Things Remembered:
Andrea Thomas
So back to my statement, “I don't
understand Black America.” I will refer you to a new series on my
forgotten blog called “Out of My Mind”(go
here:https://www.blogger.com/blog/posts/8140572634127178933)
on which I will be posting these and
other FB posts some of which will be more focused on my years at the
Allan B. Polunsky Maximum Security Prison of the Texas Department of
Criminal Justice. The more focused posts hopefully will find their
way into a book which I aspire to publish shortly before I die
unless, of course, I don't and then I won't.
For me, attempting to share what I
learned is sometimes best told in stories of people I met in prison.
Andrea Thomas was early in my time at Polunsky. For some reason, I
was making rounds on Death Row and our department had received a
referral about his behavior. Andre's story has been chronicled in
Texas
Monthy(https://www.texasmonthly.com/news/texas-murderer-andre-thomas-is-mentally-ill-but-is-he-insane/)
so there is nothing I can share that is not in the public domain. I
stood at his cell, and attempted to speak with him. At that time,
there was no aggression and I certainly felt no danger. However,
something was off. At that first meeting, I notice that Andrea had
lost an eye but physical injuries was not uncommon among the
offenders. Some were the result of violence done to them, some law
enforcement did to them when they resisted arrest or used weapons
against the law. You might say, “Oh, I didn't know that.” Well, I
am not surprised because how much time have you spent thinking of
where people who are injured, arrested, patched up, convicted,
sentenced and sent to prison go? Exactly. Unless you are in some kind
of prison ministry or have an incarcerated family member, you might
not think about prison at all. The Texas Legislature counts on that.
The out of sight out of mind worked until William Wayne Justice. At
one point, he was labeled “The Most Hated Man in Texas.”Three
significant rulings under his watch brought Texas unhappily kicking
and screaming into the 20th century: the end of school
desegregation; reform of the prison system; and the provision for
bilingual education for immigrant children in Texas.
So, I brought Mr Thomas down to a psych
cell which we had on the premise for offenders who could be suicidal
or had attempted to commit suicide unsuccessfully. It was a room of
cinder block and concrete. It was the only place in the infirmary
where the air conditioning worked too well—except for my office.
There was a stainless steel toilet combined with a lavatory also of
stainless steel and only cold water. I assumed it was because the
suicide risk of an offender burning himself to death with a trickle
of hot water was a risk TDCJ did not want to take. If the person was
nice while in the cell, he would be given a “suicide blanket with
which to cover himself, keep him warm, and protect himself from the
cold air because we took all his clothes. If he was unkind to our
blanket, or attempted to destroy it or had previously destroyed this
indestructible blanket he did not get one. We got 3 days to work with
him and attempt to figure out what he needed. The “manipulating
outcriers” liked to end up in the cells because during the summer
in East Texas temperatures in the cells could be murder. And some
like to show off their man parts to the female nurses and clinicians.
Many of these male offenders got their sex ed from porn so they lived
with the mistaken belief that women swooned when they flashed their
man parts. I know, you didn't see that coming.
Mr Thomas was the real deal. By that I
mean he was unstable, but I was not convinced he was suicidal.
TDCJ(Texas Department of Criminal Justice) had a policy that when an
offender(their term for convict or inmate) entered TDCJ, their crimes
were not common knowledge within the prison. The theory was each man
was given a chance to begin a fresh start. It was also an attempt to
protect sex offenders because they were so hated by the other
offenders. It was a Topsy-turvy world where up was down, down was up,
no one listened, and although mandated, respect was lacking for men
who needed the core value of being respected. The one exception to
that was the death row offender. His crimes were of such nature, it
only took a quick search on the web to pull up the information about
him and his crime.
I had no real information on Andrea
Thomas. My dysfunctional and devastated department did not give me access to any
pertinent information about Mr Thomas. That lack of information on my
part would become significant, but all these years later, I am unsure
what I could have done differently. Mid-morning I ordered Thomas to
be moved to an open psych cell. He was brought down from death row, to the
back of the Infirmary, stripped searched, all restraints
removed(cuffs and leg irons) he was placed in the cell, and given a
“suicide blanket.” I went and prepared the paperwork. Every
offender has to be identified somewhere on the premise, suicidal
offenders are no different. When the prison stops to count, they must
be counted because if not, it could look like they escaped.
As I remember, I returned from lunch
break with a nurse running down the hall screaming, saying something
like, “I can't believe he did it,” over and over again. I guess in
my new job, I overestimated the capacity of our nurses to lean into
any situation with professionalism and a stoic “What needs to be
done here?” First, lunch was not that good. I do remember that.
Then I rounded the corner onto the left hall where two psych obs
cells were located. Standing at the door was one from our department,
and a security officer. People were responding unhelpfully. So I
walked up to the cell and looked at my employee and said, “What
happened here?” The person said, “He dug out his good eye and ate
it.” Yep, it definitely was not that good of a lunch.
The cell was bloodied, his suicide
blanket was bloodied, and as soon as we could, he was transferred to
a hospital for treatment and then to the psychiatric hospital where
he now resides. Andrea was a tragic story almost from the beginning.
What I learned was it was not an unfamiliar story. Raised in a black
community in Grayson County totally unfamiliar with mental illness, he showed early
signs of being mentally ill. A kindly church lady started taking
Andrea to church but he disappeared and she did not keep up with him
or know what was happening. At the target age he developed full blown
paranoid schizophrenia but still fell in love, married, and together
they had children: two; a boy; and a girl. Then they separated and
divorced but Andrea came calling one day stabbing his wife, their children and
attempting to stab himself. Simply, it was murder-suicide gone wrong.
Arrested, tried, convicted, sentenced to DR to be executed, I found
him in 2008 and that morning not in good shape. What I did not know
at the time was he took his other eye.
On that day, he was successful in
totally blinding himself not realizing that without any vision he was
now doomed to the hell of only seeing the horrific images playing
again and again in his head. Sadly, that began a theme I saw repeated
again and again in black offenders. In the black community, there was
no access to mental health care or no awareness of how mental health
could impact a person. So the most seriously mentally ill black offenders
were never identified, never treated, never stabilized, until they
came to prison. Sadly, prison gave them their first experience of
getting the help they needed.
No comments:
Post a Comment