Norman and Joan Scott hid the knives when their grown son came for dinner.

They coped as best they could with his mental illness and wanted nothing more than for him to get better. They paid his insurance, covered his motel bills so he wouldn't be homeless and saw him through at least 23 hospitalizations.

The couple twice sought restraining orders, once after Doug Scott threw his mother's cat into the New River and again after he struck his father. They hoped the court would force their son, who was bipolar and an alcoholic, into treatment.

"We can see that this is escalating," Norman Scott warned a Fort Lauderdale detective as far back as June 2004, reporting that his son beat him and ripped out the kitchen cabinets.

When Doug Scott threatened to kill his mother and "get" his father in April 2013, police took him for emergency psychiatric care, records show. "Without treatment I believe that Scott will hurt people around him," the officer wrote. The hospital quickly released him.

Four days later, 81-year-old Norman Scott was dead -- stabbed 13 times, police said, by his only child.







Across Florida, families of the seriously mentally ill are literally dying for help.

No government agency monitors the tragedies. But a six-month Sun Sentinel investigation determined that people with mental illness have killed or brutally assaulted at least 500 loved ones in Florida since 2000. During that time, Florida's spending on mental health programs has declined significantly: When adjusted for inflation, the state last year spent one-third less per capita on mental health and drug treatment than it did in 2000, according to a Sun Sentinel analysis of data.

The result is a mental health system in crisis, one that too often misses opportunities to help the seriously mentally ill and prevent the violence. In a review of government records and interviews with relatives who have never before spoken publicly, the newspaper found:

• In dozens of cases, psychotic people were brought to hospitals, treated and released, only to kill themselves or a loved one within days, even hours.

• A lack of crucial follow-up care, secure treatment centers and accessible psychiatrists has fueled repeated emergency visits to hospitals.

• Hospitals have discharged people without places to go, sending them out with bus passes or cab vouchers.

• Lawmakers have rejected calls for more funding for safe, supervised housing for the mentally ill, leaving families with the horrible choice of taking in a volatile, unstable adult or casting the person out into the street, homeless.

• Some people with mental illness finally do get the medication they need --after killing a loved one.

Strapped for cash Florida's per-person spending on mental health and drug treatment has dropped by nearly one-third since 2000 when adjusted for inflation. PER CAPITA SPENDING $80 60 40 20 0 ’04 ’06 ’08 ’10 ’12 ’02 ’14 ’16 Sources: Florida Department of Children and Families, U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

After the tragedies, families often cling to the evidence of their efforts to get help: kept in cardboard boxes, tote bags, file folders. They have medical records and documents with names of doctors and dates of hospitalizations, phone numbers of officials called, copies of police reports, and letters written to government agencies, even to the president of the United States.

Her husband dead and her son jailed for his murder, Joan Scott, now 85, keeps piles of paper in crates in a corner of her bedroom, documenting their attempts over decades to get Doug help. "It isn't that we haven't tried," she said.

Ghastly Results

A Florida law meant to defuse crises is often the only hope for families with a troubled and dangerous loved one. And too often, the Sun Sentinel found, it fails them.

The 1971 Baker Act allows mentally ill people deemed a danger to themselves or others to be hospitalized against their will for up to three days. For those who need longer treatment, hospitals can seek court orders. But some people are kept only hours and never admitted.

Time and again, patients are hospitalized under the act and sent home -- only to soon inflict grave harm on those trying hardest to help them.

• Police hospitalized James A. Monroe, 61, of Lakeland, in December 2014 after he claimed his wife, Susan L. Monroe, was cheating on him with federal agents crawling around their attic. He was home "within a day or two," prosecutors' records show. Within a week, both husband and wife were dead: He shot her in the head, and police shot him in a standoff.

• Jonathan Harriford said his brother, Sean, now 30, was hospitalized at least 20 times over 10 years, including twice in the month before he allegedly suffocated their mother at her Jacksonville apartment in October 2014. A hospital released him about two weeks before the murder, Jonathan Harriford said.

• Ronald Morgan's parents hospitalized him in May 2001. Eleven days after he was released, police said the 18-year-old beat his father to death with a baseball bat at their Pembroke Pines trailer park, telling police God instructed him in a dream to kill his parents.

More than 500,000 adults in Florida live with a chronic, debilitating mental illness, such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. Many lead productive lives with the support of their families and local mental health agencies, and few turn to violence. Those who do often turn against those closest to them.

