![]() Ask the police to 5150 him, they’ll bring him back. If he gets worse, Jose remembers the nurse saying, call 911. He was briefly taken to Santa Clara County Jail before being readmitted to the hospital.Ī day later, the psychiatric emergency room at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center discharged Christian. ![]() In the ensuing scuffle with TSA officers, Christian was tased and then taken by ambulance to the emergency room. Finally, Gabby relented and bought Christian a plane ticket, but when they arrived at the airport, he broke away from her, charging through the security checkpoint. He would stare blankly and say nothing for hours, then he would begin weeping, destroying his belongings, and begging to visit his extended family in Mexico. When Christian wasn’t playing sports or working out, he liked to snuggle up next to his mom on the couch, taking selfies they would decorate with puppy ears and post on Instagram.īut since he’d taken mushrooms, his bad reaction seemed to grow worse each day. When his family ate at restaurants, he would order extra food and give it to homeless people on his way out. At 16, he stopped eating meat out of concern for the climate crisis. Read: When mental illness becomes a jail sentenceĬ hristian Madrigal was shy and disciplined, and he cared about the world’s problems. “We were blind to the fact that something could happen to our son in that jail,” Jose told me. Both families would come to regret the decision to call the police for help, and Christian would not survive. The moment their family members called 911, both Carlos and Christian became unwitting players in a system that is massive, complicated, and, according to many experts, manifestly broken. “These are people who are not necessarily intending to perform criminal acts,” Christine Montross, a psychiatrist and author of Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration, told me. A conservative estimate says 900,000 people with mental illness end up in our jails every year. without any options for those seeking treatment. When policy makers began closing state-run psychiatric hospitals in the 1950s, they promised to replace them with localized mental-health care-but in most places the funding and political will required to make this happen never materialized, leaving large swaths of the U.S. They’re representative of a decades-long pattern of filling up jails with mentally ill people. She and Jose stood by in shock, not knowing what to do.Ĭarlos and Christian weren’t just unlucky. When they led him outside the house, Christian began crying out to his mother for help. There, they arrested him for being under the influence of a controlled substance, although his parents maintain that he hadn’t used any drugs since he ingested the mushrooms. Jose said when the Fremont police arrived, they called for backup and ordered that Christian be brought outside. “When you looked him in the eyes, he was not our boy,” Jose told me. “Something bad has happened in his mind.” Two weeks earlier, Christian had tried hallucinogenic mushrooms for the first time, and he hadn’t been normal since. “He needs to go back to the clinic,” Jose, Christian’s stepfather, says he told the police. ![]() Police officers arrived at the door of Jose Jaime and Gabby Covarrubias, responding to a 911 call for help with their 20-year-old son, Christian Madrigal. “He’s doing that because he’s sick.” Even so, Carlos was taken to jail.įive months earlier and about 400 miles northwest, a similar scene had played out in the Bay Area city of Fremont. “He doesn’t do anything because he wants to do it,” she remembers telling them. He’d been collecting trash in the backyard and had set some on fire to warm himself. When they arrived, she recalls, she told the police that Carlos had been off his medication for weeks and refusing to come inside. About 10 police cars showed up, she says. But she knew they were vastly underfunded, and it might take days for them to respond.įrightened and half-asleep, Antonietta picked up her cell phone and dialed 911. County’s mental-health hotline, taped to her fridge for moments precisely like these. Antonietta’s grandson, Carlos Zuñiga Jr., is schizophrenic she had the number for ACCESS, L.A. It was November 2019, in the Los Angeles County city of Pico Rivera. W hen Antonietta Zuñiga woke up to smoke pouring through her bedroom window, everything she had learned about how to care for her grandson completely left her mind. Photographs by Arlene Mejorado and Carlos Chavarrí a
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