individuals with mental illness being killed or injured by police officers.
Also too often lost in the sensationalism of reporting violent acts by the mentally ill is the high incidence of self-violence they commit. Suicide is the number one cause of premature death among people with schizophrenia; an estimated 10 percent to 13 percent of those with the disease eventually kill themselves.
Partly as a result, the life expectancy of those with severe mental illness is 25 years less than the general population?s in this country.
Events like the mass murders at Virginia Tech and the January shootings in Tucson rightfully raise awareness that anyone can become a victim of with untreated mental illness.
Our hope is that Kelly Thomas?s death also raises awareness that people with untreated severe mental illness are dying far too young everywhere, every day - and they will continue doing so unless they get the treatment they need. Orange County - and the rest of the country - needs better mental health laws and policies if this is ever to change.
|
The desperate pleas of Kelly Thomas are haunting:
Quote:
SANTA ANA ? Mentally ill transient Kelly Thomas died of asphyxia caused during a beating at the hands of Fullerton police officers at the Transportation Center in July, District Attorney Tony Rackauckas said Wednesday during a news conference at his office.
The coroner's death certificate lists the manner of death as homicide and the cause of death as asphyxia caused by "mechanical chest compression with blunt cranial-facial injuries sustained during physical altercation with law enforcement."
The district attorney said Thomas died because of the force of the officers on his chest, which made it impossible to breathe. Thomas fell unconscious, then slipped into a coma and died when taken off of life support five days later. The injuries to his face and his head, Rackauckas said, contributed to his death.
Also contributing to his death were brain injuries, facial and rib fractures, and the extensive bruising and abrasions he suffered during the beating, which left him lying in a "growing pool of blood," Rackauckas said.
The toxicology report shows that Thomas had no illicit drugs or alcohol in his system.
Thomas was severely bleeding and struggled and pleaded, "I can't breathe," "Dad, help me." But the officers did not reduce their level of force during the nearly 10-minute assault, the district attorney said.
"It's hard to watch and to listen to," Rackauckas said about the surveillance and cell-phone video and audio that captured the bloody beating. "He (Thomas) seems to know it's over just before it is."
|
I don't know how those (ex)-cops sleep at night. 
ADG |