Standoff with Surrey RCMP highlights concerns about inmates’ release without meds
Shortly after 2 p.m. on January 29, more than a dozen RCMP officers surrounded the Grouse Creek Motel on King George Boulevard in Surrey.
Twenty-seven-year-old Chris Trotchie had barricaded himself inside Room 211 and was threatening to harm himself and shoot anybody who tried to enter.
“You breach that door, I will draw on you,” Trotchie screamed to police while on the phone with the Georgia Straight.
Six members of an RCMP emergency response team wielded automatic weapons. Meanwhile, a negotiator worked through a small camera that police had inserted into the room.
“What are you hiding behind your back, Chris?” the negotiator shouted.
Trotchie’s response came quick: “You will see when you open the door.”
The exchange continued.
“I’m in control,” Trotchie yelled. “I control what happens to me. And to be perfectly honest with you, I don’t give a fuck about dying today.”
Earlier in the call, Trotchie spoke in a whisper.
“I do not want to go back to jail and go sit in a fucking seg [segregation] cell all alone,” he said with a tremor in his voice. "Fucking listen to people kick and bang and fucking not sleep and have fucking nightmares every night. I swear to you, I will make them fucking execute me.”
Trotchie had a knife. During the standoff, which lasted just more than two hours, he used it to cut himself in several places. But it turned out he didn’t have a gun. When officers finally entered the room, Trotchie did not resist arrest.
The following morning, RCMP Cpl. Bert Paquet told the Straight that the incident ended “about as smoothly as it gets”. But officers were worried they were going to have to shoot Trotchie in what could have become a case of suicide by cop, Paquet revealed.
“He made threats during the negotiation that he would injure members if they tried to arrest him,” Paquet explained. “It is definitely something that is on the officers’ mind, especially since he was already inflicting himself with injuries.”
Officials released Trotchie, a chronic repeat offender, from prison on November 20. Surrey RCMP placed him on their most-wanted list on December 9 for violating probation. Paquet said police knew Trotchie was prescribed psychiatric medications while in prison and were aware he was not taking those pills when the situation developed at the hotel.
“That was key in planning the response, or the strategy, as to how we were going to deal with him,” Paquet said.
That information has Trotchie’s father, James, wondering why—if police knew his son was off his prescribed medication—no one helped him before the situation became a crisis.
“He doesn’t have no money; he doesn’t have a proper prescription or nothing,” James said via phone. “So he gets nothing.”
At a December 10 meeting at the Guildford Town Centre food court, Trotchie told the Straight he was released from Surrey Pretrial Services Centre with little more than a bag of clothing and a bus pass.
“My first priority was the Ministry [of Social Development] for shelter, support, and medical coverage for psych meds,” Trotchie said. He never was able to navigate that bureaucracy, a failure common with inmates coming out of B.C. prisons, service providers report.
In a telephone interview, Lookout Emergency Aid Society executive director Shayne Williams argued that existing government services are inadequate. “An inmate can apply for social assistance the day they get out, but they have the same waiting period as anybody else,” he said. “At the best of times, at least three weeks. So what does a person do?”
Williams recommended B.C. Corrections begin connecting inmates with health services while they are still in provincial custody awaiting release.
“There has been a huge challenge within the system in terms of releasing inmates and lack of continuity around their care, and especially their mental-health care,” he said. “More often than not, they don’t connect quickly enough with a doctor and don’t connect quickly enough with a pharmacist to continue the medications that have kept them stabilized.”
Julia Payson, executive director of the John Howard Society of B.C., told the Straight there is no standard procedure for an inmate’s postrelease care.
“We hear, quite a bit, about people coming out with no medications and, as a result, struggling when they are released,” she said.
Payson noted that in Ontario, inmates are given a two-week supply of the medications they received in prison. She suggested B.C. could do the same.
