System Makes Police Cope With Mentally Disturbed

Police negotiator Bill Lintini’s heart raced as he heard the radio call: A “5150” suspect with a gun had barricaded himself inside a house in Yorba Linda.

At the scene, Lintini assessed the situation. Inside the house was a 23-year-old man out of touch with reality, clutching a double-barreled shotgun against the imaginary enemies that haunted him. Known as an expert marksman, the man also had a .306-caliber rifle and had rigged a booby-trap to a window armed with another shotgun.

It happened in 1984, but Lintini remembers it as if it were yesterday--how the beads of sweat covered his forehead and the adrenaline flowed. How, after a three-hour standoff, he talked the suspect into meeting him unarmed.

“I knew I could take him down,” Lintini said last week, “but while we were standing inside his house and the shotgun was on a (kitchen) counter, a cat knocked over a box in the garage. He thought we were storming the place. He grabbed for the shotgun. I had to make a decision--leave or go for him. I took him out, knocked the shotgun away about 15 feet. My backup heard the scuffling and they rushed in.”

“Fifty-one fifty” calls--named after the section of the state Welfare and Institutions Code that authorizes police and medical officials to detain someone in a psychiatric-care facility for a 72-hour observation period--often pose a greater danger than criminal suspects, Lintini said. They pit police against mentally disturbed--sometimes violent--individuals who are in the midst of psychotic episodes.

When the episodes are over and the observation periods have ended, many of these individuals quietly return home--or to the streets--until the next police call. Five thousand to 6,000 people a year, including both police detentions and medical referrals, are brought into psychiatric facilities as 5150 patients in Orange County, said Julie Poulson, a deputy director with the county Health Care Agency. Of those, about 30% will be released only to recycle through the system.

“The problem with these calls is you never know what you’re up against,” said Lintini, a Brea police lieutenant and negotiator in nine successful barricade situations.

It was a 5150 call that led to the arrest last week of Frank Benjamin Kovaletz, 45, an Anaheim man known by neighbors as “Crazy Frankie.” With a .22-caliber rifle and 300 rounds of ammunition, Kovaletz held SWAT teams from two police departments at bay for 24 hours. Forty-six canisters of tear gas failed to flush him out of the house in Anaheim where he lived with his parents.

Frequently End With Odd Twist

As 5150 calls frequently do, the Kovaletz episode ended with an odd twist. Amid tear gas fumes and the acrid stench of gunpowder, police tossed a pack of cigarettes onto the walk outside Kovaletz’s front door and grabbed him when he crawled out to retrieve them. He was taken to the UCI Medical Center for observation.

Kovaletz, who was charged last Wednesday with five counts of assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer and one count of false imprisonment, reportedly has been in and out of mental institutions for years.

In Orange County, health officials say, there is a shortage of both facilities and funds for treatment of the mentally ill. And the law makes it difficult to provide care for anyone who doesn’t want to accept it.

To be held involuntarily for psychiatric observation, an individual must be gravely disabled and pose a danger to himself or to others because of a mental disorder.

72-Hour Observation

Under the law, patients like Kovaletz can be held another 14 days after the 72-hour observation period if a doctor considers it necessary. But at any time during that 17-day period, the patient can request a court hearing on whether he should be released, said Superior Court Judge James A. Jackman, who is in charge of the court’s mental health calendar.

Once a patient expresses a desire to leave--even if it’s as simple as stating “I want to get out,” Jackman said--nurses, psychiatrists and other health professionals are legally bound to notify the patient’s lawyer or conservator. A hearing must be held within two days.

Many of today’s legal protections for the mentally disturbed are a result of legislation in the 1960s that “effectively deinstitutionalized” thousands of patients as part of a reform movement to broaden patients’ civil rights, Jackman said. The legislation is the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, which became law July 1, 1969. It ended indefinite involuntary commitments to state mental institutions.

The theory was that as the state closed its mental institutions, funds for establishing halfway houses would be allocated to follow the individuals into the community. But it has become an unfulfilled promise, health professionals say.

‘Living Under Bridges’

“In essence, we deprived them of their right to safety and instead put them on the streets to be robbed and beaten,” said Dr. John (Rick) Massimino, a psychiatrist on the clinical faculty at UCI Medical School. “Now everybody is out on the streets, living under bridges as part of the growing ranks of the homeless.”

Bed space for the mentally ill is limited in Orange County. The county contracts with 13 private hospitals or clinics for in-patient care for indigent mentally ill patients, Poulson said, and patients are sent to Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk when there is no space available in the county.

When patients are released, many have no understanding of their situation and are incapable of caring for themselves properly.

“Yet they are put back on the streets within days of extreme abnormal behavior,” Massimino said.

Because of the limited number of hospital beds, doctors sometimes feel pressured to release patients prematurely. And the patients often seem much healthier than they really are, Massimino said, especially once they have received medication.

‘Uncomfortable Position’

“These people have the ability to shape up very quickly,” he said.

“I get put in a most uncomfortable position,” Massimino said. “I let the hospital discharge the patient on my orders. The family gets mad. I feel compromised. But what can I do? I don’t own the hospital and they’re in business to make money.”

The process is an ordeal for the families of the patients, too, said Carol Schnitger, president of the Alliance for the Mentally Ill of Orange County, a volunteer organization of parents of young adults with mental disorders.

“Some of our members have had relatives taken in on a 5150 and were receiving treatment to stabilize them when all of a sudden the hospital says it needs the bed for someone whose symptoms are more acute,” Schnitger said. “They get released, and without support they are picked up by the police again.”

For Janice Librizzi, whose 22-year-old son was detained earlier this year for psychiatric observation after pounding his mother with his fists, it has been one clinic after another.

“He doesn’t regard rules and authority,” Librizzi said. “He was arrested in Los Angeles for riding a motorcycle without a license and having no license tags.”

She said that she and her husband were appointed conservators for their son for six months, then for a year. But he kept being bounced out of board-and-care homes because he “broke all the rules.”

“Now he’s sleeping under a bridge in Long Beach,” she said.

For Lintini, the police negotiator, it has been one unpredictable situation after another--some not without humor.

Lintini said he has tried just about everything in attempts to avoid bloodshed in volatile situations. Once, faced with a 17-year-old armed with a handgun, Lintini got him to surrender to go skating.

“I asked him where he goes to think, and he said, ‘The skating rink.’ I said, ‘Let’s go.’

“He said, ‘Do you mean that?’

“I said, ‘I’m a man of my word.’ We went to a Brea skating rink, and the manager let us go in. I promised him an hour skating. Then we took him in for psychiatric observation.”