The Case of Lashuan Harris

Posted on October 20, 2005 in Class Justice Stigma

“There are no words to describe how much this saddens me.”
Heather Fong, San Francisco Police Chief

Yet another sensationalist account of a mother who killed her offspring plays over the airwaves as I write this. CNN is indirectly attracting advertising dollars by focusing on the search for three bodies in the San Francisco Bay:

Authorities told the San Francisco Chronicle that [23-year-old Lashuan] Harris told them that voices told her to throw the children in the water.

Relatives said Harris suffers from schizophrenia and wasn’t taking her medication.

“She was out of her mind. She wasn’t in her right mind,” a woman who identified herself as Harris’ cousin told KGO-TV. “Lashaun wasn’t the kind of person to do anything wrong to her kids.”

Family members said Harris had been living at a shelter in Oakland but recently said she was going to San Francisco.

The story goes on to record the response of San Francisco’s mayor, Gavin Newsom:

At a news conference Thursday, Newsom said the alleged actions make “you frankly sick to your stomach.” He cited the city’s resources for people who feel they can’t care for their children, such as drop-off stations known as “safe havens.”

MSNBC added this tidbit to the story:

Harris was diagnosed with schizophrenia earlier this year and had threatened to hurt her children, according to Britney Fitzpatrick, her 16-year-old half-sister.

“She told my mama she was going to feed them to the sharks,” Fitzpatrick said. “No one thought it was that serious.”

About a dozen other family members met the girl at Pier 7 midday Thursday. They got out of a van and gathered together to hold hands and pray.

Authorities and broadcasters will undoubtably murmur “tragedy tragedy” and then do nothing at all about the conditions which led to the dumping of three toddlers off Pier 39. What are those conditions?:

I would rather deal with them as questions because at this point I do not have all the facts. The first question pertains to the cost of her schizophrenia medication. Was it simply more than she could afford to pay? I know of uninsured bipolar disorder sufferers who find themselves paying as much as $500 a month for their meds. As the money and the meds run out, it becomes almost impossible not to become noncompliant. (I live in fear that my wife will lose her job and we will lose our insurance!) Deprived of their prescriptions, many patients attempt to self-medicate. No one it seems has asked the big question: was Harris either drunk or on street drugs at the time?

The second question: What kind of environment do people think a shelter is? It’s not a place that is condusive to staying on your meds. A shelter breeds chaos because the staff is often overwhelmed. People sleep on the floor because there are not enough beds. When we were looking for a place for a friend who had recently been hospitalized, we were strongly advised by the shelters themselves against attempting to place her there. Shelters breed stress and stress leads to episodes of noncompliance and worse.

The last question pertains to her family: Just what kind of attitudes did they have about her mental illness? That they went to the scene of the murders and prayed suggested to me “magical thinking”. In other words, Harris might have been brought up in an environment which told her that she could expect miracles and to listen to the voices of angels. Another bipolar sufferer I know took her hands off the steering wheel because she said an angel told her to do so. Her family taught her to listen to the angels when they talk. Are there other schizophrenics in Harris’s family? Could she have been taught to think uncritically about those voices?

From what I have learned from other mentally ill people, what we have been taught affects the course of our illness. In the film The Aviator, for example, the young Howard Hughes is shown being taught the word “Quarantine” by his mother. This word and the ideas associated with it become the meat and bones of his later life obsessions. The similarity to the Andrea Yates case also suggest themselves: like Yates, Harris apparently came from a religious background and was surrounded by religious people of that variety which believes in divine intervention and instruction. For what she was taught, can we fault her?

It’s all too easy for Mayor Newsom and the pundits to place the blame on Harris, especially when they can reduce it to “she didn’t take her meds”. The story, it seems to me, is more complicated. Having moved home from Florida only recently and forced to live in a shelter, Harris existed in a frazzled world made worse by her disease. She may not have had insurance yet (I have known recent arrivals in California to go for months before they are protected under MediCal). Newsom can go on and on about Harris’s maternal negligence, but he and other government officials should be called to account for the shoddy way they fail to assist the mentally ill.

No, they didn’t kill the three kids. They just made it real likely.