I didn’t yawn as I stirred beneath the covers and there were no cobwebs for me to wipe from my eyes. I was alert and sharp, and knew that I wouldn’t need any more sleep until the sun descended beneath the horizon almost twenty-four hours from now. It was 3:00 am and still pitch-black outside, but I didn’t mind it one bit. The predawn is my optimal time of the day to think, write, and devour the written word.
I propped myself up from the bed and went to the bathroom to empty my bladder and scrub my teeth. When I returned to my bedroom, I flipped on my laptop computer and pulled up my favorite site to get the news of the day: The Daily Kos. I kept the bedroom lights off and placed a towel beneath the door behind me so that the glare from the computer would not seep through the bottom crevice and cause the others in the house to stir in their beds. And I didn’t want anyone peeking in through the door to ask why I was up so early. The only thing I wanted to hear besides my breathing was the hum of the electricity that powers my laptop computer.
Once of my favorite authors on the news site, Joan Moar—Joan reports on race and social justice issues that are pressing in our country—had uploaded a story the previous night. It was trending on the site, as it had been recommended over one-hundred forty times by other members of the Daily Kos community. The title of the piece: Parents’ heartbreak: Cops they called to help their son, killed him# Justice For Osaze.
Oh no. Poor Osaze. I inhaled a deep breath, and braced myself for the impact.
Osaze Osagie was twenty-nine years old, the son of prominent African immigrants with means, and a student at his local university. He had also been diagnosed with a mental illness, one he’d lived with for the entirety of his life. I read and scrolled. And then I read and scrolled some more, my heart sinking further to the floor as I read more of the details of what happened to this young man. Ozaze’s parent’s, fearing for the health and safety of their son, had frantically called the police to report that he was “missing and had been acting erratically.” Osaze was in the midst of a full-blown mental health conflagration.
Osaze lived in an apartment on Old Boalsburg Road at the stage college in Pennsylvania. The police rushed over to Osagie Ozaze’s apartment and attempted to serve him with a mental health warrant, which is a document that gives the police the authority to take a mentally disturbed person into temporary custody. According to reports, Osaze responded to the police presence by waving a knife around, and the police responded by drawing their firearms and pulling the triggers until Osaze was dead. After reading about the scholarship that was created in Osagie’s memory, I pushed myself away from the desk. I thought back to that time in 2005 and shivered a bit, and then shook my head from side to side. “My god. That could have me,” I said, whispering. “That could have been me.”
*********
My full name is Ezebere Ihenetu, the first and only son of two Nigerian transplants, and I’ve been conscious of my silent battle against mental illness since I was twenty-six years old. In early February, 2005, I escaped through the window of my childhood home at the age of twenty-eight, hopped on the Amtrak train heading for Portland, and was whisked away.
In early May, 2005, I had been walking the streets of Portland, Oregon for hours, homeless and aimless, until I checked into a hotel for the night. When the night did fall, I should have been exhausted enough to sleep as soon as I curled up in the bed, but after not having slept for more than 24 hours because of vivid dreams and paranoia, I was wide awake and marching from one side of the hotel room to another, kicking at demons in white walls.
It was spring time in Portland and probably seventy-five degrees outside. My mind was scattered and feverish. However, my blood had turned stone cold because of the thing that I’d seen a few hours earlier. I draped a blanket over my shoulders to try and keep warm, but my body temperature kept on dropping. I’d been cold before, but this felt completely different, like the warmth was just being drained out of my system. I repeatedly intoned a prayer as I marched, hoping that these prayers would repel the demons somehow. And yet the more I marched, prayed, and sweated, the more animated and emboldened the demons became. The chorus of evil voices rained down on me like hail in a spring storm, pelting and denting my scattered psyche. I was losing the battle, but I didn’t know what else to do except to keep on marching and praying.
*******
It was nearly dawn when something very large banged against the front door of my motel room, causing me to halt my steps. I turned to face the door.
“This is the police department,” said a voice. “Open up the door. Open the door right now!” This demand for my compliance was immediately followed up with more banging on the door.