The violence can be triggered by delusions and imagined fears: They're acting in self-defense from some perceived threat, or they're stamping out demons because they think their loved one is possessed.

Predicting whether someone may become violent is difficult. "Psychiatrists are not soothsayers," said Steven Ronik, CEO of Henderson Behavioral Health, the largest outpatient mental health provider in Broward County. "They're making clinical judgments as to whether someone is safe to be discharged -- at that moment."

In interview after interview with the Sun Sentinel, families described how hospitals across the state sedate people, give them powerful anti-psychotic drugs, get them talking coherently again -- then swiftly send them home, not much better off.

But hospital representatives say the law allows patients to be held only until they're no longer a threat, and then they must be released. Patients face insufficient local resources to keep them stable and an insurance industry that is less supportive of treatments for mental illness than for physical ailments.

"The coverage is often limited," said Broward Health spokeswoman Daniella Aird. Case managers at community mental health centers, she said, are "stretched thin and overburdened," yet they are the vital link for patients between hospitals and follow-up services, including proper medication.

Quite often, those with mental illness turn to street drugs or alcohol to ease their symptoms, further complicating their lives and care.

Doug Scott had been hospitalized twice in the week before he was accused of murdering his father. Both times, he was held overnight in the emergency room and released, hospital records show.

In the first incident, he was found naked at Fort Lauderdale beach and told police he tried to drown himself to escape evil people trying to kill him. At Broward Health Medical Center, however, he said he'd been drinking and denied being suicidal. Nurses gave him a sedative and he slept. The next morning he was deemed sober and ready for discharge, hospital records show.

Only two days later, police returned him to the hospital, warning that he "has a history of violence and mental illness" and had said "he hates his mother and will kill her."

Scott was disheveled and depressed, but denied homicidal thoughts. Again, the hospital kept him overnight and released him -- with a bus pass, a prescription for an anti-psychotic drug, and the phone number to a local mental health center, hospital records show.

"Baker Act lifted," the records say. "Patient is not a danger to himself or others."

Broward Health said patient privacy rules prevented the hospital from commenting.

"He had so many chances to get help," his mother said. "Police said he fell through the cracks."

Rejected

Even mentally ill people who have sought help on their own have been rebuffed, with dreadful consequences.

Coaxed by police and family, Micah Hobbs, who has schizophrenia, voluntarily went to a community mental health center in Central Florida in March 2014 to talk to a counselor. The staff concluded he wasn't aggressive and couldn't be held under the Baker Act. His mother, Eva, reluctantly took him home.

She didn't survive the next 12 hours. "No, Micah, no!" she cried out in the wee hours of the following morning. Police said Micah stabbed his mother 19 times with a kitchen knife. One wound pierced her heart.

Just the day before she'd told police her son was acting strangely, wasn't taking his medication and had been violent in the past. They'd declined to force a psychiatric exam under the law. Now police swarmed in and out of Eva Hobb's house, taking pictures and recording details about the crime scene, her body splayed across her bed.

Her son was sentenced earlier this year to 40 years in prison.

Jailing a mentally ill inmate in Florida costs up to three times more than treatment. One successful statewide program that provides social workers to visit the mentally ill, ensure they take their medication, go to the doctor and have adequate housing, costs $35 a day. By comparison, it costs $121 a day to house a person with mental illness at the Broward County Jail.

A mid-summer study at that jail found 100 mentally ill inmates had been booked an average of 34 times apiece just in the last three years. The cost to taxpayers: more than $22 million.

"We're going to be paying for either prison or treatment," said Kathleen A. Smith, the public defender for several counties in southwest Florida. "You can treat people for far less outside of a prison setting. So we're all paying for it as taxpayers one way or another."

Just getting into a hospital for mental health treatment requires drastic action, said Edward Covington. He would know. Covington is on Death Row for one of the most gruesome crimes on Florida's west coast -- the slaughter of an entire family.

In an interview with the Sun Sentinel at Florida State Prison, the mentally disturbed killer described his odyssey through the mental health system, including once when he cut his arms to appear suicidal and be admitted. "To go to the hospital and say, 'Hey, I'm bipolar. I have mental illness ... I don't feel right,' they can't take action," he said. "You basically have to hurt somebody or attempt to hurt yourself."