Natasha McKenna, alive and well
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Complete and utter bullshit.
Fucking bullshit.
Motherfucking bullshit.
Everything about Natasha McKenna's case is a heartbreaking injustice: Her arrest, then murder, followed by the bullshit investigation, and this bullshit decision not to prosecute the officers who killed her.
I first wrote about McKenna in April.
Then again in May.
To be clear, and everything starts and ends with this: Natasha McKenna should never have been arrested or jailed in the first place. On page two of the final report on her death, the first paragraph of her autopsy states that McKenna:
"Has a well documented history of major mental illness. Her first psychiatric hospitalization occurred when she was 14 years old. In the ensuing years she accrued psychiatric diagnoses including: schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder, and depression."
McKenna did not deserve, require, or need incarceration, but desperately needed hospitalization. Taking someone like her to jail is the equivalent of taking your gravely ill newborn baby to a filthy veterinarian's office for open heart surgery. Jails are ill-equipped to handle the emergency medical needs of mentally ill patients. At this point, it needs to be illegal to take severely mentally ill people to jail, unless there is a properly certified facility and staff within the jail to properly care for those in distress.
Read on for more sickening details on this needless death.
In the month before Natasha was killed in custody, she was hospitalized over and over and over again because of extreme mental health episodes. She had gut-wrenching mental breakdowns, publicly and privately, all month long. Her overseeing physician, Dr. Haile, advised police verbally and in writing that she lacked the capacity to make decisions for herself and was "quite ill." In spite of her long and documented history of extreme mental health episodes, on January 26 Natasha McKenna was taken to the Fairfax County Detention Center—her local jail.
What's particularly gross about her January 26 arrest is that Natasha was actually arrested that day not for anything new, but for her behavior during a January 15 incident, after which she was actually hospitalized for 10 days during a complete psychotic breakdown. During that breakdown she resisted arrest. The day after she was released from the mental hospital, she was charged with assaulting an officer and resisting arrest from the January 15 incident that required her hospitalization. This is ludicrous. She spent pretty much the entire month of January in the hospital, but was arrested and sent to a jail that could not care for her the day she was released.
This was doomed to fail. From the first day she arrived, the report describes violent and heartbreaking mental health episode after episode after episode. They were constant. In the notes, officers describe their encounters with Natasha as the worst encounters they've ever had in their lives. They could only compare her to male inmates they've dealt with on drugs, but Natasha wasn't a man and she wasn't on drugs. Any mental health facility would've seen hundreds of people like Natasha. In my experience as a counselor at a mental hospital for children, I saw kids and teens like her daily.
For days on end, according to the notes, she was constantly restrained with brute force. Officers admitted to punching and hurting her, but claim they did so to protect each other. The deeper truth is that they had no idea what in the hell they were doing and she was not only wearing them out, but she was wearing them thin. Officers described her as being "demonically possessed." This portrayal is troubling because it not only makes her "otherworldly," and thus open to mistreatment, but demonic possession is not anything near a proper medical diagnosis.
She desperately needed a very particular treatment plan, but instead her acute medical needs were treated with the law enforcement equivalent of a hammer and nails. She needed a complex cocktail of prescription medications, counseling, safe rooms, and a full staff and facility prepared to treat her.
After seven brutal days of what appears to be around-the-clock psychotic behavior on the part of Natasha McKenna, the jail officials finally called a local hospital and admitted they couldn't properly care for her. This was obvious, though, in dozens of different ways, well before she was ever jailed and certainly throughout those seven days.
On February 3, dressed in full protective gear, five officers fought hard to restrain Natasha McKenna and successfully had her arms handcuffed behind her back. After that, she was tasered over and over and over and over again—four times, five seconds each, in a short two-minute span. Ten minutes later she was completely unconscious and had no vital signs. She slipped into a coma in the jail and died at a local hospital less than a week later.
According to the report of the video, officers told Natasha she was going to be tasered, but this is irrelevant. She lacked the mental capacity to fully process what she was about to endure. Every single note about her seven days of incarceration makes it painfully obvious that she was in a psychotic mental state. She should've been medically sedated and a Taser is a terrible substitute for such a thing.
Natasha's mother stated that when she arrived at the hospital to visit, her daughter was on a ventilator, her entire body was black and blue with cuts and bruises, both of her eyes were swollen shut, and one of her fingers was amputated. She never woke up, and died on February 8.
What's clear is this: The entire system failed Natasha McKenna. Our country failed her by not having the proper treatment systems in place to handle and potentially house her. The local justice system failed her by insisting on arresting her and sending her to jail when they were fully aware that she was mentally incompetent and had been hospitalized for most of the month. The jail and the staff there failed Natasha by subjecting her to what amounted to abusively harsh treatment for seven full days, by a staff that was ill-equipped to handle her.
The guards, none of whom were mental health experts, should not have been subjected to caring for Natasha. It is painfully obvious that the only language they knew to use with her was brute force. It's not what she needed, and it's ultimately killed her.
Finally, shame on the prosecutors for dragging this on for more than seven months, only to decide to do nothing whatsoever. While charges for murder would've likely been an overreach, nobody was charged with anything at all—not negligence, assault, nothing.
With this, it's as if the prosecutor is saying this tragic outcome was completely and totally Natasha's fault.
It wasn't. That's bullshit.
America killed Natasha McKenna.
