A tough choice to arrest son
Family’s struggle with mentally ill man requires help from law enforcement
Second in an occasional series
Shelia Muldrow exhaled Tuesday morning before she walked through the brown door marked in white with the Fort Bend County seal.
The mother felt she had no choice but to ask authorities to detain her son, Warren Muldrow, 22, bipolar and dangerously out of control. She had struggled since Warren’s teenage years to get him long-lasting help. But, in recent days, as Warren lived on the streets, his mental state had become unbearably precarious.
Shelia approached one of six service windows, an act of faith in the emergency mental health detention process. She placed her thick packet of Warren’s records on the ledge and told the staff member she needed to amend a mental health warrant.
“It’s actually out of Precinct 2,” a county worker told her.
Shelia tried to hold back the tears. She had thought she would only need to amend the warrant with a new name for a hospital where law enforcement could take her son. She’d even called ahead to be sure the judge would be available to consider the change.
Now she needed to find a different building, fill out another set of forms and hope the other justice of the peace would have time
to consider her son’s case.
Shelia walked outside and paused in front of the building.
Overwhelming frustration was not an unfamiliar feeling, but it didn’t make her immune to crying.
She dabbed her eyes with a tissue wadded in her hand.
“I don’t get this system,” Shelia said.
A month earlier, Shelia, an information technology risk analyst, held out hope that a ruling in her son’s criminal case would alleviate her quest to find him aid. He had pleaded guilty in a Fort Bend courtroom for a terroristic threat he’d made during what seemed like a psychotic episode last fall. A judge assigned him three years of probation.
A court filing outlined Warren’s probation conditions, including a term handwritten at the end that seemed to describe what Shelia wanted for him:
“The Defendant is to complete within 30 days of this order a mental evaluation through an agency that offers such services and which is approved by the Ft. Bend Co. Community Supervision (and) Corrections Dept. If the treatment is necessary, the defendant shall abide by any and all treatment directives, comply with all rules [and] regulations of the approved agency and pay all costs incurred for such services.”
Mentioning mental health in probation conditions typically triggers a review to determine if the case should fall under the purview of four probation officers specifically trained to oversee mentally ill offenders, explained Anthony Mayshack, a supervisor. (Mayshack declined to discuss whether Warren’s was among them, but Warren’s probation officer identified himself to Shelia as one who deals with mental health.)
Still, only four days later, Warren’s pattern of instability began to repeat.
The group home in Fort Bend where Warren lived kicked him out in early May. Shelia gave Warren the number for another home, where he stayed only one night.
The next word she got came a day later from a staffer at Memorial Hermann Hospital, who called to ask for her insurance information. Warren was in the emergency room for homicidal thoughts, they told her. They were searching for a psychiatric facility where Warren could stay.
“It’s just this constant cycle,” Shelia said. Perhaps she’d been wrong to believe Warren’s criminal case would improve anything.
Two days later, Warren went from Memorial Hermann to a mental health hospital in Richmond. Warren’s dad said he kept the probation officer informed throughout.
Warren’s parents divorced when he was 1½, and the father, not Shelia, acted as Warren’s keeper. He posted Warren’s bond after the terroristic threat arrest. He took Warren to court hearings and attorney appointments that followed. With Warren in the Richmond hospital, his father tried to find a place Warren could go once he was released.
Declining permission for his name to be used with his comments, Warren’s father said he faulted the growing number of area smokeshops — not the health care or criminal justice systems — for his son’s predicament. At such shops, the father explained, kids like his son could purchase dangerous, and sometimes lethal, products like synthetic marijuana known as Kush, which Warren mentioned to police the day he was arrested.
“That to me is the real villain,” he said.
The psychiatric facility released Warren on May 26. He slipped into homelessness. A week later, Shelia learned from Warren’s parole officer that he hadn’t been showing up.
In a typical mental health case, the offender reports to a probation officer twice a month, and the officer, in turn, checks on the offender every 60 days, while also staying in touch with family, friends and doctors as possible. Warren’s officer, however, told his mother he was unaware of Warren’s bipolar diagnosis and had never met him, she said.
Shelia thought the officer would soon file paperwork about Warren’s lack of involvement with the District Attorney’s office. It would be “really quick” to revoke probation, a spokesman said, but other options were available.
“Our goal is to help him,” said Michael Enax, director of the probation department. “It’s not to hurt him.”
In the early morning hours Sunday, law enforcement officers brought Warren to his dad’s doorstep. He’d walked out into traffic — a suicidal act, in his mother’s view.
And so, while the father tried to keep watch of Warren, Shelia pursued the mental health detention. If approved by the judge, law enforcement could transport him — by force if necessary — to a mental health facility. He could be held there up to 48 hours for evaluation and then, possibly, longer.
“It’s urgent right now,” she said Tuesday after she’d gone to the wrong office.
Calm now, her eyes free of tears, she drove 10 minutes from the county’s Precinct 4 office in Sugar Land to the county’s Precinct 2 office in Missouri City. She found the parking lot full and left her car at a neighboring church.
Once in the office, Shelia approached the window and got seven stapled pages to fill out.
With a steady hand, Shelia listed in black ink the reasons she believed Warren had a mental illness (“attempted suicide by walking into the street with traffic… does not know day, time, where he is,..”), why he seemed to be a risk to himself and to others (“attempted suicide and assaulted father”) and why he needed to be restrained (“he will not go to hospital”).
The mother consulted her text messages with Warren’s dad and her packet of paperwork as she completed the questions. She attached a list of hospitalizations also used for his court case. His most recent stay had been added.
“I’m hoping it’s going to help him,” Shelia said.
At 10:40 a.m., she passed the packet through a slot under the window. A staffer showed her blank places to fill in, called the new psychiatric facility to confirm space then said she would get it to the judge.
“So I can go now,” Shelia said, just before 11 a.m.
Stepping into the beige hallway, she remembered how, years before, she’d gone through the same process for Warren in Harris County. She’d accompanied law enforcement that time to watch as they apprehended her son. He couldn’t see her. She observed from far away.
But she didn’t want to think about that. This time, she hoped not to have to be there to watch Warren be detained. “I hope he’s OK,” she said.
Dressed in long shorts and a short-sleeved shirt, she stepped outside into the sun’s heat. Warren’s father called at 11 a.m. She gave him her update. He gave her his. Warren, who had disappeared from his father’s house the day before, had called him from a gas station.
The dad would go soon to pick him up.
By 11:20 a.m., the judge signed Shelia’s request. The sheriff’s office contacted her within 25 minutes. Three deputies went to pick up Warren around 1 p.m. at his dad’s home. He asked to be handcuffed, saying he would knock out someone at the hospital without them, according to a mental health official in the sheriff ’s office.
The deputies let Warren, his hands bound, smoke a cigarette, then they left for the hospital.
By 1:30 p.m., Shelia had the information she’d been waiting for: Deputies had safely picked up her son.