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Unsafe housing jeopardizes success of community living for mentally ill

Some of the sickest people in Arizona live in some of the worst places

Posted 11/3/21

On a hot June afternoon, Aaron Wallace attacked two older women, one in her 90s, at the Tucson boarding home where they all lived. Wallace, 39, has schizophrenia and had not been taking his …

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Health

Unsafe housing jeopardizes success of community living for mentally ill

Some of the sickest people in Arizona live in some of the worst places

Posted

On a hot June afternoon, Aaron Wallace attacked two older women, one in her 90s, at the Tucson boarding home where they all lived.

Wallace, 39, has schizophrenia and had not been taking his medication.

According to the police report, Wallace wrapped his body around one of the women, “gouging” her face, then surprised the other from behind, hitting her over the head with an object in the kitchen, possibly a metal skillet.

The injury required stitches. Wallace, bloodied after being restrained by an employee of the home, later acknowledged to police that he had been in psychosis and that the attacks were unprovoked.

Holly Gieszl, one of Wallace’s attorneys, says her client had little hope of succeeding in that environment. He had been released from the state hospital in February.

“The option in Tucson was homeless or an unregulated, unlicensed board and care facility,” Gieszl says.

Wallace did “OK” in the boarding home, she adds, “but depending on how he was doing with his medication and visits to his clinic, talking to his case manager, he would be erratic, very bad impulse control, and ultimately he got arrested.”

In recent years, advocates have adopted the mantra “housing is health care,” saying that a place to live is one of the most important indicators of success for a person with serious mental illness (SMI). But it’s got to be the right kind of care.

Many consider boarding homes a thing of the past, yet those familiar with the mental health care system in Arizona know that even after 40 years of reform, for people like Aaron Wallace, the only other option can be the street.

Today, case managers are prohibited from placing clients in boarding homes. Somehow, people with SMI still find them. The manager of the boarding home where Aaron Wallace was living when he attacked the older women did not return calls from AZCIR.

The Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System (AHCCCS), the state agency in charge of providing mental health care to more than 43,000 Arizonans, did not respond to questions about boarding homes, either.

John Goss, the inspiration for the 1981 Arnold v. Sarn lawsuit that reformed Arizona’s mental health system, lived in a boarding home. So did other people with mental illness, particularly patients discharged from the Arizona State Hospital to the streets in the 1970s.

Laurie Goldstein, a board member of the Association for the Chronically Mentally Ill (ACMI), a local non-profit, says her son briefly lived in a boarding home several years ago.

“There was a mattress on the floor, no light in the room and the ‘hot meals’—they’d give them a sandwich and tell them to go out to a picnic table and eat.”

Today, there are people intimately familiar with the state’s mental health system who insist boarding homes are a thing of the past. Goldstein disagrees.

“They exist,” she says, “and they’re awful.”

Also known as board and care homes, boarding houses typically give people with chronic mental illness more freedom than another setting, like a state-licensed group home. Residents come and go as they please, and there tends to be less oversight, meaning it might be easier to use illegal drugs, skip daily medications and avoid therapy and other organized activities.

There is very little official information available on boarding homes. County health departments are required to license a home with a kitchen and five or more unrelated residents, so Maricopa County does keep a list of boarding homes. But the oversight stops there. There is no monitoring from the state Department of Health Services, which licenses other housing for people in the mental health care system.

For some, a boarding house is all they can afford. Often, a person with mental illness will turn over a chunk of their monthly social security check in exchange for a room and three meals a day.

A boarding house may also be the house of last resort because the mental health system has no other place for a person with serious or chronic mental illness to live. These unlicensed homes operate largely under the radar. For this story, AZCIR reviewed hundreds of pages of police call logs and reports from boarding homes in Tucson, Mesa and Phoenix.

The Tucson boarding house where Aaron Wallace was living had 101 calls for service between Jan. 1, 2020 and June 21, 2021, the day Wallace was arrested. A boarding home on 22nd Street in south Phoenix had more than 340 calls between 2018 and mid-2021, many of them flagged, “mentally ill subject.”

In Mesa, one had more than 440 calls during the same time period. People with mental illness often turn to boarding homes because there are few other options.

Some housing is provided by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)—but in Tempe, for example, only 26 of 42 vouchers were in use as of June 2021 because of a difficulty in finding housing.

The state recently reported a waiting list of 2,800 people in Arizona who qualify for supported housing specifically designed for people with mental illness.

There are people with mental illness that are being released from jail directly to the street.

AHCCCS took over control of the state’s mental health care system not long after the Arnold settlement agreement, and bureaucrats are aware of housing shortages—not only for people with SMI but others who are homeless. They are making efforts to fix that. AHCCCS recently applied for a Medicaid waiver that would increase housing options for the state’s most vulnerable, including people with mental illness.

But critics like Josh Mozell, an attorney who represents Aaron Wallace and handles dozens of cases involving people with SMI, say if you don’t provide strong case management along with housing, most people will fail.

Arnold v. Sarn, the 40-year-old lawsuit that called for system reform, did lead to the creation of a case management system to track and assist people with SMI, and for many years, case managers have been prohibited from placing clients in unlicensed boarding homes. But today, people like Aaron Wallace still find their way to such settings.

Jack Potts, a psychiatrist who chairs the Central Arizona Independent Oversight Committee, a volunteer group that monitors human rights conditions for people in the mental health care system in and around Maricopa County, says he’s asked AHCCCS to require the Regional Behavioral Health Authorities in charge of providing services to people with SMI to compile a list of boarding homes. Southern Arizona has such a list, which includes 73 homes as of early 2020.

