Debra Loved Her Children, She Insisted--but She Killed Them : Mental Health: Institutionalized twice for paranoid schizophrenia, she was freed just two months before the stabbings.

The first thing the police officer saw when he stepped into the townhouse the night of July 21 was Debra Jackson, a young woman in a bloodstained Garfield-the-cat nightshirt, rushing downstairs.

There was blood on her feet, blood on the entryway floor beneath the glass officers had broken to unlock the front door. Jackson’s neck and wrist were cut. When the officer asked her what had happened, she stared at him.

So he walked upstairs.

There was blood on each step of the stairway, a trail of blood down the hallway and continuing into each room.

Jackson’s children, 5-year-old Shanae Jackson and 2-year-old Jason Mann Jr., were in the master bedroom, swaddled in bedsheets, covered in blood. They had been stabbed to death hours or perhaps days before.

On a hallway wall between two bedrooms was scrawled, “I love my child.”

Five weeks later, in a St. Paul courtroom, Judge Lawrence Cohen dropped his glasses down the bridge of his nose and looked at Jackson as she stood mutely before him. Her arms were folded over her chest; her braided hair hung askew.

“The court finds that the defendant is mentally deficient and unable to have the capacity to understand the nature of the proceedings against her,” he intoned.

“She cannot at this time participate in a meaningful way with her attorney in her defense. The court is going to order that . . . Miss Jackson be committed to the Minnesota Security Hospital . . . and held until she is competent to stand trial in this matter.”

In this matter, the matter of Debra Jackson, there are few facts:

Two of her children are dead. A court commissioner concluded the children died by their mother’s hand, and ordered her committed for evaluation and treatment of paranoid schizophrenia.

In the matter of Debra Jackson, there are many questions:

How could a woman whose illness was treated during two prior commitments--the last ending just two months before the killings--still be so ill?

How could she slip through the safety net of court orders, doctors, social workers and family?

How could a 33-year-old woman described by neighbors as a loving mother fall so far from reality that she killed her own children, and then scrawled her love for them in a bloodstained hallway?

In the matter of Debra Jackson, there are no satisfying answers.

*

She was the sort of girl few people remember. Her name appears on a list of “camera-shy seniors” in her 1977 Highland Park High School yearbook. Her face appears in none of the club or team pictures.

Sharon Jackson, Debra’s step-mother, said the light-skinned, dark-eyed child grew into an “absolutely beautiful” woman.

She had a boyfriend, Jason Mann, who eventually fathered her three children. (A teen-age daughter was not at home when the killings occurred.) But Mann was in and out of jail, in and out of Jackson’s home.

It is not clear how her illness first manifested itself; those who know what happened to her--physicians, social worker, attorneys--won’t discuss her case. But police and court files and neighbors portray a woman who was sliding into a world of private terror.

*

Schizophrenics generally have low self-esteem and few friends; typically fearful and meek, they keep to themselves. Jackson was no exception.

“We don’t ever recall her . . . having anyone to confide in,” said her stepmother. “I think about the only friends she had were the ones in the apartment complex” where she lived.

Neighbors remember Jackson as a quiet woman who kept her children near but wouldn’t let other people get close. One said Jackson was “a fragile person . . . scared of her own shadow.”

“Paranoid schizophrenia is the only dangerous type of schizophrenia and it can be very dangerous,” said Mary Latham of the Minnesota Bio Brain Assn., which helps families cope with the illness. “But they’re only violent because they’re so frightened.”

Debra did serve on the complex’s committees for children and security, said neighbor Rita Carroll. “She used to bring her children to my house because she didn’t have anyone else to watch them during the committee meetings, and she treated them kids real good. . . . She’s real protective of her kids.”

But there were odd beliefs, bizarre behaviors.

Jackson often wouldn’t answer a knock on her door. She kept the window blinds pulled, and the glass open just a crack in the summer. She was reluctant to let her children out to play.

In the dead of winter, said a neighbor who spoke on condition of anonymity, Jackson would carefully bundle her two small children in winter clothes, load them into her car along with her trash, then drive 100 feet to the garbage bin and unload the trash before driving back to her apartment.

“Debbie didn’t let people get close to her,” said the neighbor. “She thought people were going to take her food. She thought people were taking items from her house.

“Just before she went in the hospital (in November, 1992), she kept all her groceries in the car. You could tell when she was cooking because she would come out to the car and get her groceries.”

