Miami Herald wins December Sidney Award for “Guilty of Grief”
Carol Marbin Miller, Linda Robertson and Camellia Burris of the Miami Herald win the December Sidney Award for “Guilty of Grief,” a deeply reported, multi-layered account of the police shooting of a severely mentally ill young man named Richard Hollis. The series documents his mother Gamaly’s frantic search for accountability, which ended with her being imprisoned for violating a restraining order against the officer who shot her son. A week after the series was published, the State Attorney’s Office reversed course and announced that the state was offering Hollis a plea deal instead of additional jail time.
The Sidney-winning series shines a spotlight on Florida’s broken mental health care system and the lack of training for police who respond to calls involving severe mental illness. Gamaly and the police were locked in a cycle of frustration. Gamaly would call the police when her son became violent, only to clash with the officers when they tried to commit him to a psychiatric facility, which would release him almost immediately with no meaningful treatment, beginning the cycle again. Bodycam footage shows that the police repeatedly insulted Gamaly, calling her a bad mother and blaming her for her son’s behavior.
“I’m telling you, if your son takes a BB gun or a real gun out on me, I’m gonna kill your son,” officer Jaime Pino warned Gamaly after responding to yet another violent outburst by Richard. Pino’s words proved prophetic. A year later, Pino shot Richard after he locked himself in the apartment with his mother and threatened responding officers while clutching two steak knives.
When Gamaly later confronted Pino and demanded to know why he shot her son, she was arrested. She was subsequently imprisoned for violating a restraining order by criticizing Pino on social media and sentenced to a year in jail, which an analysis by the Herald showed was much more severe than those received by offenders with similar profiles who violate restraining orders.
“The bodycam videos reveal the toxic approach the police used with Gamaly,” said Sidney judge Lindsay Beyerstein, “The series reveals the total absence of a mental healthcare system that can respond to families in crisis.”
Carol Marbin Miller is deputy investigations editor at the Miami Herald, where she has worked since 2000. She has written extensively about children, elders and people with mental illness or disabilities – and several of her stories have led to changes in Florida law.
Linda Robertson has covered a variety of compelling subjects during 40 years as a Miami Herald reporter and sports columnist in the fascinating infuriating place where she grew up. She was on Herald teams awarded Pulitzer Prizes for stories on Hurricane Andrew and the Surfside condo collapse.
Camellia Burris is an attorney and journalist from Nashville, Tennessee. She is a graduate of Spelman College, Tulane University School of Law, and Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where she specialized in investigative reporting at the Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism.
Backstory
Q: How did you find out about Gamaly and Richard Hollis?
A: We were told about Gamaly Hollis’ unusual story by a source in the criminal justice system. We thought the story, at first, appeared outlandish. So we began to do some preliminary research. We collected a handful of court records. We asked very quickly to see some of the police body camera footage. We called some experts in the fields we were looking at, such as mental health and police conduct. Because Hollis had a hearing scheduled a week later, we moved quickly to learn about her unusual situation, then attended a couple of hearings before determining we wanted to do a much deeper story.
Q: Describe the dynamic that brought the police to the Hollis home dozens of times before the fatal shooting.
A: Richard Hollis was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and he displayed several symptoms associated with other conditions, such as major depression and schizophrenia. When his illness was most severe, he hallucinated, at times imagining he had a wife who drove a red sports car and a deceased child. He refused to take medications or seek help, so when he was not involuntarily committed, he would frequently spiral out of control. When he was acutely ill, which was most of the time, Richard’s behavior would cause either his mother or neighbors at the Peppermill Apartment complex to call police for help. Nine times the police involuntarily committed Richard for psychiatric evaluation under what is called the Baker Act in Florida. But following each commitment, Richard was released from custody after only a few days. Then the cycle would repeat.
Q: Police body cam video was a big part of this investigation. What advice do you have for reporters who want to use police body cam footage in their reporting?
A: We made the decision to use only condensed versions of the body cam footage within the story because most of the police encounters we used were at least 30 minutes long, often longer. We also decided to post each video for our readers in their entirety as an act of transparency. We opted to post the most sensitive videos – the shooting of Richard Hollis and the attempt to resuscitate him – unredacted, though we also included warnings for readers who may lack the stomach for such content. We did that so as not to varnish what happened to the Hollis family. We also wanted our readers to see for themselves the callousness with which some officers treated Richard, who was effectively dead immediately upon being shot, and his mother, who was in shock and suffering enormous grief.
Q: Richard had a history of violence and non-compliance with psychiatric medication. Why did the hospital keep releasing him almost immediately? What standard of impairment or dangerousness would someone have to meet before they qualified for weeks or months of mandatory psychiatric treatment?
A: In Florida, as in most states, a person under involuntary psychiatric evaluation must present a danger to himself/herself or others or be at risk of severe self neglect. Richard would meet those criteria when he was admitted for evaluation. But after two or three days on anti-psychotic medication, Richard would improve sufficiently to no longer meet criteria for continued confinement. He would be released back into the community with prescriptions for medication he refused to fill and outpatient treatment he would not seek. After a week or two Richard would decompensate and once again become unstable. This type of revolving door is typical for thousands of Floridians who have severe and persistent mental illness. The Legislature could reform this system, but has refused to do so for decades because effective mental health treatment is expensive and jail beds are less costly and funded by counties, not the state.
Q: Deescalation training has been shown to be effective in protecting mentally ill citizens and police. Why is it not being implemented more widely in Miami?
A: We do not have data on how many police officers in Miami-Dade and its 34 municipalities have been properly trained in dealing with people in psychiatric crisis. We do know that Officer Jaime Pino had received what we believe is de-escalation training 19 years before his deadly encounter with Richard Hollis. Either it was not effective, or its effectiveness eroded over the years of his being immersed in a police culture that does not embrace de-escalation. As one of our mental health experts said: treatment centers hire trained social workers. Police departments do not.
Q: You were able to show that Gamaly got a wildly disproportionate sentence for violating her protective order against the officer who shot her son. What could the system have done differently with her?
A: We have been told by experts in the field of domestic violence, and data from Miami-Dade and Broward counties confirm, that the overwhelming majority of defendants who violate restraining orders are given probation or very short jail sentences. If police and prosecutors believed Gamaly Hollis was a serious threat she could have been given probation along with other requirements designed to ensure compliance, such as home detention – or, in Hollis’s unique case, the absence of internet access. If prosecutors believed a jail sentence was warranted, which still would have made Hollis an outlier, the sentence could have been substantially shorter. More broadly, however, police and prosecutors could have offered Gamaly Hollis grief counseling. She could have been given a victim’s advocate. Someone in law enforcement or the State Attorney’s Office could have attempted to listen to her questions, provided answers and given some amount of sympathy to address her own deteriorating emotional state.
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