Prison System Fails an Ill Man

Michael O’Doherty, 25, looked like he’d been hit by a truck. When state corrections officers delivered him to a parole office in Pasadena late Wednesday morning, his eyes were swollen shut. He had facial bruises the color of eggplant and a head the size of a pumpkin.

O’Doherty, who is mentally ill and hears voices, had repeatedly beaten himself while serving time at the state prison in Tracy. In Pasadena, parole officials were shocked by his appearance and stunned that he would be driven to their office, a ride of roughly six hours, rather than to a hospital.

“He was in really bad shape,” said one. “We were all pretty perplexed at his condition. In my opinion, it was unacceptable.”

Another parole official had never seen anything like it.

“I’ve never seen anyone come out of prison like that who wasn’t transported medically.”

The parole officers drove O’Doherty to County-USC Medical Center for examination. Doctors found no serious damage, but that didn’t calm O’Doherty’s father, who is accusing prison officials of failing to protect his son and then dumping him “like garbage” in Pasadena.

“It’s just ludicrous,” said Dennis McCarthy, a Los Angeles resident who accompanied his son to the hospital and put him on the phone with me after O’Doherty was moved to the psychiatric emergency room.

“I kept feeling like a ghost was telling me, ‘If you don’t start hitting yourself, I’ll never let you alone,’ ” O’Doherty said. “When I hit myself harder, he left.”

He told me no other inmates and no guards struck him. He estimated that he had clobbered himself with his own fists on five or six occasions since March 27 while in his cell.

“They looked in and tried to tell me to stop,” O’Doherty said. “I stopped for a little while, but when they left, I started doing it again.”

That’s what his father can’t understand: why a mentally ill inmate was allowed to keep beating himself without prison officials putting a stop to it. Couldn’t they medicate him? Watch him more closely? Put him in restraints?

Lt. Mike Quaglia, public information officer at the Tracy prison, said the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is conducting an investigation out of Sacramento. But Quaglia says it appears that Tracy prison officials did what they could and that “appropriate protocol was taken with this inmate.”

But he didn’t have a good explanation for why O’Doherty, who was taken to the prison Feb. 12, was housed with the general population.

Given the nature of his disease, that was like throwing him to the wolves. O’Doherty was diagnosed years ago as paranoid schizophrenic, his father says. And, as with many people who have psychiatric problems, his behavior had landed him in the L.A. County Jail’s mental ward after arrests for drug abuse and physical outbursts. So why wasn’t he sent to the psych unit at Tracy?

Quaglia said it doesn’t appear that his staff was aware of O’Doherty’s psychiatric history and that no records were available at the time to inform them.

How could that be? I asked.

“That’s just the nature of the beast,” he said.

Unacceptable, but not surprising. The prison system is under court oversight following class-action lawsuits over the medical and mental health care of inmates.

Quaglia said O’Doherty was screened upon admission and seemed normal.

For anyone who’s wondering, that means nothing. Mentally ill people don’t always seem mentally ill, so a quick little checkup isn’t going to reveal anything.

“There didn’t appear to be a problem at that point,” Quaglia said, “and actually he functioned fine in our general population until the 27th of March.”

That’s when O’Doherty got violent.

“He told the psychiatric staff that he had been striking himself,” Quaglia said, and O’Doherty was then transferred to the mental health unit, where he was monitored every half hour and was seen hitting himself again.

On Sunday, his injuries were bad enough that he was transported to an outside hospital for examination and found to have no broken bones. He was returned to prison and placed in a cell, where he was under constant surveillance but hit himself again.

“At that point he was ... evaluated by psychiatric staff and given some medication,” said Quaglia, who added that to his knowledge, no restraints were used to keep O’Doherty from beating himself.

Two days after the last known beating, O’Doherty was driven to Pasadena.

“How can they make the conclusion that nothing inappropriate happened?” asked Steve Fama of the Prison Law Office, which filed the lawsuits that led to the court monitoring. “Something inappropriate did happen. Look at the photos.”

The pictures raise serious questions, Fama said, as to whether appropriate decisions were made regarding “the use of restraints, the medication that was provided and the supervision Mr. O’Doherty was under.”

Fama did offer a word in defense of the prisons officials. They’re overwhelmed, he said, trying to run massively overcrowded and archaic facilities. Adding to the challenge is the presence of roughly 30,000 mentally ill patients statewide, many of them severely disabled, who arguably shouldn’t be in prison to begin with.

McCarthy hit the skids years ago, and his son was adopted by a Pasadena family, taking the last name O’Doherty. But McCarthy pulled himself together years ago, reentered his son’s life and has been trying desperately to get him treatment and keep him out of jail.

“This has been my passion now for five years -- how unfair it is to have these kids in prison,” McCarthy said. “I mean, these are sick, sick kids, and they are kids. They get mentally ill and they get shoved into jail and they get abused and go unmedicated. It’s horrible.”

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Reach the columnist at steve.lopez@latimes.com and read previous columns at www.latimes.com/lopez.