Jesus Rincon Murietta. (Yet again). And the simple fact that the administrators of Arizona's sole long term public mental facility are 100% behind each and every aspect of the issues that federal authorities repeatedly have needed to intervene. 

(Originally published on April 06, 2012)

It took about 4 weeks for Jesus Murietta's defense attorney to even realize that he had issues relating to mental illness- again, this due to ASH administrators failing to meet their obligations in terms of the public trust. He sat in Maricopa county's jail for that period of time, effectively facing the death penalty, before the county's prosectors and his own representative defense attorneys came to realize this fact.

After the point, that is, that I contacted his lawyer on one of the Hospital's patient phones and shared crucial information specific to Murietta's state of health and mind as a man affected and disabled by serious mental illness. Speaking with both patients as well as Hospital staff about this issue, I was sincerely compelled to take this simple action on behalf of Jesus himself, who I do consider a personal friend, and deserving, as such, the full breadth of civil rights that all Americans possess in this day of age.

As a direct consequence of my willingness to challenge the Hospital's attempt to cover up Murietta's escape- which I know occurred on the basis of ASHs administrators desire to avoid due accountability- by in fact contacting his attorney in this matter, this young man was not sentenced to death. Instead, as per law, he was prosecuted and convicted of second degree murder (vs. first degree homicide), and sentenced to 22 years in the state's prison system. Not that this wasn't a better turn in the process, the plain fact remains that Murietta, affected as he is by serious mental illness, should still be hospitalized today, versus imprisoned.

While, in equally plain fact, April Mott should still be alive today.

Dr. Steven Dingle (the acting chief medical officer at ASH at the time), and a host of others directly involved in this horrific story (most of whom have either been fired, or otherwise departed from their positions in relation the operation of ASH), has everything to do with how this went down. Bottom line.

And yet today, Dingle is still playing that role, acting as the Hospital's most authoritative medical officer, while also getting away with his unlawful involvement in this matter as well as his longer history as a sexual abuser of women under his direct authority; all of it to the detriment of the ASH patient community as a whole. With the overt, loudly presented support of current ADHS Director Cara Christ , ASH CEO Aaron Bowen, and their various associates throughout the office of Arizona's Behavioral Health Services, including attorneys, entrusted medical professionals, and so on as it applies.

Dingle and his kind are used to getting with this sort of wrongdoing, as personified by the slap on the wrist he got twenty odd years after found guilty of breaking state and federal law as a known sexual abuser of women working under authority. Following, in graphic defiance of his then very recent depravity, this so called provider of "excellence in psychiatric care" found a nice, safe home in the ADHS/BHS construct as an ASH psychiatrist.

ASH is a public entity, licensed in accordance with regulator authorities  here in Arizona, as well as at the federal level. How is it, then,  that ASH' administrators could get away with this sort of activity? That is a question that I have had to consider for many many months, the vast majority of it while there in ASH, where patients are supposed to have a reasonable expectation of safety, ASH being a "hospital" and all; and today I am working to explore this mystery through participating in critical inquiry such as the blogging networks. But I have my own notes, too (and man did I ever take good notes while I was a patient at ASH).

When I first arrived at ASH, I was personally pretty freaked out by the possibility that I would be surrounded by a bunch of raving lunatics, even some of the hospital staffers in the Tucson hospitals made comments to the effect of ASH being a really scary place. I learned, however, in relatively short time, that the patients are not the problem at ASH, and in terms of any justified fears that I heard from other patients, it was all about abusive staff.

But before I go much further into detailing my experiences at ASH, I need to state a disclaimer of sorts: There are good people at ASH. Sadly, they are the minority, and power dynamics being what they are, the miscreants (including doctors, nurses, security, and administration) rule the land once anybody enters the grounds of ASH. 

But I definitely met a handful of basically nice folks working there at ASH, and I feel that I made some good Friends among certain of the staff that I had dealings with. And speaking of you folks, I thank you from my heart for your goodness in the face of all the wrongdoing there in ASH. You know who you are, and I would not have gotten through my experiences there if not for the likes of your kind, pearls in a virtual wasteland of utter depravity and inhumanity.