The B.C. Ministry of Social Development referred questions to the Ministry of Justice, which refused to grant an interview. An email supplied by spokesperson Stuart Bertrand states correctional staff inform inmates on how to access support upon release. “Ultimately,” it continues, “it is up to the individual to follow through with any appointments that are not mandatory.”
Canada’s chief correctional investigator, Howard Sapers, previously told the Straight it’s estimated more than a third of new prisoners are identified as having a mental health condition.
A December 2014 report authored by Laurie Throness, B.C.’s parliamentary secretary for corrections and Liberal MLA for Chilliwack-Hope, acknowledges that former inmates are falling through cracks in the system.
“Offenders with serious mental health issues are discharged without the proper prescription medications,” it states. “When they go off their medication, they become vulnerable to further criminal behaviour.”
James said that in the past his son was released with meds but never more than a one or two days’ supply.
“Every time that Christopher gets arrested, the first thing the police do is phone me up to ask me, ‘Do you have Christopher’s medication?’ ” James recalled. “And I say, ‘I don’t have no medication for him because he wasn’t released with any.’ ”
Hours after the incident at the Grouse Creek Motel, Trotchie was back on medication for the first time since his November release from Surrey Pretrial. He was heavily sedated at Royal Columbian Hospital.
Series: Chasing a crisis
Part one: Vancouver police still seeking help to prevent a mental-health crisis
Part two: Amid a mental-health crisis, Vancouver care providers revisit the debate on institutionalization
Part three: Vancouver service providers fail to get ahead of a mental-health crisis
Part four: B.C. prisons lock mentally-ill offenders in isolation
Part five: Vancouver's ill and addicted lost in a mental-health care maze
Comments
5 Comments
Enough is enough
Feb 4, 2015 at 3:05pm
This is why Riverview Hospital needs to be renovated and reopened. The closure of Riverview was a total failure.
Gord
Feb 5, 2015 at 10:50am
This is another classic example of stakeholders not communicating. The justice system recognizes someone to be ill, provides medication and then releases the offender. Healthcare is not there to intercept the client; most of the reoffenders are inside because of missing a meet with PO or other administrative infractions. No meds, no structure, no healthcare, no nothing. Released to the street and justice expects a different outcome. Ridiculous.
These people are ill and need care not jail. Ask any one candidly who works in justice. Answer - these ill inmates should not be in here!
Lewis
Feb 5, 2015 at 8:43pm
The article mentions that there are people being released from prisons that require daily medication without even having a prescription. The fact was also reported that even when they are required to take their medication while in prison some of these people are not able to integrate into prison society and authorities find it necessary or convenient to house them in solitary confinement.
As such how many of these people should be transferred directly into a mental health facility rather than released into the general public when released from prison? Of those that should be directed into a mental health facility how many of those require full confinement and how many just require supervision that could be provided with a halfway house?
What changes to legal requirements and judicial standards would be required? How would these changes be accepted by various advocacy rights groups?
Serendipity Rose
Feb 6, 2015 at 7:26pm
My late husband was released from prison in December 2014 and was dead 4 days later. He had diagnosed mental health issues and had been assessed at Colony Farms. We were separated but he was a good man when he was taking his meds and staying away from the booze. His discharge plans included employment in the Okanagan and he was released and died homeless in PoCo within days. I will be pursuing his records from corrections and Colony Farms and I will not be surprised if I find a lack of due diligence in his case. There is something very fishy with his probation order too but this is getting a little long. The coroner seems to be evading my phone calls but I am cutting her slack because she is very busy. With that being said, I know the report is completed because the coroner's office did manage to tell me that much. Freedom of Information forms will be filled out in a few weeks and then I hope to get to the bottom of the matter.
Anne Miles
Feb 9, 2015 at 3:44pm
The main problem here is they have nowhere to go. All the facilities we used to have have been closed or are full. One of the definitions of the word "asylum" is
"a place affording safety from attack, or shelter". I realize that placing people in institutions, especially involuntarily, can lead to abuse--but is it greater abuse than being turfed out on the street, sick and with no where to go?