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So Natchez families have continued to lose some of their own to a broken system that makes the desperate wait for a place to go or takes them in only to abandon them again. Roy Dunagan, for one, was desperate enough to show up at the courthouse on June 22, 1998, and sign the commitment papers himself. On the day of his hearing, he packed a vinyl duffel bag with socks, T shirts, the pocket Bible from his childhood and the cross necklace his mother Hilda had given him for Christmas.
Hilda assumed that once the judge ordered him hospitalized, the recovery process could begin. "We thought he'd either be going to Whitfield or to jail first," she says. Instead, she and Roy were told that Whitfield could not take him for two months. On the drive home in his mother's Oldsmobile, hopelessness hung in the air. "What am I supposed to do until then?" he asked her. Seven weeks later, Roy, 24, answered his own question. He stopped by an aunt's house, took a shower, changed into clean clothes and left without goodbyes. "He had already died within himself," says Hilda. He walked to the woods, beyond a railroad track where his cousins ride four-wheelers. He strapped his belt around a low branch, stepped off a plastic bucket and hanged himself. His body was found a week later, on the day his mother received a call that Whitfield was ready for him.
Roy's mother and stepfather say they had begged sheriff's deputies to arrest him and keep him in the county jail but were told that if he was determined to commit suicide, the officers didn't want him doing it in their jail. Unlike Chief Huff, the Adams County sheriff refuses to house mental patients, citing the liabilities involved in turning his cellblocks into psychiatric wards and his guards into nurses.
In the city limits, on the other hand, Chief Huff will find a misdemeanor charge to detain them legally, then drop it when they go to Whitfield. "Willie is doing what the right thing is, regardless of the law," says Jack Lazarus, the chancery judge who decides whether residents should be committed.
When jail is not an option, Lazarus says, he has no choice but to send patients home, sometimes to the "very relatives who have just testified against them." Anthony Smith, now 41, who had been drinking rubbing alcohol and stealing his family's medication, seemed more suicidal than homicidal when his relatives asked Lazarus to commit him in 1997. With no crisis-intervention center nearby, the judge sent him home to wait for a bed at Whitfield. Seventeen days later, Smith got frustrated after handing his grandmother tomato paste instead of the tomato sauce she had asked for. He shot his brother and step-grandfather to death and wounded his grandmother. From jail, he called her daily until she died weeks later, a bullet still lodged near her lung.