Push Comes to Shove Between Law Enforcement and Mental Health

As usual, it was the tiniest of requests that generated the most intense heat. As the county supervisors contemplated the competing needs outlined in this year’s proposed billion-dollar-plus budget this Friday, they found themselves staring down the tear-filled eyeballs and trembling chins of two middle-aged mothers of mentally ill sons. They were asking the supervisors to set aside $130,000 to keep alive a pilot program designed to train law enforcement officers on how to de-escalate confrontations with mentally ill subjects.

Santa Ynez Valley resident Toni Fox fought to maintain her composure as she described an unhappy encounter the night of April 5 between three Sheriff’s deputies and her 33 year-old son, Brent Fox, then suffering a serious psychotic episode. Fox’s husband, Dan, had called 9-1-1 for help, fully expecting mental health workers with the county’s CARES (Crisis and Recovery Emergency Services) unit to show up as they had on three previous occasions. Instead three sheriff’s deputies arrived, entered the house, and began moving toward their son. By then, he was standing on top of a table and wielding — at least briefly — an umbrella. (Another son, she said, took it away.) He asked the deputies whether they were there to kill him. He proclaimed that he was an American. He challenged them to a fight.

At least one of the deputies, according to Fox, took the bait. “Okay, I’ll fight you,” he reportedly said. With that, Brent Fox leapt at the deputies and the fight was on. Two of the deputies received blows. Brent Fox was tased four times, rolled on his stomach, cuffed, and placed in a patrol car. There he violently banged his head against the car. His wrists, his mother said, were bleeding. Since that night, Toni Fox said, her son — who’d been hospitalized three times in recent years because of acute psychiatric problems, has been held in custody in County Jail. The Fox family has private insurance that would cover the costs of another hospitalization, Fox said. Instead, he was now “rotting” in jail. “Mentally ill people do not ask to be sick,” she testified. “They are not criminals. My son is being treated as if he were.”