Potts also thinks someone should be tracking how many people with chronic mental illness are living in boarding homes, adding that without a case manager’s intervention, people often suffer in silence.

“When someone’s quietly crazy and living in an unfit environment and they stay below the radar, you leave them alone. I think that the advocacy can be better but one of the other issues is case management.”

Boarding homes may be the mental health system’s dirty little secret, but members of the law enforcement community are well aware that they exist.

Amanda Stamps is a lead police officer and the crisis intervention team program coordinator for the Mesa Police Department, as well as the department’s point person on mental health.

She won’t talk about any specific unlicensed boarding houses for privacy reasons but is familiar with several in Mesa, and says they can be a problem because the staff is not trained to work with this “ultra vulnerable population.”

The Olive Press, a non-profit in Mesa that has billed itself as a domestic violence shelter, is one of the best examples AZCIR found of an unlicensed boarding home plagued with problems.

Between January 2018 and August 2021, police responded to 445 calls at the small residential complex on Mesa Drive, not far from downtown Mesa. The unmarked main entrance to the Olive Press is plastered with signs warning against trespassing and of video surveillance in progress.

On a recent Thursday morning, during a ride-along with a Mesa Police Department community officer, the spot was quiet; two men stood outside, chatting.

But it’s not always calm.

On the evening of Feb. 9 of this year, Mesa police responded to an emergency call at the Olive Press for a “man stabbing multiple people.” According to police reports, the house manager said the suspect had lived at the home for two years and that 20 people lived on site.

A witness told police she was visiting the home when she saw a man “push an older man down and begin hitting and kicking him,” then remove “an 8-inch long kitchen knife” from his pants and begin stabbing an older man, later identified as 80 years old.

The Mesa SWAT Team was dispatched and released gas to get the suspect to come out. The man emerged wrapped in a blanket. His hands were not visible. Police shot him with bean bags and a K9 bit off his little finger. He was taken into custody hours after the incident began.

It’s unclear from the police report whether or not the parties involved were mentally ill, but additional police reports confirm that people in the mental health system do live at the address.

For years, police have received reports that people at the home were “unable to reach case manager in 4 days,” “wanted to kill themselves with a knife,” “was intoxicated and threatening suicide by jumping into traffic,” or “could hear a female screaming as we stood there, but there was no noise.”

There were many calls for service regarding one woman. Deemed by the court to be mentally ill in 2010, she has been arrested in the past for prostitution.

In December 2018, police responded to a call at the boarding home because

“she is rambling about being with the FBI.”

Two years later, in June 2020, the woman told police she was “hearing voices saying that her kids are being cut into pieces…says she knows who did it.” She was “ranting about how her doctor is a murderer and that he humiliates her every day.”

In July of this year, she called police to say she “wants to turn herself in for prostitution” and later said, “her meds make her watch porn, she lost her legs when she was a stripper and that is why she got arrested but her legs ‘reaugmented’ and that is why she has legs.”

In August, she reported “she is being held hostage” and says there is a machine gun in the house.

At her request, the woman was transported to a mental health clinic.

Sarah Gomez, who operates Olive Press, cited privacy concerns and declined questions about residents with serious mental illness or Olive Press’ status as a boarding house. According to the organization’s website, as of Dec. 1, 2021 the house will only accept women.

Every time someone calls the police from a home like Olive Press, there’s the chance things could go wrong, says Stamps, the Mesa police officer.

“The reality of it is that when you invite the police to your house, we take over the situation. And we’re trained first for law enforcement,” she says. “We’re not always going to be able to get them the help they need….There are other resources that are better than tasers and guns.”

“A lot of the individuals are not receiving treatment or care,” she adds.

Stamps says police have an easier time working with group homes that are licensed by the state.

“The unlicensed ones pose very significant safety risks that we can’t address,” she says, as police often find “a lot of SMI population in one place that needs more support than the residence is able to provide. I think they might take advantage of people who can’t get into licensed facilities.”

Aaron Wallace has been in Arizona’s mental health system for 20 years. He’s lived in adult foster homes, on the street and at the Arizona State Hospital, where he was a patient on three separate occasions. While at ASH, he was stabbed twice by two different patients. Gieszl and Mozell sued on his behalf, and Wallace received a settlement from the state.

A December 2018 report to the Psychiatric Security Review Board said that he could be “maintained outside a secure facility” if “he could be placed in a highly structured and supervised placement, with adequate supports in place.”

Wallace was released from ASH in February 2019 and returned to Tucson, where he’d been living.

Wallace shared his anguish in mid-May during a phone interview with AZCIR. Unlike many people with schizophrenia—who have no insight into their illness, a condition called anosognosia—at the time of the conversation, Wallace understood that he was sick.

“To be in my fucking head? It’s full of torture, it’s fucking full of demons, it’s hell. It’s suffering. Every fucking day of my life I think of killing myself, but I don’t,” he says.

Arizona’s mental health system has failed Wallace at every turn, according to his lawyers, Gieszl and Mozell, who say he was too sick to be released from the state hospital, too sick to take advice from his case manager (whom they say resigned from his case) and because of his history of violence, too sick to be placed in a licensed home designed for people with serious mental illness.

“The system had no place for Aaron. Nowhere for him to live,” Gieszl says. “They finally said, ‘There’s nowhere for you to go.’”

Wallace is now in Pima County Jail on assault charges.