Beverly Anderson tried repeatedly to get her husband AC help for his mental illness and called 911 to no avail two days before he was found frozen to death just outside her home last Friday morning. Credit: Gary Porter

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Beverly Anderson tried hundreds of times over the past few years to get her husband, AC, to go back on his medicine so he wouldn't see rabbits coming out of floorboards or imagine that little men were coming through the heat vents to stab him.

No matter how many times she called 911 and tried to get police or paramedics to take him to the Milwaukee County Mental Health Complex, he would always refuse, she said. AC had used a wheelchair, unable to walk since his neurosurgery in 2011. Police told her that unless he threatened to hurt himself or someone else there wasn't anything they could do.

Milwaukee County has a Mobile Crisis Unit, a team that includes a psychologist, nurse and police officer who are trained to go into the community and deal with people in psychiatric crisis. But the team, dispatched from the Mental Health Complex on Watertown Plank Road, was never called to the Anderson home.

Beverly said she never heard of a crisis team.

Once, a few years ago, Beverly Anderson got her husband, 66, to agree to go to a nearby hospital to be evaluated for his terrifying thoughts, but after nine or 10 hours, he started to worry that the doctors and nurses were going to kill him and he demanded to go home.

"They told us there wasn't nothing they could do if he would not take treatment," she said Tuesday in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "He apparently wasn't dangerous enough."

Beverly found her husband frozen to death on the front steps of his northwest side house at 6:20 Friday morning, three days after she begged police to get him to a hospital. His wheelchair was tipped on its side. AC's body was lying on the pavement. He fell and hit his head so hard his dentures popped out of his mouth.

Police figure he had been out there for several hours. By the time the medical examiner got to the scene, AC's limbs were frozen. His body temperature was 45 degrees.

In the past year, police records show, Beverly Anderson called 911 more than 60 times trying to get help for her husband, a retired carpenter whose slide into psychosis took a steep turn when he went off his medication for schizophrenia in 2009.

"Any fool could see he was paranoid," said Beverly Anderson, 71, a retired insurance claims specialist.

Quiet but funny

Before he started seeing rabbits in the floor and imagining that people in his computer were staring at him, AC Anderson was the kind of guy who taught his granddaughter how to dip her toast in coffee.

"He'd take me to Grants at 4th and Grant and buy me breakfast," said Erica Pirtle, 23, as she wiped a tear from her right eye. Pirtle remembers how AC calmed her down a few years ago after she crashed her grandmother's car.

"He told me, 'A car can be replaced. You can't,'" she said. "That made me feel better."

Beverly and AC met in 1987 at The Wright Spot, a bar on Wright St.

"He was quiet, but really funny when you got him going," Beverly said.

And he met her criteria:

He had a job, was single and he wasn't "shacking up with another woman."

"I knew he had a nervous condition," Beverly said. "But he did real good when he was taking his medicine."

After several months of "courting and sparking," AC and Beverly were married. And the first several years were very good.

"He was a real good daddy to my kids," Beverly said.

In 2009, for no apparent reason, AC stopped taking his medication, Beverly said. The next year, their house burned and they moved in with her daughter and grandchildren.

AC had grown "mean and ornery," his wife said. He moved back into their burned-out house several blocks away, once he got the electric company to restore power.

He started falling a lot. Beverly took him to the hospital and said she told doctors, "Figure out what is wrong with this man, because I am not taking him home." Doctors discovered some kind of neurological disorder — Beverly is not sure exactly what was wrong with him — and AC had surgery in September 2011. He could not walk well after that.

"He did not rehab well," Beverly said. "He would scream and holler and raise all kinds of holy hell."

Beverly said she understood why you can't just put someone in the psychiatric hospital who does not want to go.

"There has to be a reason, or else people would be calling all the time trying to get their husband or wife away from them," she said.

But when a person is obviously sick and paranoid and can't be reasonable, there have to be ways to get them care.

"There should not be this many roadblocks," she said.

Milwaukee police did not respond Tuesday to requests for comment.

Jim Kubicek, the acting director of Milwaukee County's Behavioral Health Division, said he could not comment on specific cases. But he said the law limits what police can do with a patient who is not obviously in danger.

"It is what it is," Kubicek said. "Those are the standards we have to work with."

He noted the county's social services can be accessed by calling 211.

But Beverly said she did not know that, and police did not suggest that she call that number.

So every time AC would fall or cause trouble, Beverly would call 911. But the paramedics would never agree to take him to the hospital.

"They told me that they couldn't take him, but I could," she said. "Once, they even put him in my car, but AC wouldn't budge."

Called 911

Beverly called 911 again Tuesday, Dec. 31, after AC began ranting about the men in the heat ducts chasing him with knives.

The paramedics showed up with two Milwaukee police officers.

"Do you see how upset your family is, Mr. Anderson," Pirtle recalled one of the officers telling her grandfather.

But AC wouldn't go to the hospital.

"They said they couldn't take him if he didn't want to go," Pirtle said. "They told us that would be kidnapping."

One of the officers told Beverly that AC was probably getting Alzheimer's disease, and they gave her a business card for the Milwaukee County Council on Aging.

The next day, New Year's Day, AC fell from his wheelchair, and, once again, Beverly called 911. The paramedics took his vital signs, wrestled him back into his wheelchair and left. He spent the next day at home. Beverly went to shoot pool with some friends while Johnny, a friend of AC's, came by the house to spend the day with him.

AC had wanted Johnny to take him out for a beer, but he told AC it was too cold outside, Beverly said.

When Beverly came home at 9:45 that night, AC was asleep, as usual, in the living room lounge chair.

Beverly awakened just after 6 the next morning to find the front door wide open and blasts of cold air billowing. She found her husband's body slumped on the sidewalk about 20 feet from the front door. He was wearing a T-shirt and jacket, but no pants or underwear and only one sock, on his left foot, according to the medical examiner's report.

The temperature outside was 4 degrees below zero.

Beverly figures AC woke up in the middle of the night — the way he often did — and was hallucinating that someone was trying to kill him.

Standing in her grandmother's living room on Tuesday as the family prepared for AC's funeral, Pirtle said she feels guilty about his death. AC had asked her to take him to a friend's house the day before, and she figures he would still be alive if she had obliged.

"He was a good papa," she said, starting to sob again.

Her cousin, Allyiah Hall, rubbed her arm.

"She's taking this very hard," Hall said. "She's blaming herself. I told her it wasn't her fault."