The lockdown psych ward at which this girl was involuntarily incarcerated for five days was apparently quite frightening: Eight-year-old children saying things like “I’ma gunna kill all you motha-f***ers right F***ing now!” Grade-school aged children bending over at the waist and ramming their head repeatedly over and over again into block walls. Girls who were cut from shoulder to fingertip on both arms from actual suicide attempts having to be monitored on a 1:1 ratio by staff who ensured they didn’t pick out their stitches and bleed to death. Multiple violent children, including one girl who stood up from a chair and just started beating the living heck out of an adult staff worker who’d asked to borrow the girl’s chair, until three other adult workers dragged the violent child – who was speed-bagging the worker with full on kidney-punches – off the adult worker … and after which the violent child was placed in solitary with a Thorazine shot. Bathroom doors that had holes in them (so staff could check to ensure the girls weren’t killing themselves while doing their business). No soap or conditioner (can’t let the girls eat it and die). Hair shampoo – which all the veteran resident-children warned the newcomers not to use – lest their “hair fall out 2 weeks later.” Occasional trips outdoors, to a pool no on could of course use, and to a patch of grass that had been replaced with artificial turf – so the kids would not eat the grass and die from pesticide consumption.
And while, technically, children who are involuntarily committed are given “habeus corpus” paperwork that allows them to challenge an improper involuntary detention, the question must be asked: with no assigned legal counsel, is a 13 or 15 year old abused child – let alone a third-grader ramming his head into the wall – really capable at the ripe old age of eight of filing this paperwork that challenges his involuntary commitment?
Further, per the staff, such paperwork must be filed when the courts are open. Thus, if a child is committed at 5:00 p.m. on a Friday night of a long holiday weekend, by the time any 8 year old who was wrongly committed COULD file the paperwork with the judge on the Tuesday following the holiday weekend, such action would be moot.
Moreover, while state law likely requires these institutions to have a physician available after hours to be “on call,” in the case herein – though the mother and even an MD friend of the mother’s made repeated requests for said on-call doctor to phone the family – the facility and “on call” doctor refused from 5 p.m. on Valentine’s evening through the next morning to ever have such “on-call” doctor respond. (And, nursing staff intimated – although this has yet to be confirmed – during later days that said “on-call” doctors NEVER responded after hours, and indeed, might not even be present in the state).
Which perhaps explains why the commitments to this locked-down psych ward reached a veritable zenith on Valentine’s evening: the girl reported that after she was admitted at 5 p.m., the psych hospital had something like 22 more admissions that night. And indeed, witnesses state that police cruisers were just lining up all night long in the pull-thru in front of the psych ward, dropping off unaccompanied teenage girls (many of whom told the girl in this case they were NOT suicidal and that their “commitment” was thus actually unlawful).
As well, the veteran-residents who’d been locked up previously KNEW the “Baker-Act commitments” were a bit of a racket: they told the girl that the parent’s insurance would be billed for the 72 hours of care, along with all the extensive blood panels and MD visits and medical work-ups done on these allegedly suicidal “girls.” Which 72 hours of care no doubt yielded a hefty payout to the psych hospital owners. And if the parents of these children did not have insurance that would cover the bills of the involuntary 3 day psychiatric commitment? Well then, apparently Medicaid or Medicare or some other third party payor for indigent children would step in. And again, cursory review of the other girls committed during Valentine’s weekend by the child herein yielded the fact that a fair number of them said they were NOT suicidal, but had been committed anyway.
As a human rights attorney looking at the facts herein and assuming such facts are accurate, this whole Baker-Act system poses myriad red flags from a constitutional perspective and from the perspective of these children who are alleging they were illegally and unlawfully committed by teachers and cops who either straight-lied or intentionally perverted their disclosures about being “sad” into false allegations of suicidal ideation. In short, it would seem that the Baker Act law in Florida, while originally enacted with good intentions, has likely been perverted into a veritable pipeline of public-private partnerships (whether official, or indirect, or simply “understood”) by which patrolmen cops in major cities as well as school counselors and teachers are taking teenage girls on busy weekends and funneling them into lock-down facilities … which facilities then get paid handsomely from insurance carriers for such commitments.
I believe Florida would be well-advised to do an undercover operation or other type of audit to determine what percentage of the girls being committed – particularly on Friday evenings of long holiday weekends – were actually properly committed… versus what percentage were simply being deprived of their constitutional rights under the Fourth Amendment to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures and confinements … and in order to line the coffers of the corporations that own these locked-down psych wards.
