Mental illness lurched into local consciousness after that awful day five years ago.
Since Jared Lee Loughner’s psychotic explosion, we’ve improved tremendously around here in recognizing people in crisis and trying to get them help. Citizens have taken mental-health first-aid courses. Many more police officers have crisis intervention training.
And yet, as events Wednesday showed, every day we’re still perched on the razor’s edge between community safety on one side and, on the other side, one person’s internal crisis becoming a public tragedy.
A series of coincidences showed us that this week.
First, on Wednesday morning, a man, who had already spoken incoherently to police dispatchers, went on and did something really strange. He backed his RV out of the parking lot at the Miracle Mile police station, up over the curb and up almost against the building.
Then he told dispatchers he had tactical gear, explosives and propane and threatened to blow the place up.
What ensued could be considered a good result of our raised consciousness. The police cleared everybody out of the area, set up positions, then talked and waited, talked and waited, talked and waited.
Snipers and SWAT tacticians surrounded the scene. It was poised for an eruption — gunfire or an explosion. But it didn’t end that way. After the man, whom police identified as 37-year-old Thomas Scott Mills Jr., tried to light the inside of his RV on fire, firefighters soaked the inside of the vehicle with water and police ended the standoff peacefully.
H. Clarke Romans, the executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness of Southern Arizona, liked what he saw from Tucson police.
“I am sure that the CIT (crisis intervention training) had a profound impact on the 10-hour standoff,” Romans said.
It is a situation where you could easily imagine the outcome being the bullet-riddled body of Mr. Mills and a halfhearted investigation of police conduct. Now Mills has a chance at life, small though it may be with prison looming and little help to be found there.
The young man involved in Wednesday’s second incident, Kyle Montgomery, is also lucky to be alive, though a Pima County sheriff’s deputy did shoot him in the shoulder. Deputies were called to a Family Dollar in Picture Rocks, and Montgomery fled when they arrived and hid from them. He raised a short-barreled rifle when they found him, and a deputy fired, authorities said.
The problem is our system still fails to deal well with people like Montgomery, putting them, law-enforcement officers and the public in danger.
Montgomery was in trouble just last week, on Dec. 30, when he fled from U.S. marshals looking for someone else, running into traffic on I-10 near Ina Road and stabbing himself in the neck. He was in the hospital a few days for treatment of the neck wound, then taken to Sonora Behavioral Health.
Sheriff Chris Nanos said that by the time deputies went to serve him with a warrant to have an involuntary mental-health evaluation, he had already been released.
“This man is going to be killed or kill somebody, and that is a shame. Nobody can seem to figure this out,” Nanos said. “If he’d have shot one of my deputies, God forbid, this would be a completely different conversation.”
Montgomery’s mother, Dawn Wilson, told me he’s been having substance-abuse and mental-health problems for a few years. He spent more than two years in prison for burglary, getting out last fall, and returned straight to the bad scene that had gotten him in trouble in the first place.
“Nothing good came out of going to prison,” she said. “He came out a different person.”
In other words, he came out worse off then he already was.
She was disappointed that Sonora discharged him Tuesday before he was any better. They would not pursue involuntary treatment, Wilson said, because his problems were depression and substance abuse.
That infuriates Nanos. He feels the area’s cops have drastically improved their response to people in mental crisis, but the system is now failing the officers who put in that effort, as well as the mentally ill.
“For five years now, we’ve recognized our failings,” Nanos said. “We weren’t keeping track of people. We just turned them loose. Jared Loughner woke us up.”
Now, he said, “We’re putting in an effort, and we’re not seeing a return.”
Part of the problem is systemic and seems almost impossible to resolve. Our laws in Arizona are progressive — they allow an adult to petition for the involuntary evaluation of another person even if it’s just because the other person is “persistently or acutely disabled.” But young men like Montgomery are still adults and have the legal right to turn down treatment and fight involuntary commitments.
Another part of the problem is financial, Romans said.
“We’ve cut mental-health funding year after year after year, and case managers don’t have what they should have in terms of clients. (Instead of) like 30 clients — they’ve got 100,” he said.
When we reduce taxes and impose hiring freezes, that comes with a cost. We can’t help as many people who need it.
But of course we don’t generally hear of the success stories, either. I sat in on a conference call with Mark Kelly and Gabrielle Giffords Thursday, and he pointed out the positive news.
While outlining his gun-related executive actions Tuesday, President Obama also announced $500 million in additional spending on mental-health care and reporting, Kelly pointed out. He also noted that if a person in crisis gets help and gets better, that tends to go unnoticed.
True enough, yet the coincidence of two mental-health-related police emergencies in Tucson Wednesday, during the same week of the anniversary of the Jan. 8, 2011, attacks, shows how much more progress we still have to make.
