Extended case study of Tyler youth who slayed special ed teacher

The Dallas News has published an excellent, extended article by Lee Hancock on the sad case out of Tyler where a mentally ill youth named Byron who was hearing voices stabbed his special ed teacher, Todd Henry, at John Tyler High. I'd refrained from commenting on this high-profile case because we knew so little about the youth and the situation beyond the bare facts of the murder, but now Hancock has provided a wealth of detailed background. Here's a notable excerpt:

bureaucrat after bureaucrat seemed bent on making a deranged child someone else's problem. Byron was pushed from school to treatment center to prison and back in a pattern that, on paper, looks like treatment by transfer.

Official fears about what Byron might be capable of went largely unshared until Henry died. Fragmented educational, mental health and justice agencies appeared incapable of communicating with one another, even after state psychologists declared Byron too sick for juvenile prison and unstable enough to warrant locking up every knife in his family's home.

"I'm not mad at Byron. I just want him put where he can't hurt anyone ever again," said Henry's widow, Jan. "I'm angry at the system. It failed Todd. The system put [Byron] in my husband's classroom. Todd didn't have a chance. And that can never, ever happen again."

Byron is jailed, awaiting pretrial hearings. His court-appointed lawyer, Jim Huggler of Tyler, echoes Jan Henry's assessment. He says Byron needs what he has never gotten – consistent mental health treatment.

"He hasn't just fallen through the cracks. The system keeps throwing him through the cracks," Huggler said. "Everything set up to prevent what happened to Mr. Henry was broken."

Experts say such disconnects are sadly common. The head of a Michigan juvenile agency recently told Congress that the problem of juvenile offenders getting little coordinated care until they commit horrific crimes is "the hidden secret that nobody wants to talk about."

Granted permission by Byron's mother to access his official records, the News found that:

The agency forms, memos and reports – a five-foot pile of paper that weighs 70 pounds – trace a descent into chaos. From his arrival in Texas as a Hurricane Katrina evacuee until his arrest for Henry's slaying, records show that Byron had:

• 20 transfers among schools, treatment facilities and TYC prison units.

• 10 transfers in 18 months in TYC. That included three trips to the unit for the most disturbed juvenile offenders and a mental hospital stay.

• Treatment by at least 10 psychiatrists who prescribed six drugs, including four antipsychotics. Eight psychiatrists saw him in TYC.

• Cycles on and off psychiatric drugs. Byron was taken off drugs for 82 days by TYC psychiatrists who declared he didn't need any treatment. When he refused medications, some TYC psychiatrists instituted a bizarre punishment. They ordered all drugs withheld, sometimes for weeks at a time. Juvenile justice and psychology experts call that practice unconscionable.

The notion that TYC psychiatrists took the boy off his meds as punishment reaches beyond the "bizarre" to gross incompetence or intentional negligence. Any medical professional who was aware of that practice and didn't object should be fired and pilloried. Yesterday.

FWIW, in 2007 about the time this boy entered the system, Ben Raimer from UTMB was telling the Legislature that the quality of mental health treatment at TYC had declined because of the loss of key staff, underfunding by the state, and a "chaotic" environment. So there's a very real extent to which the Lege shares responsibility with the bureaucracy: They were told mental health services for such youth were inadequate and declining, but rectifying those problems always seemed pretty far down the priority list during debates dominated by allegations of staff-on-youth sexual assault.

There are many other remarkable implications to this story. The entire, lengthy article is worth reading in full as a case study of the consequences of relegating mental health treatment to carceral institutions instead of hospitals or community-based assistance. Too many mentally ill offenders are passed from bureaucracy to bureaucracy just like Byron instead of getting focused or effective help. In that sense, this story is a painfully common one, differing only from so many thousands of others in its spectacularly tragic denouement.

RELATED: Listening to voice hearers outside the justice system.