GREAT FALLS — A Great Falls mother is appealing for change after her deaf son was hurt during what she described as a mental health crisis gone bad.
Trudy Fisher, an advocate for the deaf community, says that her deaf son Jeremy, who suffers from PTSD and ADHD, was restrained by officers during a crisis, leaving him injured and terrified.
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“He ran off and they grabbed him. They held him down, punching his face. And he got all this bleeding on his hand. I mean, he didn't do anything wrong,” Fisher said. “Police should have provided a deaf advocate. That’s what I would’ve thought.”
MTN News has requested comment from the Great Falls Police Department and Cascade County Sheriff's Office; both organizations spoke with us about the crisis response disparity.
Sheriff Jesse Slaughter claims that, despite their best intentions, law enforcement is simply not prepared to handle the complexities of mental health issues.
"People obtain their doctorate and master's in college to be able to deal with these complex types of issues," Slaughter said. "And there's so many different issues."
He said that officers frequently arrive without knowing whether the person is experiencing trauma, substance addiction, or a co-occurring disorder, which can exacerbate the situation.
"Oftentimes we don't really discover those issues until they come to jail," according to him.
Cuts to behavioral health funding nationwide, including in Montana, have severely limited access to specialist crisis teams and institutions.
Great Falls currently lacks a mobile crisis response team and an active crisis stabilization center, leaving police enforcement as the default responders.
However, this may soon change as the county recently received a grant to start restoring disaster infrastructure.
Kami Stone, Cascade County's new Crisis Diversion Coordinator, has been charged with forming a future mobile response team manned by mental health specialists.
“We don’t have a mobile response team currently. We also don’t really have a crisis center,” Stone said. “So they got this grant and hired me to get this up and running.”
Stone believes the initiative is still in its early phases and will need community support, both financially and otherwise, to progress.
"We really need the community of Great Falls and Cascade County to step up and start working on different financial things — and it doesn't always have to be monetary," she urged.
The goal is to develop a fully operating crisis team within the next year, able to respond with or in place of law enforcement, particularly in cases involving vulnerable or disabled people like Jeremy.
Until then, the sheriff's office requests patience, cooperation, and ongoing communication from the public as they try to develop safer and more humane crisis response choices.
