When mental illness and the law collide

Sunday, October 30, 2016

Rachel Hornback squirmed in the courtroom, tearful and helpless as her girlfriend Renee Boyd began to stammer in front of the judge.

Something wasn’t right. Renee was supposed to simply enter her plea, but the judge kept making her say what she already had told him — how exactly had she assaulted patrolman Jonathan Ortmann? What happened Jan. 27? What was happening now?

From the gallery, Rachel could hear the confusion in Renee’s voice. It all felt so wrong — the hearing, the felonies, the jail and the courts and nine months of worrying sick. But then again, not much since January had gone according to plan.

It was October now. They were tired, and Renee had been offered a way out. It wasn’t great, but she was too afraid not to take it.

As society’s understanding of mental illness grows more nuanced, area agencies and institutions grapple with how best to account for disorders in the field.

Renee found out firsthand how quickly mental illness can jeopardize a person’s livelihood, especially as it steered her too close to law enforcement. Her experience that night, in a flash of mutual misunderstanding, set her on a journey through jail and court toward a future that’s still unclear.

Renee’s first venture into the criminal system began Jan. 27.

Renee and Rachel, now 23 and 24 respectively, were at home, a little green house at 1000 N. Middle St. in Cape Girardeau. The house was shabby, but having dated for three years, it was the first place they had shared as a couple, and it was what they could afford to rent.

Without a car, Rachel walked the mile or more or caught rides to and from her shifts at Dollar General. Renee, who’d been diagnosed as a child with a variety of mental disorders, was on disability. Her Social Security benefits helped, but they didn’t have much. Mostly, they just had each other.

Renee Boyd looks out over 1000 N. Middle Street in Cape Girardeau where she was arrested in January, 2016.

Laura Simon

Over the seven years they’d known each other, they’d learned each other’s rhythms — Rachel especially, because Renee’s mental illnesses made hers more erratic than most.

Of Renee’s diagnoses, her obsessive-compulsive disorder, chronic depression and Tourette’s syndrome give her the most trouble.

Tourette’s syndrome is a neurological disorder that causes “repetitive, stereotyped, involuntary movements and vocalizations called tics,” according to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

The NINDS also reports many people with Tourette’s, like Renee, exhibit other neurobehavioral problems, including OCD. While it’s not known whether depression or anxiety disorders are directly related to Tourette’s, anxiety and excitement has been reliably shown to worsen tic symptoms in Tourette’s sufferers.

As such, Renee’s conditions tend to compound each other. A tic caused by her Tourette’s might trigger a series of compensatory gestures to satisfy the OCD, Renee later explained.

Likewise, stress and anxiety from a depressive episode could exacerbate her Tourette’s symptoms, and so on.

Though she tried to avoid stressors, things happen. Tics happen. Especially when she was off her medication. And while some tics have come and gone over time, she’s experienced many of those most commonly found in Tourette’s patients. She’s had simple ones such as sniffing, making faces or other spasms while developing complex tics compulsively popping joints or inappropriate outbursts.

Tic symptoms typically fade somewhat with age, but Renee’s were so bad during adolescence school administrators, out of frustration, placed her in a special-education class for a time, she said.When she’s at ease, the tic that’s most outwardly apparent often resembles a cough or sharp clearing of the throat with a small facial twitch.

Bad stress, though, can get problematic. With bad stress, her tics make her prone to fits and self-harm.

“I used to have them all the time when I was trying to figure out medications,” she said. “I’d hurt myself. I never really hurt anybody else.”

Renee Boyd, left, and her girlfriend Rachel Hornback stand at the 1000 block of N. Middle Street in Cape Girardeau where Boyd was arrested in January, 2016.

Laura Simon

Sometimes, she said, it’s head-butting walls. Other times, it’s punching herself on her hips and abdomen.

“This part of my forehead is so thick from bashing my head against the wall,” she said. “It’s like it’s grown another layer of skull or something.”

