‘He fell through every hole they had in the system.’

Father’s addiction, mental health struggles end in family tragedy

The fatal stabbing of a Hartford man last weekend marked a tragic collision of drug addiction and under-treated mental health issues that exploded into violence between a father and son inside a Grafton Street apartment.

Confesor I. Delgado Jr., 19, is accused of killing his father, Confesor J. Delgado Sr., 41, in the confrontation. But family members say the younger Delgado was actually defending himself and his grandmother from his father, who had a history of mental health and addiction issues and had been in and out of treatment and prison for years.

Family members and court records indicate it was the elder Delgado who attacked his son and mother early the morning of May 1 while suffering a mental health episode — potentially fueled by PCP — despite a court’s protective order that was supposed to keep him away from both. The ensuing fight left the elder Delgado with a series of fatal stab wounds and the younger Delgado badly beaten.

The younger Delgado was arrested and charged with first-degree manslaughter while his father was rushed to Hartford Hospital, where he died of his injuries less than 30 minutes later, court records show.

“For a long time I tried to prevent this. I’d say, ‘You guys are waiting for somebody to get hurt,’ ” said Elisa Caraballo, sister

of the elder Delgado and aunt to the younger. “It doesn’t matter how many people I called, nobody listened to me. Now my nephew got a manslaughter charge for killing his own dad; do you know how traumatized he is? How beat up and bruised he is?”

“I just feel I failed,” she continued through tears. “No matter how many people I called, we couldn’t get help.”

A history of suffering

Confesor J. Delgado Sr. suffered from schizophrenia at an early age and was diagnosed with the condition as an adult, Caraballo said.

He could be incredibly tender and affectionate, especially with the younger members of his family, who remembered him as a charming and loving uncle before his health began to decline, Caraballo said.

“They knew him before the mental health breakdown,” she said. “What other people never saw, they saw in their uncle. What other people saw was him jumping up and down, yelling and screaming and angry. People were scared of him because of that, but he was really good. A lot of people loved him. It was just his brain. He needed medication.”

He was generous to a fault, often taking advantage of his family’s help and patience to try to help his many unhoused friends, but he did not cope well with being told no and would fly into frightening fits of extreme rage.

The hallucinations and paranoia he experienced as part of his disorder were only exacerbated by drug addiction as he got older, including cocaine and PCP, which landed him in trouble with the law more than 10 years ago, according to family and court records.

He ultimately was convicted in 10 separate cases, including possession of narcotics, third-degree assault and criminal trespassing, court records show. Hartford police were called to the Grafton Street home at least 14 times over the past five years, including a call on Jan. 16 for a report he had violated a protective order, records show.

For more than a decade he cycled in and out of mental health and addiction treatment programs, including stints at Whiting Forensic Hospital and the former Cedarcrest Hospital, and at the Hartford Correctional Center, where he would also receive medication, Caraballo said.

His health would improve during those times, but he would refuse to continue his medication upon his release and frequently relapsed into narcotics, she said.

After a domestic incident involving his then-girlfriend, the elder Delgado was ordered not to have any contact with his son or mother and was barred from the Grafton Street apartment, Caraballo said.

He repeatedly broke that order over the years, however, sometimes because his mother would allow him to stay temporarily when he had nowhere else to go, Caraballo said. On other occasions the family would involve the police, and he was convicted four times over four years for violating the protective order, going back to prison each time to temporarily get clean and medicated, according to Caraballo and court records.

The family frequently called on the Connecticut Mental Health Center’s mobile crisis response teams, which include civilian clinical staff trained specifically to help people experiencing severe mental health episodes.

But between mobile crisis, probation requirements, Delgado’s court-appointed conservator, police and his clinical treatment, he continuously resisted treatment and refused to take medications that could have helped stabilize his health. To Carabello it seemed no agency could break through the bureaucratic morass to force that.

He roamed Hartford relatively freely, despite the risks he posed to himself and his family that came to a head just before 1 a.m. May 1, she said.

“I was like Narcan to my brother,” Caraballo said. “If they would say Elisa’s coming through here, he’d be gone because he knew behind me was the mobile crisis or Hartford police. But it was this exact thing I was trying to prevent.”

A violent end

The elder Delgado had been staying at his son and mother’s apartment on Grafton Street in recent months, despite the protective order barring such a stay, while the family tried desperately to secure an apartment for him without his cooperation, they said this past week.

On the night of his death, he was packing his things to storm out of the house just before 1 a.m. when he began arguing with his mother in the living room, according to Caraballo and an arrest warrant affidavit. That court record does not publicly identify the mother or elder Delgado due to state laws designed to protect the identities of domestic violence victims, but their family independently confirmed their identities to The Courant to share their story.

The elder Delgado then came for his son, banging on his bedroom door and yelling profanities and threats at him, according to the affidavit. The younger Delgado grabbed his pocket knife from his bed and opened the bedroom door to find his father in the nearby closed bathroom.

The elder Delgado opened the bathroom door, “took a fighting stance and came out of the bathroom swinging his fists,” according to the affidavit. The two tangled and the younger Delgado stabbed his father in the stomach and face as they fought through the hallway.

The elder Delgado, who weighed almost 300 pounds, got on top of his son and slammed the teen’s head into the floor, records show.

“You’re going to kill him,” the elder Delgado’s mother said to him as she tried, unsuccessfully, to split the two apart.

The elder Delgado pushed his son head first down the nearby stairs and the teen “slid to the bottom because of all the blood,” according to the affidavit. He walked down the stairs — past his son — and out the back of the house, where he fell down in the grass.

The younger Delgado walked out the front door with his hands up to surrender to police when they arrived a few moments later, and both he and his grandmother provided voluntary statements to investigators describing the fight in its aftermath, records show. Both told police they believed the elder Delgado was under the influence of either or both cocaine or PCP.

An autopsy by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner concluded the elder Delgado had been stabbed in the head, neck and torso during the fight. A toxicology report on any substances in his system at the time of his death is pending.

The younger Delgado was arrested and charged with manslaughter that morning and the family has since been able to post a $250,000 bond for his release as the case proceeds.

A family torn

The call Caraballo had long feared receiving came a short time after the stabbing, but she was stunned to hear the horrific circumstances.

It has left their family torn. Heartbroken at both the loss of the elder Delgado and the trauma it already has and will continue to inflict on the younger.

But it’s also further infuriated a family that already felt failed by the clinical and legal systems that were supposed to support a mentally ill man and protect his loved ones.

“He fell through every hole they had in the system,” Caraballo said.

Over the years Caraballo penned letter after letter to legal, political and mental health leaders across the state pleading for help, but nearly all told her there was little they could do, she said. Then-Gov. Jodi Rell was the only official willing and able help their family get the elder Delgado in a treatment program, she said.

In the aftermath of the tragedy last week the family is on its own again, juggling both funeral arrangements for the elder Delgado and the post-arrest criminal proceedings for the younger.

“Now they want to offer treatment help for his son,” Caraballo said. “You should’ve been protecting him.”