Personally Speaking: The law is personal
By Brian Stettin
A young woman named Kendra Webdale was standing alone on a Manhattan subway platform on the evening of January 5, 1999, waiting to catch a train home after visiting her sister downtown. Without warning or provocation, she was pushed to her death into the path of an oncoming train by Andrew Goldstein, who was off his medication for schizophrenia and had a long history of cycling in and out of psychiatric hospitals and jail.
Her death was every New Yorker’s worst nightmare; the fallout commenced the next morning with grisly headlines on tabloid covers and did not let up for months.
I was a young New Yorker myself at the time, about four years out of law school. That morning, I read the horrifying details of Kendra’s death while riding the train to my first day on a new job, joining the administration of a newly elected state attorney general.
I had been hired as an assistant attorney general for program development, which was supposed to entail crafting low-profile policy proposals related to the functions of the AG’s office, such as consumer protection and nuisance abatement.
But my first day on the job — before I had even laid claim to an office or computer — I was asked to figure out the best thing the AG could propose in response to Kendra’s death. The boss wanted a bold idea to repair New York’s broken mental health system, and that’s about all the direction I was given.
I was taken aback by such a momentous first assignment – and utterly panic-stricken. I knew precious little about public mental health and the AG wanted to introduce legislation within weeks, so I reached out to a mental health advocate in the city I was acquainted with named DJ Jaffe.
Jaffe told me about a little known but highly promising practice of civil commitment to outpatient care for individuals with severe mental illness who struggle to maintain treatment engagement. He gave me highly clarifying background reading by a brilliant and fearless psychiatrist named E. Fuller Torrey.
Just as crucially, he introduced me to a fledgling organization he, Dr. Torrey and others had recently founded, the Treatment Advocacy Center. Jon Stanley and Mary Zdanowicz of TAC were fellow attorneys who helped me work through the legal intricacies of drafting an outpatient commitment law. They even suggested the perfect, never-before-used phrase to describe the practice: “assisted outpatient treatment.”
Before unveiling our proposal later that month, we sought the Webdale family’s blessing to call the bill “Kendra’s Law.” The family was understandably wary of having Kendra’s name used for political theater, and they needed to be convinced that our bill really would spare other families their still-raw anguish.
The AG and I flew to Buffalo to meet Kendra’s parents, Pat and Ralph Webdale, and several of their grown children. Nobody could blame a family in their circumstance for wanting the policy response to be keeping people with severe mental illness locked away, so I entered the meeting with trepidation, expecting AOT to be a hard sell. I surely did not expect Pat Webdale’s opening words, which have lingered in my mind ever since.
Pat reported that in the weeks since Kendra’s death, they had received letters of sympathy from many strangers. Some came from other families of homicide victims, but many others were from parents of people who had fallen hopelessly under the grip of long-term untreated SMI, who told them it could just as easily have been their own son or daughter who pushed Kendra.
“The thing is,” she told us, “a lot of these people are in the same boat as us. They’ve lost their kids just as much as we’ve lost Kendra, even if they happen to be living and breathing somewhere. So, what I wanna hear from you guys is, what are we going to do to save them?”
Eight hard-fought months later, Kendra’s Law was signed by Governor George Pataki.
At a ceremony in Albany, I proudly watched the governor hand the signing pen to Pat and Ralph Webdale. In the years that followed, AOT became a fixture of New York’s care system, as multiple studies affirmed its power to transform the very lives that Pat Webdale so remarkably fretted over that day in Buffalo.
I went on to serve another 10 years in New York state government, but no assignment I worked on would ever mean as much to me as those first eight months working side-by-side with TAC and the Webdales to develop Kendra’s Law and get it across the finish line.
When an opportunity arose in 2009 to join TAC and assume its mission of universal, nationwide implementation of AOT, I grabbed it and never looked back.
Brian Stettin is the director of policy at the Treatment Advocacy Center.
