Rod Thomas was arrested for slugging a pedestrian on a Manhattan street - with a rock wrapped in a belt - and spent his last six months in the grim confines of Manhattan Psychiatric Hospital on Wards Island.The final sequence in Thomas' violent, troubled life occurred on the evening of Oct. 12, 1990, when he directed sexual remarks at a female hospital aide. Ordered to stop, Thomas snapped.
In the frenzied battle that followed, according to criminal court records, three aides tried to restrain the 26-year-old patient, who stood 5 feet, 10 inches and weighed 178 pounds.
One of the workers, Angel Mely, 35, about 6-1 and 260 pounds, threw his arms around Thomas' chest from behind. They fell to the floor. Two other aides grabbed Thomas' arms and legs.
Suddenly, Thomas stopped moving.
An autopsy showed his neck and chest were crushed. Thomas' larynx was fractured. His eyelids were hemorrhaging, his ribs broken. The medical examiner declared that Thomas died of asphyxiation.
Shocking and sad, the demise of Rod Thomas was hardly an isolated incident.
Thomas was one of 104 mentally ill patients in New York State who died after being restrained between 1979 and 1990, a Newsday investigation has found. Some patients, the investigation shows, suffocated in straitjackets. Some died in seclusion rooms where medical emergencies passed unnoticed. Others were strangled accidentally when aides used choke holds to subdue them. A few suffered fatal side effects of potent anti-psychotic drugs.
While most deaths occurred in state institutions, 11 were reported in hospitals run by New York City, two at Nassau County Medical Center in East Meadow, and four others at private hospitals in the city and on Long Island. Among the dead were:
Sonja Yglesias, who died in 1982 in a steamy room at City Hospital Center in Elmhurst, Queens, after being twice sedated with a powerful drug and strapped to a bed. Rigid and with her temperature at 106, Yglesias lapsed into a coma and could not be revived by frantic medical teams.
Vincent Starling, a Hofstra football player, who perished in a tumultuous encounter with 10 aides at Kings Park Psychiatric Center.
Robert Faria, 28, of Wyandanch, who was sedated with the drug Haldol at Kings Park and strangled a day later when attendants fought to put him in a straitjacket.
Roger Wade, who suffocated at Kings County Hospital Sept. 1, 1991, after a struggle with eight workers trying to put him in a straitjacket...
But other mental health officials agreed that staff shortages and lack of training could be a contributing factor in the state's restraint deaths - an embarrassing situation that may explain why authorities apparently misled a number of families whose relatives died in mental institutions.
For example, when Bennett Fine, 28, a Manhattan bicycle messenger who grew up in Valley Stream, died May 1, 1984, at Mid-Hudson Psychiatric Center in Rockland County, a state doctor told his mother, Mildred, that he was killed in a fall while trying to scale a fence.
But state officials later said Fine suffocated after four aides bound him in a straitjacket and locked him in a cell-like space called a seclusion room - a move that prompted his mother, Mildred, to charge wrongful death.
She sued for $10 million. Five years later, the state settled for $13,500. Mildred Fine says the judge trivialized her son's death by allowing the state to pay so little. "What in effect he was saying was that his life wasn't worth that much," she said.
In a number of fatal restraint cases, state officials wrote letters to families saying they found nothing extraordinary about the deaths. But in some instances, as Fine's case shows, problems were severe...
\Calvin Phinizy, 37, died at Central Islip Psychiatric Center in 1987 when aides tried to force him into a straitjacket. The Suffolk County district attorney's office charged one of the workers with criminally negligent homicide, but the man was acquitted. Only three times in the last decade have hospital workers been indicted in the death of New York mental patients, and none have been convicted...
Between 1979 and 1990, according to records obtained by Newsday under New York's Freedom of Information law, 77 patients died in restraint-related deaths at state hospitals or developmental centers, four in county hospitals, and seven in private hospitals. Four died in private programs for the mentally disabled. Details on the 12 remaining deaths were unavailable...
