Trapped between law and madness

Insight on the News, Sept 14, 1998 by Aimee Howd

They roam the streets bemusing and firghtening Passerby with their antics. Many mentally ill people Can be helped but have been left by a crazy system To their own sad devices.

Aparanoid schizophrenic with violent tendencies was listed "critically missing" from St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington for two months this summer. A young Park Police officer found him on the street a few weeks ago and returned him to the hospital. Despite the patient's status and despite the fact that the officer was taking time from his duties to help, hospital officials said the patient couldn't be admitted. Rather than leave him on the street, the officer spent 16 hours completing the paperwork to have him recommitted. Twenty-four hours later, the officer saw the violent man wandering the neighborhood again, released after a meeting with his caseworker.

In the shadow of the White House, the young officer slouches back on his patrol bike, shaking his head with frustration after telling this story that experts say is all too common in America since the deinstitutionalization programs of the last decade. Once seriously ill mental patients refuse treatment or leave home on some paranoid expedition, they cannot be forced to receive treatment. And without treatment, their civil liberties protect them from intervention -- until they commit a crime.

Take Russell Weston, accused of killing two U.S. Capitol guards on July 24, 1998. He's another diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, newly infamous, who traveled from his Illinois home to strike back at the government, which he believed had implanted a device in his head and was sending him messages through the fillings in his teeth. The voices began haunting him when he stopped his medication two years ago.

"From the interviews I've seen of his parents, I think his story is practically archetypal," Xavier Amador of Columbia College, a nationally respected expert on schizophrenia, tells Insight. "The inability to see how ill he was and how much he needed medication ... is repeated every day all over America."

To many in the nation's capital such street people are as familiar a sight as the national monuments. But usually they are regarded not as suffering human beings but as part of a great social abstraction. "Americans don't really have a good understanding of the homeless" says Bryan Thompson, who works on the front lines of the homeless-relief effort as executive director of the capital's Central Union Mission.

For instance, there is the woman who calls the thick yellow pigment streaked on her dark face "the new look" as she models her idea of fashion every day on the steps of the fountain at Union Station near the foot of Capitol Hill. People call her the "Tattoo Woman" and laugh, stare or just wonder. Few notice that her mouth -- painted with bright pink lipstick that melts into the creases of her chin in the heat of the day -- twists crazily when she talks or that the hollow eyes behind her dark glasses are full of sadness. The "Tattoo Woman" is Ann, a 39-year-old former employee of the Government Printing Office, who has sisters and brothers in the district and a mother with a heart condition. But passersby only see her tiger-striped skin, her red turban, her pathetic bags.

Then there is the scraggly preacher. He prefers to be known as "Bosco Pinko" or even "Speed" from his days as a meat packer in Columbia, Mo. He says he plans to run for president in 2000. Current campaign headquarters? Lafayette Park, on Pennsylvania Avenue across from the White House. His platform? If elected, he declares, he will have 20 million people reading the Bible. Even now he stops passersby with unfathomable questions: "If you're so smart, tell me what it means to pray without ceasing. You think you're so high class: Look at you, you're cleaner than Jesus -- Jesus didn't have shampoo." Park police say he arrived in early June. By now they have heard his sermons "way too many times" and lament about how badly he needs a shower.

On the streets a few blocks away from the U.S. Capitol a less innocuous wanderer pauses by a bronze statue. He is young, blond and has rotting teeth. American flags are visible through the grime on his T-shirt and cap. He looks like a derelict patriot. Far from it, he says, introducing himself as Mike Fisher.

Fisher believes he is being held hostage in Washington, where he arrived about five months ago hoping to get work. As a captive, he explains, he "legally" could shoot to kill anyone at any time. Not that he would, mind you.

His story began five years ago, when he thinks the government at an Army intelligence base in Charlottesville, Va., poisoned him. He has gone to the FBI, to the White House, to the state of Virginia, to the Secret Service. He is sure they all are in on a conspiracy against him, because for five years they have told him nothing.

He figures he's a human guinea pig for American technical experiments similar to Japanese efforts to control cockroaches with high-tech electrodes. Tapping the base of his skull and his tailbone, where he believes chips were implanted, he shakes his head. "That's the way I got it figured. I can feel a contusion about that long" he gestures, "on the base of my spinal cord. It sounds stupid, but it's not. It's like living in a nightmare."