As you read about it, the death of Jack Keewatinawin, a 21-year-old suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, seems driven by some inept malevolence, which is one way, I suppose, of describing our continuing failure to treat people with this disease. Its tentacles reach into almost every aspect of the story.
Keewatinawin was first shot twice with a Taser but both attempts were “ineffective,” and so the situation escalated, leading Seattle police to shoot him to death Tuesday night. Police have blamed his bulky clothes, but schizophrenic insensitivity to pain — a topic of frequent research — might seem to correlate with stories of those with paranoid schizophrenia being Tasered without apparent effect, until death.
He was already known to the police department. He had assaulted a woman in fall of 2011, while high on marijuana, believing a jogger to be a vision of a “marijuana goddess.” (“[S]chizophrenics don’t anticipate that after the positive effects of getting high wear off, their hallucinations get worse.”)
A neighbor told the Seattle Times that “police had been called to the house a handful of times in the past two years when Keewatinawin was off his medication. ‘They’d talk to him, and Jack would sit on the curb until they put him in an ambulance and took him to the hospital,’ she said.” Though an arrest warrant had been issued for Kewantinawin back in January, for failing to report to his corrections officer, and everyone involved knew where he lived, no attempt seems to have been made to pick him up prior to the 911 call that Tuesday night in late February.
This happens a lot to people troubled by paranoid schizophrenia — people grant the disease more agency than the person burdened by it. The disease says keep away, don’t bother me, don’t even try to talk to me, and more often than not, that’s just what other people do, until they call 911. Then what? The criminal justice system rightly balks at locking someone up for mental illness, while our overtaxed mental health has steadily lost funding.
At 6′-1″ and 350 pounds, Keewatinawin, who had inexplicably-sadly-fatally been gifted with an 18-inch piece of rebar for protection from his hallucinations, was the size of person that no one wants to see go out of his mind. But who was going to make sure he took his medication? Who was going to keep him from self-medicating with marijuana? Not a corrections officer. Not his terminally ill father.
“The mortality rate among schizophrenics is four times higher than in the general population.” That’s normally because people with schizophrenia tend to kill themselves, or smoke themselves into lung cancer. But it’s also because they are sometimes shot to death, and the disease wins that way, too.
