31 Replies to "West Seattle Crime Watch: Ryan Cox in jail again"

• marty September 21, 2011 (8:07 am)

  This guy is a time bomb waiting to go off.

• Wallflower September 21, 2011 (8:35 am)

  Agreed. All the signs are laid out over and over.

• eastwest September 21, 2011 (8:39 am)

  Stuff like this drives me crazy, the laws seem so slanted in his favor. We can do nothing until he either seriously hurts or kills someone because to intervene now would violate his rights.

• Jiggers September 21, 2011 (9:11 am)

  the great court system allows them to be released and do whatever they do..

  • WSB September 21, 2011 (9:22 am)

    In this case, which we have followed closer than most, going to multiple court hearings, including Mental Health Court, where the judge is tasked with quickly evaluating competent-or-not (ask question/listen to answer) – it’s not just the court system, it’s the legal system. And certainly it is created to protect people from abuses of the past, where you might have been locked away for being “insane” when your only sin was to be different (see, Frances Farmer).
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    But in this case, we have been told by the experts involved, the barrier to determining that someone like this should be “committed” is so incredibly high, that most of the time, they are sent to Western for the eval, then sent away with a bus ticket and a “OK, good luck.” The medical-privacy rules mean that no one – not even the prosecutor! much less the media – is allowed to know whether the person was “committed” or not. And in terms of whether a suspect can be “restored” – basically, forcibly drugged – to competency to stand trial, if it’s not a major violent crime, there’s a very high bar to meet there too. None of this is meant as apologism, but having somewhat followed this man’s case for a few years now, I have to say, it’s really complex.
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    As a side note – a couple years ago, a woman came up to our booth at an event in The Junction where we were tabling. We chatted about something WSB-ish or WS-ish for a few moments. Then suddenly she said, “I’m Ryan Cox’s mother.” That of course changed the conversation. The setting wasn’t conducive to in-depth conversation but I thought I recalled her saying she might be interested in talking more. If she is by any chance reading this … I lost your e-mail address shortly after receiving it, and can’t remember your name, but always did want to follow up (I’m still at editor@westseattleblog.com) … TR

• bridge to somwhere September 21, 2011 (9:20 am)

  i think it’s a mistake to put the severely mentally ill in the same camp as a criminal who can control his behavior and know better. the court system isn’t the right way to deal with people who “aren’t competent to stand trial,” which is why that declaration exists in the first place.
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  mr. cox shouldn’t be sitting in jail, he should be sitting in a psychiatric institution. i agree that this is a crisis waiting to happen–but properly dealing with mental illness is not throwing the mentally ill into jail with people who know right from wrong and yet specifically choose the latter.

• bridge to somewhere September 21, 2011 (9:41 am)

  thanks for the explanation tracey. you know far more about the process and this case than i do. my perception as a total outsider though is that the various laws, organizations, standards, systems, etc. haven’t been well coordinated or funded regarding mental health cases. so people fall through the cracks, or there is no place to put them, or there is no funding to oversee them, or there is some kind of law prohibiting coordination across agencies (ad infinitum). it’s very easy to blame some single organization (or, regrettably, some family member including the accused) for real systemic failures; it’s easy, but it’s naive. other countries handle mental health issues in a far more comprehensive and moral way, and to much better outcomes. i believe the first step in improving public safety and that of the lives of the mentally ill is for us to get past blaming the victim–in this case, those who are victims of their own delibitating mental illness.

• Jeff September 21, 2011 (10:16 am)

  Call me simplistic, but if he spray paints MY garage door, I consider myself the victim and him the criminal, regardless of motivation.

• bridge to somewhere September 21, 2011 (10:27 am)

  @jeff: i believe it’s possible for *both* of you to be vicitims in a sense. i would be angry too if someone spray painted my door, but i don’t think a deeply mentally ill person who spray paints my door is making the same kind of choice that an otherwise healthy tagger is. consider this definition of mental illness: “Mental illnesses are medical conditions that disrupt a person’s thinking, feeling, mood, ability to relate to others and daily functioning.” by definition then some behaviors exhibited by the mentally ill aren’t rational “choices” as we may perceive them; they are the result of a sickness, like coughing may be for others.

• SJ2 September 21, 2011 (10:43 am)

  He was hanging out at camp long for quite a while, with his jug of milk. Several people have seen him. As far as I know, he hasn’t done anything wrong there, but him being there watching down on the trails bothered me enough not to go back. I am sad to see his bail is only set at $8,450.