That was the second time she was hospitalized; she was first committed in June, 1989, to St. Joseph’s Hospital in St. Paul.

Four decades ago, that might have been the end of it; Jackson would simply have been institutionalized, warehoused beyond hope with hundreds of others. With the advent of effective medication, hospitalization lost favor.

“It was kind of a moral decision, to release these patients into the loving arms of the community,” said Sibyl Shalo, a spokeswoman for the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill.

“But there were no loving arms then, and there are no loving arms now.”

Jackson stayed at St. Joseph’s about five weeks and received injections of the neuroleptic drug Prolixin. She was assigned a social worker from a county agency that works with the mentally ill and was released.

Her mother, Connie Jackson, called police again in November, 1992, because her daughter again was acting strangely. The medication Jackson took after her commitment had helped, her mother said, but she’d quit taking it.

She was taken to University of Minnesota Hospitals, where she was said to be “obsessed with fears of brutal death and-or sexual abuse” of her children. She believed hospital workers would shoot her or cut off her legs.

On Nov. 25, after Jackson refused medication and psychiatrists found her “a danger to herself and others,” a judge ordered that she be administered up to 60 milligrams of the drug Haldol daily.

“That would mean somebody who’s having extremely severe symptoms and somebody who’s pretty brittle,” said William Brauer, a Twin Cities psychiatrist who works extensively with paranoid schizophrenics.

“You’re giving an extremely large amount of medicine because you aren’t controlling symptoms adequately--you’re barely keeping the person well.”

Still, there was no evidence that Jackson was abusing her children. For that reason, child protection authorities didn’t become involved in the case, according to Ramsey County Court Commissioner Jim Finley.

A university attorney said she was provisionally discharged in December. The commitment petition was routinely dismissed in May, six months after it was issued--and less than two months before Jackson’s children were killed.

*

In the days leading up to the killings, Jackson grew increasingly reclusive and confused. She began barricading the front door of her apartment with an exercise bicycle. She talked with neighbors about an incident that had occurred a year earlier, apparently believing it had just happened.

“She was back in time,” a neighbor said. “She was just not right.”

Police files show Jackson went with her social worker July 16 to see her doctor, who prescribed a higher dosage of Haldol to control returning “signs of thought disorder.” Connie Jackson later told police her daughter had been off her medication and probably never picked up the new prescription.

She said Debra began acting strangely on July 17, and made several hang-up phone calls to her the next day. Then, apparently, she took her phone off the hook.

Worried family members came by the apartment several times July 21, but Debra wouldn’t answer the door. When her brother looked through a window that night and saw what looked like blood, police were called.

Neighbors heard pounding on the door and crashing glass. Then four jagged words from Connie Jackson, who had followed police into her daughter’s townhome: “Oh my God, no!”

“I could tell by the pain and the ache in her heart that something horrible had happened,” a neighbor recalled. “She said, ‘I knew I should have taken those babies home with me. I just knew I should have taken those babies home with me.’ ”

By 2 a.m., Jackson had been treated at a St. Paul hospital and was being questioned at police headquarters. Investigators asked if she knew how her children died.

“I can’t remember,” she said.

“Whose blood is that in the bathroom?”

“That is all my blood.”

“Then the children’s blood is on their bed?”

Jackson nodded.

She told the investigators she wished people would stop picking on her and her children. She said, over and over, that she was a good mother, that she loved her children.

*

Shanae Jackson and Jason Mann Jr. were buried July 28. Their mother was committed Sept. 30 to the Minnesota Security Hospital, where she’ll stay until she’s judged competent to stand trial for their murder.

“It’s hard to say that the system failed this family,” said court commissioner Finley. “The things that normally happen in a treatment sequence for a person with persistent mental illness were followed.”

It’s also hard to say Jackson’s family failed her.

“The family were involved, and they were involved in a responsible manner,” said attorney Louie Torinus, who represented Jackson in her November commitment. “They seemed to be knowledgeable about what was necessary; they weren’t trying to minimize the seriousness of the illness.

“It’s kind of nobody’s fault, just an accident.”

An accident in a system that did its job, but didn’t work.

“She was diagnosed, she was treated, people recognized there was an illness, recognized there was a problem,” Brauer said. “It was just that either medical science or the system wasn’t adequate to prevent the tragedy.”