Vincent Starling, 22, a Hofstra University football player from Wyandanch, died in 1986 when he battled Kings Park aides who said they were trying to subdue him. But Starling's mother dismissed the hospital's explanation, got a lawyer and took the case to court.
"They choked him, they beat him up. They treated him like a dog," said Starling's mother, Mollie, who lives in Wyandanch.
Last year, Court of Claims Judge Leonard Silverman awarded the Starling family $134,000 in damages, finding that Kings Park staff members had used "unreasonable, inappropriate and unnecessary" force. "For 35 minutes, one man, who was a patient, was knocked around by as many as 10 health care providers," Silverman said.
In another incident, Gasparre Rabito, 44, a former school custodian from Deer Park, died six years ago at Central Islip Psychiatric after a struggle with hospital aides...
Sonja Yglesias was among the unfortunate. Sentenced to the Bedford Correctional Facility in Westchester after a Brooklyn stabbing incident, Yglesias, 33, became violent and was sent on Aug. 3, 1982, to the psychiatric ward at City Hospital Center in Elmhurst.
Workers in Ward D-11 strapped her to a bed in a non-air-conditioned room with wrist and ankle cuffs and injected her with Haldol, an anti-psychotic drug that can cause high fevers. When she became rigid, a doctor halted medication but just 25 minutes later, a nurse administered another dose of the potent substance.
Yglesias' temperature hit 101.8 and then 106. Staff members packed her in ice and rushed Yglesias to intensive care, but it was too late. Though her fever passed, Yglesias died.
The New York City medical examiner found the cause of death was an unusually high fever, followed by cardiac arrest. When she drew her last breath, Yglesias was in a coma.
In addition, powerful anti-psychotic medications, given to patients under restraint, have caused deadly side effects when not properly monitored.
The 1984 death of Pablo Santiago at Kingsboro Psychiatric Center drew no public notice. But state investigators classified his death as restraint-connected and sharply questioned the care he received.
According to a state report, Santiago was taken to Kingsboro Psychiatric Center in Brooklyn suffering from alcohol withdrawal and delirium tremens. A doctor prescribed Haldol and Valium for him over the phone and ordered him placed into a straitjacket without examining him. A nurse also gave him Librium.
A few hours after Santiago was admitted, the staff found him rolling on the floor, still in the straitjacket. No one had checked his vital signs. Another doctor determined Santiago was in a coma. A short time later, he was pronounced dead.
The autopsy blamed alcohol-withdrawal syndrome. The state report on his death criticized as "inappropriate" the hospital's restraint and medication orders for Santiago and charged the staff had failed to monitor him...
24 patients died in restraints, or shortly after those restraints were removed.
30 patients died after hospital aides struggled to restrain them - sometimes choking them in the process.
Blood clots contributed to deaths of six patients tied to their beds with wrist and ankle cuffs...
Forquer said lack of staff training in state hospitals rather than the devices themselves may have been responsible for some deaths.
On Dec. 21, 1990, Darrell Booth, 33, clashed with aides at Central New York Psychiatric Center in Oneida County near Rome. Booth, a schizophrenic prison inmate transferred to the hospital for psychiatric care, exhibited bizarre and angry behavior on the day he died.
When aides tried to subdue him, he became more agitated. The staff tried to hold down his legs, arms, and neck. Finally, they lowered Booth to the floor. When they began lacing him into a straitjacket, they discovered he was limp. Later, state investigators for the Commission on Correction - which investigated because Booth had been a prison inmate - found one or more aides had crushed Booth's neck...
Earlier this month, Angel Mely was found innocent of murder charges in connection with the death of Rod Thomas at Manhattan Psychiatric Center. "It's clear to me he was a scapegoat in the situation," said his attorney, Ronald Kliegerman. "It seemed to me the state expended a tremendous amount of time trying to get a murder verdict when they should have been trying to change the procedures they use to ensure patient safety."...