• Denise September 21, 2011 (11:08 am)

  I wonder who bails him out every time? Agree that he belongs in an institution, but I’d rather he be in jail than out on the streets. Only a matter of time before this guy explodes.

• Jim P September 21, 2011 (11:23 am)

  “mr. cox shouldn’t be sitting in jail, he should be sitting in a psychiatric institution. ‘

  One or the other. Equal to protecting the rights of the individual is protecting the rights of the many. The right to be secure in our homes and community for example.

  Past a certain point, he must be restrained. One does not let a harmful animal loose simply because it “does not know what it is doing”.

  Much of what is called “liberal thinking” in this country is presupposed on the basis that the rights of the many outwiegh the rights of the one and that the one must sacrifice for the “greater good”.

  I do not necesarily subscribe to this but I find it odd that often those who do so also seem to champion the right of someone to continue harming the many.

  The “why” he does things is less important on a societal level than preventing him from doing those things that harm others.

• bridge to somewhere September 21, 2011 (11:47 am)

  @jim: agreed, but who in this case do you believe is championing the right for cox to harm the many?

• Alvis September 21, 2011 (12:25 pm)

  I feel most threatened by last month’s stalking charge to which he pleaded guilty. Why are the specifics of the court charge and guilty plea still being withheld from the public (online) record?

  • WSB September 21, 2011 (1:33 pm)

    Alvis – I requested that first thing this morning from the City Attorney’s Office and have JUST received it – stand by for addition. They’re not being withheld- it’s just that Municipal Court details are not online, in ANY case, the way King County Superior Court is. Don’t know why that is, but it means that if I’m researching a Muni Court case, I have to contact the City Attorney’s Office. On the other hand, they have far more details about the disposition of cases … just not details of the case itself. Anyway, I’m off to read/update – TR
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    (added) The City Attorney’s Office charging docs are not as detailed as county docs. So now I am checking with SPD in hopes of more details. The “stalking” incident happened in early August, and then apparently the violation-of-no-contact-order involving that victim happened yesterday, before the arrest, which also involved the warrant.

• Jim P September 21, 2011 (2:08 pm)

  “@jim: agreed, but who in this case do you believe is championing the right for cox to harm the many?”

  In essence those who feel it would somehow be unfair to lock him up. He is considered unfit to stand trial, he spends a few days being examined and then released back to what he was doing when he was interrupted.

  If he cannot control his criminal impulses or does not understand them, then we can expect this cycle to continue until such time as he does something really violent or wanders into traffic or finds himself on the wrong end of someone’s firearm. (Bullets do not care if you are fit to stand trial, they pass no judgement, they just do what they are sent to do.)

  If he can be medicated into sanity (or what passes for it around here) he probably should be so he can indeed stand trial for his actions.

  It is not fair to society or indeed to him to just let him wander loose, doing as he pleases to the harm of others.

• Rick in the park September 21, 2011 (2:35 pm)

  For everybody’s information, Ryan has been living in the tall grass above the tennis courts for several months, just below Solstice park. I’m sure, when he’s released again, he will head right back to his little nest there.

• Anon September 21, 2011 (2:58 pm)

  The West Seattle tennis courts?
  I played tennis there about 2 weeks ago and someone was sleeping on the bench behind the courts. When he woke up he just stared at everyone for about an hour and walked back up the hill (into the garden area)
  It was weird. I felt a little uncomfortable but just ignored him and kept playing. Not sure if it was the same guy though.

• burglarbustindad September 21, 2011 (4:31 pm)

  I have 30 plus years of personal involvement in the Washington State metal health care system. My relative with a debilitating mental illness (schizophrenia) ending up in the King County jail after not complying with a policeman’s commands. No treatment occurs in jail…only abuse. The only way to keep him safe was to become his guardian and advocate for his treatment.
  While the mental heath community has of many well meaning, caring people; there is an overwhelming bias toward releasing the mentally ill in to the community. This position seems to be a reaction to the “warehousing” image of the mentally ill in an era before some sort of enlightenment in the 1970’s. Many times I was told how inhumane the large mental institutions were like the ones depicted in the movie “One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest”. I believe it is crueler to allow a large number of mentally ill roam the streets. The chances for a cure are remote although I understand that recent research into the genetic root of these diseases has promise. There must be a better way.

• ellenater September 21, 2011 (7:22 pm)

  Thank you for that, burglarbustindad. Well said.