I let out the breath that I was holding, then felt a surge of indignation well up inside of me. “No!” I screamed. “I will not open that door!”
There was a few seconds pause before the bottom half of the door suddenly exploded into four separate pieces. And in came a large boot through the hole that had just been kicked in. That boot was attached to the leg of the cop who’d kicked in the door, a large man with a thick mustache who was dressed in a black jacket and pants. Another police officer, who was also clad in all black and wearing a cap, stepped in front of the mustached cop. His weapon was drawn and pointed at my face.
“Get down on the floor! Get down on the fucking floor,” growled the officer.
“No!” I screamed again. My heart was pounding. “You’re don’t have any right to come in here!”
The growling officer took another few steps forward. As he approached the weapon that he was carrying came into sharp focus. I shrank backwards at what looked like a firearm, then turned away from the officer to avoid the bullet in case he decided to shoot. The blanket fell from my shoulders as I made my move. As soon as my back was turned, I experienced a burning pain the likes of which I’d never felt in the rhomboid area of my back. It only took a second for the burning to shoot through to every other muscle in my body like a current, and I was suddenly frozen in place. My legs crumpled beneath me and l collapsed onto the floor.
When I finally stopped trembling the policemen quickly pounced. They pinned my arms behind my back and placed metal handcuffs around both of my wrists. After my arms and wrists were secured, someone grabbed my ankles and folded both of my legs back at the knee. I felt gloved hands press my ankles together and wrap a zip tie just above them. The police were not gentle as they went about their work.
The shot to the back of my shoulder temporarily pulled me out of my fever. It stopped raining abusive voices and the ghosts in the wall disappeared. I was anxious to perform a quick self-check of my body just to make sure that I was not bleeding out onto the carpet, but I was unable to raise my head from the floor to see. So I decided to perform a tactile assessment of my physical condition. After a minute of doing this I exhaled in relief. A significant amount of my blood was not pooling on some spot of the carpet.
That section of my rhomboid was still burning though. The rhomboid pain was compounded by the pain that now inflamed my shoulders and my wrists. My shoulders were not used to being fixed in this position for this long, and whomever placed these handcuffs on my wrist made them too tight. One of the cops proceeded to pull my pants halfway down my derriere to see if I was hiding contraband in that area of my body. When he was done scanning and found nothing, he didn’t immediately pull my pants back up to their original position. My face became flush from the humiliation. Still, I made the decision not to complain about the treatment that I was receiving. I did not want to give the cops any more reason to rough me up.
The cops spend what feels like hours searching through my bags for any kind of contraband. They’re silent as they do this. Too silent. With each minute that I was laying prone on that hard carpet, my burning back and the back of my head in their sights, fear of an eventual catastrophe became all encompassing. Fuck. Are they going to shoot me in the back? Fuck!
The officers came away with nothing. And of course they didn’t find anything because I never was a criminal or a habitual drug user. Like Osaze, and other extreme sensitives, I was born into an educated and respectful familial unit who cared about my welfare. My problems were not simply a byproduct of the bad choices that I’ve made in my life. It was the confluence of being repeatedly exposed to suboptimal environments over time—I was threatened with a knife by an individual the day before—and a mental imbalance that made sicker than I’ve ever been.
The two officers finally grabbed me by the arms and pulled me to my feet. I said a silent prayer this time, for never in my life had I been so relieved to be standing upright. As they prepared to march me out of the hotel room in cuffs, I noticed that the cop who shot me with the taser was grinning as he flips through the pages of one of the books that I’d been carrying with me.
“You should really come take a look at this,” he said. “There is some really good stuff in here. I should take this home with me and use it on my wife.”
The cop with the mustache saddled over to where the lead cop was standing to take a peek. The lead cop passed him the book. The mustached police officer’s shoulders shook as he giggled. These guys really knew how to dig their heels in.
The mustached police officer looked up from the book and said, “Did you see how I kicked that door in. I fucking smashed that door to pieces.”
Sigh.
They marched me out onto the asphalt with no shoes on. I stepped gingerly as they proceeded with ushering me in the direction of the police cruiser. The mustached cop was standing behind me as I leaned against the cruiser. “Do you want me to loosen those handcuffs for you,” he asked.
