A failing mental health system leaves this mother pleading: Keep him in jail
LOS ANGELES — Deborah Smith begins her days online, searching for her son's name on the Los Angeles County sheriff's inmate locator, a ritual she shares with many moms she's bonded with over the years.
"This is something that mental health mothers get used to when you don't know where your kid is," she said. "You can call hospitals, but they won't tell you. The only thing you have left is, 'Did he get arrested?' "
His name came up after his Oct. 7 arrest in Santa Monica. He was standing in traffic waving a knife and wearing a Ghostface mask from the movie "Scream."
It was a moment of hope, a chance to appear in court and plead with a judge to petition for conservatorship.
That's not what happened. Just 10 hours after his arrest, Nicholas was released. It was late on a Friday night, and she knew he would not make his court date the following Tuesday.
A month later, the bench warrant caught up with Nicholas. He was arrested on a Saturday. She called the Santa Monica Police Department and begged the watch commander to hold him for his court appearance Monday.
Two days later, she was driving from Monrovia to the West Los Angeles Courthouse when a detective called. Nicholas had been released at 11:51 Sunday night.
All she could do was wait for the next surprise. She knew it would come. She just didn't know what it would be or when. And with fentanyl now tainting the illegal drug supply across the county, every day she feared a call from the coroner.
This is the slow, grinding reality that Deborah has almost grown inured to over a decade in which she saw her son change from a handsome, popular and attentive teenager into an emaciated, delusional 29-year-old street dweller with increasingly
