A Psychiatric Patient Spends Final Month in Solitary Torment

Gloria Huntley lay alone and helpless, her breathing labored as she screamed and struggled against the leather belts that bound her spread-eagled to a bed in a state-run mental hospital.

“Client yelling and screaming . . . IM [intramuscular shot] given for agitation,” is how Central State Hospital recorded her condition.

Fifteen minutes later: “Client continues to yell.”

And, finally: “Client complains of breathing difficulties. . . . Inhaler . . . given.”

It was June 29, 1996, the end of a month in which Huntley, 31, had spent nearly 300 hours strapped down in solitary confinement, including two separate stretches of more than 110 hours--4 1/2 days straight.

Her latest offense, according to hospital records: Falling to the floor on her way to lunch, refusing to cooperate, urinating on herself and screaming and yelling.

On the last day of her life, Huntley had complained to aides on the way to the dining room, “I can’t walk, I can’t walk,” according to another patient.

“She collapsed in the hallway. They told us to step over her and keep walking,” said the woman, who spoke on condition of anonymity because she said she feared retaliation by hospital officials.

“She was real, real sick. She said, ‘Somebody help me, somebody help me, I’m dying, I’m dying.’ ”

She was right.

But staff members, mindful of the explosive temper that had landed Huntley in the prison-like Forensic Unit, took her back to the women’s ward, placed her in the seclusion room and strapped down her arms and legs.

*

Born in Richmond on Oct. 20, 1964, Gloria “Sissie” Huntley was a “gladful, playful” child, “always into stuff,” said her mother, Gloria Hobbs. “I had a hard time keeping up with her.”

She was a towheaded child with a wide, inquisitive smile who loved to swim and dance and play with coloring books and baby dolls, her mother said.

Mary Holmes, Gloria’s sister, remembered her as a 6-year-old attempting to free a puppy from a neighbor’s fenced yard. She “had a spoon trying to dig up under the gate to get it out,” Holmes said.

As she got a little older, Gloria enjoyed playing baseball with girlfriends, said Holmes, who was a year older than Gloria.

But she was hyperactive, with severe reading and writing disabilities that caused social and academic problems in school.

“About 12, she started running away,” said Hobbs, who was bedridden with lupus at the time. “I don’t know why.”

It was probably the numerous disputes she had with her stepfather that forced Gloria to leave home, her sister said. “When she got in arguments with him, she started running away. She hated authority.”

She went to Central State for the first time at age 13 because she was a runaway. Hobbs regained custody shortly before her daughter turned 18.

About a year later, Gloria tried working as a hot dog vendor in downtown Richmond, but lasted only one day. She couldn’t read well enough and didn’t know how to multiply, said Jill Vansise, who has operated the stand for the last 14 years. “I thought she might be all right if she tried very hard and somebody was very patient with her, but she never showed up again,” Vansise said.

Gloria hit the road again. She ended up in New Jersey, where she spent about five years in a state mental hospital before she was returned to Central State. Later she ran off to North Carolina and was placed in a mental hospital there for 10 months. She was returned to Central State in 1992 so she could be closer to her family.

She was diagnosed with psychotic, mood and personality disorders that sometimes erupted in flashes of anger and violence. She was sent to the maximum-security Forensic Unit after attacking two staff members in another Central State building July 5, 1995.

Her mother agreed that Gloria had a hair-trigger temper but said the outbursts occurred when she believed she or another patient had been wronged. “She would jump right in,” Hobbs said.

*

Central State Hospital, a 127-year-old institution once called Central Lunatic Asylum, used restraints liberally as a therapeutic tool for Huntley’s laundry list of mental disorders. Belting her arms and legs--and many times her chest as well--to a bed while she lay alone and stared at the ceiling was supposed to make her better.

The U.S. Justice Department is investigating patient treatment at Central State, including whether the hospital violated a federal law barring excessive use of restraints. Central State patient Derrick Wilson died in restraints in May 1993.

Hobbs said her daughter told her she would be placed in restraints for no apparent reason. “She started crying and all and said, ‘I ain’t done nothing.’ ”

But Hobbs said she had no idea how much time her daughter lay strapped to a bed. “It’s a lot I’m hearing now I would never have imagined was going on.”

Huntley’s former psychiatrist and physician, Dr. Dimitrios Theodoridis, warned hospital officials a week after the July 5, 1995, attack on the staff that Huntley could die in restraints because she had asthma, epileptic seizures and a heart condition. He also appealed to staff members to follow his treatment plan of nurturing and encouraging Huntley. Instead, he wrote in a memo titled “Duty to Warn” that the staff became more menacing toward her.

Theodoridis threatened to remove himself as Huntley’s doctor at that time, saying he could not be part of a disciplinary treatment program.

Shortly afterward, she was transferred to the Forensic Unit, which houses mental patients charged with crimes.

“One day I will get my life togetter [sic],” she wrote her mother after arriving in the Forensic Unit. “I hope you can see that before it is too late.”

*

Mental health experts say Central State Hospital’s use of restraints in Huntley’s case was excessive and should not have been part of her treatment plan.

“Mechanical restraints have traditionally not been used for treatment simply because they are restrictive,” said Dr. John R. Lion, a Baltimore psychiatrist who served on an American Psychiatric Assn. task force that studied seclusion and restraint.

Clarence J. Sundram, chairman of the New York State Commission on Quality Care for the Mentally Disabled, said he could not recall anyone in his state ever being held in restraints as long as Huntley had been during the last month of her life.

“It is highly, highly unusual,” he said.

Associated Press reports about Huntley’s case prompted Central State in March to stop using restraints as part of its treatment regimen and to require that nurses continuously watch patients in seclusion and restraints. Previously, an aide with no medical training checked every 15 minutes.

Huntley was left alone after a nurse gave her several puffs from an inhaler about 1:30 p.m. on June 29.

A half-hour later, patients received an urgent message to leave the ward, according to the Forensic Unit patient who witnessed the lunchtime incident.

“I walked past and so many were in the seclusion room where Gloria was that I couldn’t see her,” she said.

A registered nurse wrote: “Bluish tinge to entire face. No pulse or BP [blood pressure] . . . pupils fixed & dilated. Skin cold and clammy, body flacid [sic]. . . . No response to enterventions [sic].”

“Patients were crying and screaming and hollering,” said the Forensic Unit patient. “They were saying, ‘Gloria’s dead! She’s dead!’ ”

The state medical examiner said Huntley died from “acute and chronic myocarditis while in restraints.” Myocarditis is an inflammation of the heart.

*

Hospital staff stuffed her meager belongings into a garbage bag and sent them out with her body.

The sum of her life at Central State: A hospital-issued yellow pajama bottom; a pair of worn-out gray pants with holes in them; a yellow T-shirt; a blue jacket; romance novels; a partially used tube of toothpaste and other toiletries; coloring books that perhaps bespoke ties with the happier days of childhood.

Huntley’s meticulously folded final letter to her mother was postmarked June 28 and arrived the next day, about two hours after she had died. She thanked Hobbs for sending some money and enclosed a Carmelite Friar prayer card seeking divine intervention during time of need.

The prayer reads, in part, “O Holy Mary, Mother of God, Queen of Heaven and Earth, I humbly beseech you from the bottom of my heart to assist me in this my hour of urgent need.”