• Alyxx B September 21, 2011 (8:43 pm)

  I watched the arrest – we were at the store picking up some things lateish last night, and the police really came storming in and yelling. Mr. Cox seemed extremely agitated before the officer got to him, and of course more so when he did. I think the man needs some help, but he also needs to be off the street.

  • WSB September 21, 2011 (8:56 pm)

    FYI for Alvis and anyone else interested – I still do not have the info I have requested from SPD regarding the circumstances of the incident/arrest, so hopefully I will get that tomorrow and will write a followup then – TR

• waterworld September 21, 2011 (11:43 pm)

  It was not “liberal thinking” or “enlightenment” that led to the policy of massively de-institutionalizing the mentally ill. The primary force was fiscal conservativism in the Reagan era — people decided they didn’t want to pay for it anymore. It didn’t help that decades of failure to invest in facilities, maintenance, and mental health professionals had led to such decay in mental institutions that it was often far worse than jail. Please don’t blame it on the “legal system” or “liberals” that we don’t have any meaningful system for protecting the mentally ill from themselves or us from the mentally ill. When people in this country are ready to take a step back from the notion that punishment is the greatest tool mankind has invented for changing behavior and protecting the law-abiding, that’s when we might begin to develop methods of addressing life-long mental illness in a way that works for everyone.
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  If you want to keep people like Ryan Cox off the streets, you’ll need to first be willing to recognize that we will all be better off if folks who are so ill they cannot function in society are provided with a modicum of shelter, care, and support. Maybe also we need to broadly accept the reality that profoundly mentally ill people do not generate the kind of criminal intent that the mentally “healthy” do, so things like criminal trials and jail and probation do nothing to reduce the likelihood that after the sentence is served, the misbehavior will stop. It is depressing to witness the cruelty and abuse dished out to mentally ill inmates in jails and prisons. Certainly jail time does nothing to improve their psychological functioning. More often, it gets worse, exacerbated by the usual “tools” of reform offered in jails, like solitary confinement, reducing access to family and friends, and denial of access to programs that might help.
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  Medicating a person to the point that you can put him on trial is an astonishing form of abuse and makes a mockery of our criminal justice system. Let’s take a guy who cannot rationally process what’s going on in the world, trick the jury into thinking he is sane and was sane when he committed the crime, and see how they decide the case. Frankly, it is Kafkaesque.
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  I don’t like the idea that the standards are so watered-down that people who are obviously a risk to others and to themselves are out on the street, literally. I wish we could see past the false dichotomy of either criminal or law-abiding citizen and accept the reality of the situation, which is that providing decent care and housing and, when appropriate, restrictions on their freedom. But locking them in jails and prisons, attempting to punish them into sanity, is compounding our problem.
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  Sorry for the rant — this pushes my buttons.

• bridge to somewhere September 22, 2011 (8:41 am)

  well said waterworld.

• burglarbustindad September 22, 2011 (12:01 pm)

  I respectfully disagree with some of your comments, waterworld. I was personally involved in the 1970’s when patient’s rights advocacy groups aided by the ACLU here and in Reagan’s California argued successfully for more strict commitment standards. I have not observed that the “fiscal conservatives”, or liberals for that matter, have underfunded the care of the mentally ill. Care facilities exist, but most patients need an advocate to insure their treatment.
  It is the nature of the disease that those afflicted do not care for themselves. The current commitment threshold of: “likelihood of serious harm to others; likelihood of serious harm to self; or most commonly, grave disability” is inadequate as currently applied.
  The Director of King County Mental Heath Services told me personally that the process when releasing an inmate with mental illness includes asking the inmate “Can you find the homeless shelter on First Avenue?” If the inmate answered in the affirmative, he or she was released.
  I am glad this issue pushes your buttons, waterworld. Maybe we can improve the way we treat the mentally ill.

• waterworld September 22, 2011 (4:56 pm)

