Did Mental Care System Fail Betty Madeira? : Crime: An Anaheim woman with a history of schizophrenia is accused of killing her mother. Relatives say they tried for years to get her treatment.

From the military fatigues she favored to the shampoo bottles and cheap watches she obsessively collected to the K-Mart parking lots where she frequently camped out, the family of Victoria Jacobs Madeira saw plenty of signs to suggest that this woman needed help.

No one would listen to their pleadings, the family asserts. But Oct. 14, in gruesome fashion, Madeira allegedly made the point for them.

The Anaheim woman, in her traditional fatigues, was arrested on suspicion of murder outside her 78-year-old mother’s La Canada Flintridge home, with her son, 11, by her side in girl’s clothes, gold earrings and makeup.

The Roma Jacobs killing, as laid out by authorities, poses a myriad of troubling questions on such social issues as access to firearms and child-custody procedures. But the one that has drawn the most attention from officials in Southern California and Sacramento is, can the state’s mental health system adequately identify and treat its Betty Madeiras?

The answer, many say, is no.

Indeed, state psychiatric experts, lawyers and county specialists agree that if the trail of blood left in Roma Jacobs’ kitchen is to have any meaningful end, it will lead to reforms in a mental health care system that they describe as ravaged by funding cuts and changes in the law.

“The tragedy within the tragedy here,” said Sue North, government affairs director for the California Psychiatric Assn., “is that this case is not atypical and that this is happening with increased frequency on our streets.”

Authorities believe Madeira, 43, planned the assault for perhaps weeks from her apartment, then toted four guns and several knives in a cab, along with her son, to Roma Jacobs’ sprawling ranch home.

There, prosecutors say, Madeira stabbed her mother several times in the patio area, following her into the kitchen. As the bleeding woman pleaded for help over a 911 line, her daughter and grandson allegedly shot her to death. Shocked deputies heard the fatal shots over phone lines.

“The whole system failed me at every turn,” Brian Jacobs, son of the slain woman, said in an emotional interview this week after pleading to state legislators in Sacramento for reform.

The 47-year-old Long Beach schoolteacher said that he tried repeatedly in recent years to get treatment and institutionalization for his unwilling sister, whom he said was found to be a paranoid schizophrenic 22 years ago. For the last two years, Jacobs said, he tried to get Madeira’s son taken away from her because of fears that she was harming the boy.

Attempts to interview Madeira were unsuccessful. But family members, neighbors, and court and public records indicate Madeira has lived out of a camper with her son for much of the last year, kept the boy out of school for weeks, and made wild accusations and threats against many members of her family.

Jacobs, along with his fiancee and a private detective, last year launched a surveillance of Madeira to watch over the boy and gather information that could help them in court. Jacobs’ fiancee, Carla McLelland, asserts that she saw the Anaheim woman keep her son in the camper for 22 straight hours, the doors chained shut, and other eccentric behavior.

By all accounts, the mother and son seemed inseparable. Witnesses who saw their arrest Oct. 14 said the 11-year-old appeared distressed and banged his head against a police car when Madeira was briefly led away.

When Jacobs approached caseworkers, mental health professionals, lawyers and others over the last several years about Betty, as she is known to her family, the answer was always similar, he said: Unless she posed an immediate danger to herself or someone else, they could do nothing to intervene.

And even after Jacobs and the 11-year-old’s father were successful earlier this year in getting the boy placed into a foster home, Orange County social services officials later returned him to her custody, citing her apparent stability.

If California had better funding of mental health services, critics argue, people like Madeira might benefit from closer evaluation of their conditions.

Once a national leader in mental health care reforms, California’s public funding for mental health programs has dropped nearly 12% since 1973, taking inflation into account. County emergency psychiatric response teams have been dismantled and clinics have been closed. And the state now has only 1,080 beds throughout California for such patients, contrasted with 5,500 beds in New York City alone, said R.W. Burgoyne, medical director of the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health.

A bill proposed in the state Legislature could prompt a massive reform of the mental health care system. It comes 22 years after California, sparking what proved a nationwide trend, enacted landmark legislation making it tougher to institutionalize or force treatment on the mentally ill against their will.

While that 1968 restructuring was set in motion largely by civil-rights concerns over a system that sometimes resembled “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” critics now say the pendulum has swung too far the other way.

Too frequently, Catherine Camp of the California Mental Health Directors Assn. said at a Health and Human Services Committee hearing in Sacramento this week, “the seriously mentally ill are served late, discharged early and refused treatment often.”

Or as New York sociologist Rael Jean Isaac, author of the book “Madness in the Streets,” said in an interview: “You have to catch the (mentally) ill person between the time that he shoots the gun and the bullet reaches its target, or just hope that he’s not a good shot.”

No one caught Madeira in that split-second, authorities and psychiatric observers assert. But some insist they did all they could for the woman and her son.

Orange County Social Services Director Larry Leaman, for instance, said his caseworkers followed all the proper steps before releasing the boy to his mother Sept. 12 for a two-month, unmonitored visit.