I did have one problem however, relating to the fact that even the good people at ASH don't take a meaningful step forward and speak out publicly about the shit going on around them day in and day out. Yes, of course it is question of job security, but that is simply not a sound justification, for the state employee contracts obligate employees to report abuse, and so on.

What, then, is the problem?  Why won't any of the ASH staff file reports on behalf of the patients? From what I saw, it is all about an endemic fear that is instilled in the staff with job security in mind. I had the opportunity to briefly interact with more than one good hearted staff person on this question, and it was made clear to me that they were afraid for their jobs. Retaliation, in other words, which is patently illegal.

These are employees who fully understood and agreed with my strongest concerns about abuse and so on. For example, with the Jesus Murietta affair in mind, ASH administrators refused to confirm Murietta's very existence to their knowledge when the reporter JJ Hensley asked about the escape, citing HIPPA and basic privacy standards Which of course is a crock of shit, because ASH administrators are not allowed to hide behind HIPPA in order to further their unlawful misconduct.

So Hensley asked me to at least try and find one employee- anybody- willing to drop a dime and anonymously call him from a pay phone or whatever, merely to verify that Murietta was a former patient at ASH. But the two persons who I suggested this to literally cringed at the idea of doing anything like that because they knew that no matter what the circumstances, if they took action in contradiction to ASH obvious flow of practice, they could lose their jobs.

Instilling any such fear into the minds of employees is in direct defiance of federal statutes relating to work place safety and related responsibility. Whistle blower statutes, too, apply in contexts such as this, but the state representatives responsible for hiring ASH staffers somehow instill in them that they better not speak out about anything, aka make waves, or else they can kiss their jobs goodbye.

Therein, I believe it is nothing any more or less glamorous or dastardly than common state government malfeasance, all at the expense of the patients.

I will now offer a quick peek into what my literal admission to ASH was like, because things took a turn towards the worst that quickly. I had no longer arrived to my new unit (ward) at ASH, than I learned that someone at ASH, most assuredly a member of the security staff, had stolen a bottle of my medication. My property, in other words.

The staff at ASH didn't put it that way, of course. But I went to the trouble of looking into the disappearance of the meds in question in my own with the assistance of the Arizona State Police, and much to the chagrin of the rat bastards at ASH, confirmed the truth of the matter. 

This is how it went down: I arrived at ASH in an ambulance that had transported me from the Tucson hospital that handled my reference and application to ASH. In that ambulance was a sealed plastic bag containing my medications, including a full (unopened) bottle of sixty 10mg Ambien sleeping pills. I know there was an unopened bottle of Ambien in the bag because I had watched a nurse at that Tucson hospital inventory each medication in full as he then placed them into and then sealed the plastic bag. Such processes are standard practice when it comes to medication.

Likewise, the ambulance attendants are required to submit written notice confirming the presence of such sealed bags of medications at both ends of the transport, and there are cameras on board the ambulances that come into play with this process in mind. At ASH, however, staff did not inventory my medications when they entered them into the ASH system; and I was informed  a later time that the Ambien was missing. On the street, Ambien has a reasonable street value. I have heard one 10mg pill can sell for $5.00, translating to as much as $300.00 of street value for the medications stolen from me.

It's that simple, and when I continued over time to ask for a full explanation from ASH administration, including my final assigned social worker, Mr. Robert Washington, all I got was a run around. Plain and simple stonewalling, all for a measly couple of bucks.

So far as ASH administrators are concerned, it's all business as usual.

As my first primary assigned psychiatrist, Dr. Laxman Patel, put it:

"This is the state hospital. 

What do you expect?"

Proving, as such, that the highest ranking physicians at ASH are complicit in condoning substandard care practices and conditions there, by refusing to take action in relation to issues that have repeatedly led ASH into trouble over the last 20 years. This fact is plain, disturbing to the core, and 100% in defiance of numerous efforts over the years to get ASH and other like public mental hospitals up to speed with established medical standards.

IN CLOSING: Please help me fight for the rights of the patients at the Arizona State Hospital. My email address is as follows:

paoloreed@gmail.com