  Burglar: The liberals of the 70s wanted to reduce institutionalization of mentally ill people who could function well in society on medication, and the mentally retarded, many of whom did not belong in such institutions. And you are correct that many states were forced by “liberals” and the ACLU to revamp their approach to involuntary commitment at that time. But that movement was directed toward people who did not belong locked up in mental hospitals in the first place, not so much to those who cannot function safely in society. The folks behind that push also supported ensuring there was adequate funding for community mental health care centers to protect the interests of people with mental illness who are not dangerous and to help identify those who are dangerous. At the close of the Carter administration, a coalition of mental health advocates and professionals drafted the Mental Health Care Act of 1980. Reagan’s administration promptly killed it, so instead of entering a phase of providing strong community care for most of the mentally ill while fixing the hospital-based systems that were in decline and decay, we began to see the effects of the near-complete absence of community mental health care systems alongside crumbling and underused inpatient centers for the dangerously mentally ill. Supply side at work!
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  Having said all that, though, maybe we could meet in the middle instead of bickering about who is responsible. (You can still blame the liberals and I’ll still blame Reagan — but it doesn’t change the result.) I am in total agreement that we are not protecting the seriously mentally ill or anyone else by setting the bar so high that people who truly need specialized care are being released and sent to shelters, or to park benches. My bugaboo is this business of leaving severely mentally ill people to their own devices until they commit crimes, and then prosecuting them and putting them in prison. Not only is it actively harmful to the person who is ill and needs treatment, it’s harmful to other prisoners, to jail staff who not mental health professionals, and ultimately to the rest of us when the person is released again.
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  I have represented mentally ill defendants and watched helplessly while prison officials denied them appropriate medication because the inmate didn’t have a copy of his written prescription. (Do you carry copies of those around with you? Sheesh.) Even a few days without the right medication is a disaster for some of these patients, but the mission of jails and prisons is entirely different from that of mental health hospitals, and they just don’t seem to care.
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  Also, prosecuting and imprisoning the severely mentally ill just reinforces the false but common notion that people who are mentally ill are evil, bad people. I find that just plain offensive and cruel. So yes, let’s redefine the threshold for involuntary commitment, increase the minimum stay upon commitment, and invest in community-based care that keeps the mentally ill on their medication or whatever it is they need. We will all be safer.

• burglarbustindad September 22, 2011 (6:14 pm)

  I agree with you waterworld. Blaming one group is too easy and only polarizes our positions. We can disagree on the events that lead us to this situation; but while more Federal, State and or local funding will help; more funding will not change the legal procedures we use in the treatment of the mentally ill. Discussions such as ours can raise the awareness of this problem but changes to the enforcement of treatment and commitment laws are needed to help the mentally ill. I personally thank you for your advocacy for the mentally ill.
  I do not know Mr. Cox, but given what has been reported here, he should not be in jail. If he was judged not competent to stand trail, meaning he does not understand the charges against him and cannot aid in his defense, how can he be allowed to decide not to seek treatment and sleep in the grass by the tennis courts?

• shauna September 22, 2011 (7:57 pm)

  Regardless of where he is, I’ll feel safer next Sunday morning on the Gatewood playground with him not there. Last Sunday he repeatedly muttered rude comments to my friends, daughter and me.

• Andy September 30, 2011 (9:40 am)

  I got this link from E. Fuller Torrey’s Treatment Advocacy Center’s mailing list. I live in NJ and work for a psychiatric outreach program. I see this happening all the time. I just wanted to comment that you coverage of this matter is remarkable and commendable.
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  I have worked in a county correctional facility for a redirection discharge program for mentally ill inmates before my current job. Things are not much different here with regards to how individuals diagnosed with SPMI are treated. If the Forensic unit in you local facility is anything like here in my part of jersey, it is the worst thing for an individual diagnosed with MI. In addition, the medications provided or made available in correction facilities tend to be constrained and limited as a result of the medication’s cost. I have seen many a individual decompensated as a result of not being able to receive a med that worked effectively because the jail could not provide it. Upon hearing the complaint by clients and family members about the poor care, i was/am forced to remind them that correctional facilities are about custody not treatment. Plus, county facilities do not hold people long enough for any additional internal supports to be effective (i.e. recovery groups).
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  At my current job, i have seen successes of individuals who took responsibility for their recovery and i have seen the opposite, where the individuals refuse to acknowledge the illness and its devastating impact on those around them.
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  Please continue to bring knowledge to those that are unaware of the devastating effects of this misunderstood phenomena.

• Alison September 30, 2011 (11:56 am)

  I am the mother of an adult child with schizophrenia. What is so very tragic about this story is that Mr. Cox clearly has a mental, or more accurately, a brain illness. His behaviors are not choices he consciously makes. If he, along with millions of other fellow human beings, were supported and medically treated for his illness it is very possible that he could be functioning at “normal” levels and living a productive life. We, as a society, have decided to basically throw these people away. Can you imagine the outrage if we did this to people with other illnesses like diabetes, heart disease, cancer, etc.?!

• in awe October 1, 2011 (2:39 pm)

  Allison; you are so right. It saddens me to see human beings, being treated so badly by every walk of society, because they have a brain illness. The word says; what you do to the least of these, you have also done it to me. The heart of man…………

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