The cuffs were so tight. “Yes,” I said through a whisper.
He reached down to adjust the handcuff’s grip. I heard something click behind me and I winced, which prompted another chuckle from the guy. Once again I didn’t dare utter a complaint. For I was black and barefoot, surrounded by imposing law enforcement officers who were armed with guns, tasers, and clubs; alone in a city with whom I was in no way familiar. I might as well have been in another country. The mustached police officer stepped in front of me to open the rear door of the cruiser.
I was taxied over to the local psychiatric ward and deposited into a spare room for an intake session. From the chair in which I was sitting, I saw the mild sadist leaning against the door, keeping a keen eye on the pathetic young man in the chair. I was grateful to be alive and generally intact and felt compelled to express my gratitude to him. “Thank you so much,” I said. “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”
********
I turned forty-two this past December. Every morning I look in the mirror and I see the signs of aging gradually accumulate. More gray hairs are sprouting from the bottom of my chin, my hairline is retreating to the back of my head, the metal implants in my knees are probably rusting, the groves in my stomach have morphed into a paunch, and my lower back could go out at any minute. My mind isn’t as sharp as it used to be either. Growing older is hard on a man. But unlike Osaze, who was gunned down at about the same age that I was picked up in Portland, I’m at least able to look back at the past, learn from it, and look forward to the future.
Fourteen years have gone by since I was released from the psychiatric ward in Portland. In that time I’ve obtained employment at the Mental Health Center of Denver as a peer worker for other sensitives like me. I taught elementary school for two years after that, graduated with honors from the master’s degree program at the local university, worked at the local respiratory hospital for five years straight—my longest tenure at any company, cultivated friendships that I’m confident are going to last forever, attended my sister’s law school graduation, and I’m making a few dollars as a writer too.
I was with my father as he battled cancer and kidney disease over the span of a year. I was in the hospital room as he cried out, “I love you Eze!” after he realized that he was not going to be able to defeat cancer for a second time. And I delivered my father’s eulogy in front of dozens of mourners after he passed away from cancer and renal failure in the winter of 2013.
I am the only son of Nigerian immigrants, the first of my family to be born in the United States of America. The significance of my existence cannot be understated. Do you know how pivotal it was for me to be able to speak at my father’s funeral? What would have looked like if his only son was absent from the funeral proceedings. What would happen if there was no remaining male survivor on my father’s side of the extended Ihenetu family? The amount of heartbreak in that moment would have been amplified to a point that I cannot conceive.
********
The policemen probably didn’t see any potential when they were stuffing the barefoot and harried black stranger into the back of the squad car fourteen years ago, which makes their decision to spare me from the fate that was imposed upon Osaze, and on the other untold number of black African and American men in the country, that much more noteworthy. They encountered me when I was an imminent danger to my own well-being and a danger to the Portland community. Now couple that with the fact that I hadn’t immediately complied with their commands after they’d announced their presence. Those cops could have just shot me dead. When asked to justify their reasoning for the aftermath, they could have cited my inability to comply with their commands as a justification for plugging me with bullets. Everyone would have taken their word for it and moved on to the next moments of their lives.
So many young black mentally ill men have been cut down by the police before they’ve had the chance to realize their own potential. Osaze was studying at Penn State and had established roots in the community. He was very well regarded by all of the people who had come to know him. “He was a man of peace who loved everybody” they said. It’s beyond tragic that this young man wasn’t allowed the opportunity to thrive someday.
When I come across the stories like Osaze’s, I am ruined for the rest of the day. It’ virtually impossible for me to concentrate on anything substantive, as I am forced to wrestle with an acute case of survivor’s remorse. Eventually, that remorse and guilt that I struggle with will be replaced with relief and gratitude because I was granted the extra chance to live a life that may be worthy of remembrance one day. So I want to offer a thank you to the cops who chose to subdue me with a modicum of unnecessary force and a taser instead of stopping me forever with a gun.
My two sisters thank you and my momma thanks you too.
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