On March 17, the boy was placed in the Orangewood home for abused and neglected children after a custody challenge by the boy’s father, who alleged that Madeira was living out of a camper with no visible means of support. Calvin Humphreys said in a Los Angeles Superior Court filing that he suspected his former wife “may be self-medicating on alcohol” despite a history of mental illness.

Aiding Humphreys in the custody fight was Jacobs, who said he had tried himself to get the child away from Madeira but was told that an uncle had little legal sway. Jacobs eventually tracked down the father in Nevada and enlisted him in the custody cause. He was also contacting lawyers and caseworkers to see if there was a way to get Madeira committed--but was told no.

When Anaheim police tried to serve the emergency custody order on Madeira at the camper where she had been living in Anaheim, the boy started screaming ceaselessly, and Madeira launched into allegations that her son had been molested.

Jacobs and McLelland characterize the claim as a manifestation of Madeira’s paranoia, which they said she focused most sharply against her own family.

Jacobs and McLelland say Madeira charged repeatedly--to authorities, neighbors, anyone who would listen, it often seemed--that her parents wanted to kill her son and that Jacobs had molested the boy, sold cocaine, and killed nine people and buried their bodies in the desert.

Social services director Leaman said caseworkers believed the son was sexually molested, based upon claims by Madeira and others, but would not discuss the issue further.

“What I can say is that the larger family was very dysfunctional and that there seem to be a lot more problems with the family than the press is being made aware of,” Leaman said.

Moreover, Leaman said that at the time of his return to Madeira last month, the boy was “adjusting and . . . doing well” and the mother seemed able to provide a stable environment. Caseworkers cited the progress the two had made during their monitored visits.

“Just because you are disabled, including having a mental disability, isn’t necessarily grounds to take your kids away from you,” Leaman said. “The child protective system and the mental health system are based upon federal laws that give the benefit of the doubt to the parent and the mentally ill person unless a psychiatrist says the person is absolutely beyond help.”

Basing his remarks on public accounts of the killing, however, Leaman said: “Something blew up. And whether anybody could have predicted that is a tough call.”

Jacobs says the indicators have all been there for more than two decades.

The brother said Madeira began to show psychological problems when she was 21, after a short marriage broke up. The once-happy youngster, who had enjoyed Girl Scouts, church activities, piano lessons and vacations in Laguna Beach with the family, had what appeared to be an emotional breakdown and was determined to be a paranoid schizophrenic, he said.

Striking one in a hundred people, schizophrenia causes jumbled thinking and perceptions, often accompanied by voices, delusions and anxiety. It often hits victims in their late teens and twenties and is now thought to be genetically rooted. Madeira’s late brother also suffered from the disorder, according to Jacobs.

Jacobs said his sister was hospitalized four times for treatment of her condition, most recently in the 1970s, and responded well to medication. But in recent years, she stopped taking medication and seemed to worsen, he said. “She did not recognize herself as mentally ill,” McLelland said.

During much of the late 1980s, Madeira and her son lived with Jacobs in his Long Beach home and Jacobs observed that the stress of even a simple task--such as cleaning the oven--could set his sister off into anxiety. And she would become furious at Jacobs if her son, even at the age of 8, was allowed to play with other children, McLelland said.

After one argument in May, 1989, Madeira simply took off with her son, Jacobs said. She was clever in her plans, leaving her car at the airport to make it appear as though they had fled the area altogether. But in reality, Jacobs found out later through the use of a private detective and his own surveillance, she was on the streets of Anaheim, living for months in part off money from a traffic accident settlement.

Sometime around her son’s return in September, Madeira got a $600-a-month apartment in Anaheim. There, neighbors immediately noticed her seemingly inseparable relationship with her son and her rather eccentric behavior.

Apartment manager Ginger Luna remembers Madeira’s odd reaction when Luna saw her large sack filled with five different brands of cigarettes and chewing tobacco, and told her, “You better kick the habit.” “What did you say!” Madeira shot back threateningly, Luna said.

From there, too, Madeira called longtime friend Lyzetta Edie, 73, of Montrose about three weeks ago to say that she was upset about her family’s effort to “take away” her son. “I don’t know how long I can stand this,” Madeira told her.

Jacobs said Madeira tried to keep her son away from the entire family. This upset Roma Jacobs terribly, and on the one occasion in June when she did get to visit with her grandson in Orangewood, the boy was cold and unresponsive, Jacobs said. The boy refused to visit the grandmother again.

When they searched Madeira’s apartment last week, sheriff’s deputies found ammunition, writings and documents that allegedly indicated a killing was planned well in advance, said homicide Detective John Laurie.

That evidence could lead to the death penalty against Madeira if convicted, Laurie said. But investigators still don’t know where she got the guns, Laurie said, calling this “one of the big question marks.”

Madeira may be the one person who can provide the answers, but for now she sits in the Los Angeles County women’s jail, awaiting arraignment next Tuesday.

Her son faces the prospect of spending the next 14 years behind bars if convicted as a juvenile of helping gun down his own grandmother with a 9-millimeter semiautomatic gun. Lawyers in the two cases are saying little publicly but all agree on one thing: An insanity defense is a possibility for Madeira and her son.