Son’s Internet infamy not funny for worried mom

Man confined after mutilating himself

The recording of Richard Lee Quintero’s 911 call in late March went viral. Quintero reported he was Jesus Christ and turned himself in for breaking into a Pizza Hut, where he ate a pizza and drank a Mountain Dew.

The story since then for the Greensboro, N.C., man is far from funny. Quintero, who suffers from chronic paranoid schizophrenia, amputated his own tongue after spending three weeks in jail. That got him hospitalized for about a week until he was sent to Raleigh’s maximum security Central Prison, where he was under what’s known as “safekeeping” until a court date set for May 18.

It was “heartbreaking” to Quintero’s mother, Alice Yorks, that her son’s mental illness became comedic fodder online for more than a million people who listened and shared news clips.

“This isn’t just a story for Rich and our family,” Yorks said. “There are just not enough psychiatric facilities to provide the much-needed treatment.”

Psychiatrist Elinore McCance-Katz, the first assistant secretary of Health and Human Services for mental health and substance abuse, agrees.

“That should not happen,” McCance-Katz says. “Those are avoidable tragedies.”

Jails and prisons are often called “the new asylums,” according to a report in 2016 by the Treatment Advocacy Center, a non-profit policy group focusing on serious mental illness.

The report found that in 44 states, there are more people with mental illness in the largest jail or prison than the largest psychiatric hospital.

“They should have taken (Quintero) to a hospital, but North Carolina is near the bottom in the number of hospital beds per 100,000 people,” said D.J. Jaffe, author of the book Insane Consequences: How the Mental Health Industry Fails the Mentally Ill. “So police know that if they take someone to the hospital, they will likely not be admitted, or if admitted, will be quickly discharged.”

The day before he was arrested, Quintero had been approved to enter a 30-day inpatient treatment center for his mental health and substance abuse disorders.

His mother said she believes he was temporarily homeless after being forced to leave a motel where he was staying.

The break-in in March wasn’t Quintero’s first scrape with the law. He has been arrested at least three other times, once for beating another group home resident with a brick because he said he thought his victim had become a character in a video game.

“If they don’t get the care and treatment they need,” McCance-Katz said, many people are arrested, put in jail until they can get into a psychiatric facility, then released without enough connections to resources in the community.

“Then the same cycle starts again,” she said.

For most of the time he was jailed, Yorks says, Quintero had to spend 23 out of 24 hours a day in his cell.

Central Prison spokesman Jerry Higgins said that when jails have inmates with medical or mental health problems they can’t treat in their facilities, they ask the state if they can move the person to a state prison for “safekeeping.” Central is the largest prison in the state that has a hospital, he said, and it is the largest provider of mental health treatment in the state.