(Sept. 16, 2015) The Fairfax County Sheriff’s Office released a disturbing video last week showing the violent struggle with officers that preceded the death of Natasha McKenna—a 37-year-old woman suffering with untreated severe mental illness (“Virginia sheriff releases video of effort to subdue inmate who died,” New York Times, Sept. 10).
Diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, McKenna was arrested early this year on a charge of assaulting a police officer before a 10-day hospitalization. She was taken to the Fairfax jail, and had been there for about a week before the tragic incident occurred.
“It’s my responsibility as your sheriff to ensure that something like this never happens again,” said Fairfax County Sheriff Stacey Kincaid at the beginning of the video.
The video runs for more than 45 minutes, and depicts a graphic altercation between McKenna and five deputies during which she was shocked four times with a Taser.
Early in the video, an officer explains to McKenna that the Sheriff’s Emergency Response Team was going to remove her from her cell to take her to a different jail, and that the team had been called because she had soiled her cell, exhibited noncompliance and was restrained earlier in her custody.
Next, five officers dressed in white biohazard suits, black gas masks and purple gloves walked down a hallway to McKenna’s cell. McKenna emerged from the cell, nude and disoriented.
“You promised that you wouldn’t kill me,” McKenna said to the officers. “I didn’t do anything.”
They urged McKenna to get on the ground. A long struggle began in which she is heard gasping and moaning as the officers are repeatedly commanding her to “stop resisting.”
But doctors who had been treating McKenna’s schizophrenia had warned law enforcement that she lacked the ability to process or make decisions for herself.
After she ignored repeated warnings to comply or be shocked, the officers used a stun gun on McKenna four times. She lost consciousness following the struggle and died four days later, on Feb. 7.
McKenna’s death was a tragedy, and a preventable one at that.
Had this severely ill woman been diverted away from the corrections system and placed in a psychiatric hospital bed instead of a jail cell, perhaps she would have lived long enough to receive treatment and stabilize.
Unfortunately, this is not uncommon, as there are now 10 times more individuals with serious mental illness in prisons and jails than there are in state mental hospitals.
We must not let Natasha McKenna’s death be in vain, but instead use it as further motivation to overhaul our mental health system.
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