Pat Reavy interned with KSL in 1989 and has been a full-time journalist for either KSL or Deseret News since 1991. For the past 25 years, he has worked primarily the cops and courts beat.
SALT LAKE CITY — Jerri Clark says her son, Calvin, was a smart, articulate, loving and generous boy and not a criminal. But in his teen years, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
His psychotic episodes led to homelessness and multiple arrests.
"When he fell ill, I believed there would be medical care to help. I believed there would be social systems to help lift him back up into the incredibly promising life that he began his life in.
Instead, I was told, 'It's not illegal to be psychotic,' 'He'll have to get much sicker,' 'You'll have to stop helping so that he hits rock bottom,' and 'If things get bad enough, he will eventually fall into the criminal system and then he'll get scooped up,'" Clark said. It wasn't until 2019, when Calvin was 23 and after he stepped off the roof of a seven-story building and plummeted to his death, that Clark says her son qualified for intervention and treatment.
On Wednesday, Clark told her story at the Salt Lake County district attorney's second symposium on the criminal justice system and mental health. Her message is that families who have a loved one with a severe mental illness want "treatment before tragedy.
""Our society has failed to use the most evidence-based treatments to support individuals to get as sick as my son did. He wasn't able to access the very things that would have saved his life," she said.
"Mental illness is not a lifestyle choice. "The symposium was held as part of Mental Health Awareness Month and to raise awareness of the challenges families like Clark's face.
District Attorney Sim Gill says he is once again hosting the event because the criminal justice system has become a "safety net" for dealing with people with severe mental illness, even though "the last place you want somebody with an acute mental illness is to be going through the criminal justice system. And that speaks to the reality of how our criminal justice system is broken.
"When there is a failure to respond, the one entity you can count on to respond is the 911 call and that is the introduction to the criminal justice system," he said. As he did last year, Gill recalled the time he received "one of the most difficult calls in my life as a public prosecutor" from a woman who wanted to know what felonies her mentally ill son had to commit in order to get the treatment he needed.
Gill says approximately 1 out of every 4 police shootings his office reviews involves a
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