Before things reach that point, she tries to take steps to calm down, as she tried to do the night she was arrested.

The phone

She began the night at home with Rachel and their friend, Valik Schtolton.

He was the tall blonde boy who worked at Dollar General with Rachel. He was funny and waifish and more than a little bit fabulous. Rachel liked when he told stories of the nights he spent in heels on drag stages.

Renee was not having a good night. It had been five months since she’d begun trying to switch her health insurance to Missouri from Tennessee, where she previously had lived. She still hadn’t figured it out, so for five months she hadn’t taken the antipsychotic prescription she used to manage her Tourette’s.

Some time before 3 a.m., Renee began to get upset.

“Little things would set me off, you know?” she later explained. “I was texting my brother, and the phone was acting up.”

It was a cheap phone, but the only one she and Rachel had. So when Renee threw it in frustration, Rachel got upset, too.

“She was just upset because I was upset,” Renee said, but it still made things only worse.

Fed up, she left. Rachel and Valik thought she only had stormed out for some fresh air. She did that sometimes. Rachel said she typically would have followed to help her calm down, but decided to let her cool off first.

But instead of venting on the porch, Renee ran up the block to be alone, hiding behind a concrete barrier.

When she didn’t come back inside and they couldn’t find her near the house, Valik told Rachel to call the police.

Rachel didn’t know where Renee had gone, but she didn’t think it could’ve been far. It was cold, dark, and she didn’t remember Renee taking a jacket or shoes when she left.

Besides, she figured, Renee hadn’t been doing anything wrong.

They just needed to find her, she told him; not call the cops.

He called them anyway. Just to be safe.

Patrolman Jonathan Ortmann of the Cape Girardeau Police Department pulled up in his patrol SUV at 3:38 a.m., according to the probable-cause statement the officer filed after the arrest.

He found Rachel and Valik outside the little green house Renee had left about 45 minutes before.

Months later, Hornback and Ortmann would tell a judge, under oath, what happened when Ortmann arrived. While they contradicted each other on several key points, the overall sequence of events is undisputed and corroborated by Ortmann’s statement.

After speaking briefly with Hornback and Schtolton, who informed the officer Boyd had been off her Tourette’s medication for months, Ortmann found her in a side yard between her house and one adjacent. No fences separate Boyd’s yard and the neighbor’s, but several trees and bushes grow between them.

Ortmann, wearing his black police uniform and black department-issue jacket, approached Boyd to conduct a welfare check, calling her by name when he was about 20 feet away.

She ran from him back toward her house. She said she wasn’t aware he was a cop — or even the cops had been called — until she had been pinned by Ortmann. At 5 feet, 4 inches, Boyd is smaller than Ortmann. He easily caught and detained her by taking her to ground.

She resisted, striking him in the process. When a paramedic later tried to restrain and place her in an ambulance, she did the same.

As a result, the Cape Girardeau County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office charged her with two counts of felony assault, one apiece for scuffling with Ortmann and paramedic Charles Herman. They charged her with misdemeanor assault for allegedly spitting on the pants leg of another officer who responded to the scene. The state claims violent intent. She faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted.

Since her arrest, Boyd has maintained inside and outside of the courtroom she didn’t assault anyone intentionally. It was an accident, she said, and what the officers perceived to be blows were the product of a mental episode — she contends having been upset, she became terribly confused and frightened when a man in black chased and pinned her to the ground. The stress, she claims, triggered a fit she was unable to control.

“I don’t know if you’ve ever seen someone with mental problems have those lashouts,” she said. “That’s what this was, because of not having my medication.”

As she watched Renee be strapped into the ambulance and driven off into the night, Rachel didn’t know what would happen to her. Nine months later, they still don’t know. Renee is facing charges, still in court and uncertain about her future.

Coming next: Renee goes home after weeks in jail. Officer Jonathan Ortmann on patrol downtown.

tgraef@semissourian.com

(573) 388-3627