Battling Chase's demons

CHAPEL HILL -- Seven years ago, Randi Davenport's son fell apart.

Just as he turned 15, about the time most kids are learning to drive, Chase tried to strangle himself with a cord. He was convinced that people he called "the nailers" were coming to kill him.

He went crazy.

In her new memoir, "The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes," Randi Davenport of Chapel Hill recounts her battle to save her son, Chase, as he descends into psychosis. Along the way, she delivers an indictment of mental health care in North Carolina and across the nation.

Chase spent months in UNC Memorial Hospital. When her insurance company ruled it would no longer cover that high-level care, he was shuttled to John Umstead psychiatric hospital in Butner. Once there, he was medicated so heavily he spent most of his day nodding off and drooling.

Davenport's story ends on a hopeful note because she got help from one of North Carolina's most powerful citizens.

"If I hadn't worked where I work and know who I know," she says, "it would never have happened."

Davenport is executive director of UNC Chapel Hill's Johnston Center for Undergraduate Excellence. She's also a divorced single mother with two children. Her daughter, Haley, was a typical child.

Chase, her oldest, was not.

Chase had autism and seizures. With assistance from state-funded workers who helped Davenport care for him, he went to school, loved Halloween, was fascinated by tornadoes, dreamed of being a rock star.

But in late 2002, Chase became psychotic, a danger to himself and others, so sick he needed hospitalization. That's when Davenport learned an inconvenient truth about the state's mental health system:

"...the mental-health facilities didn't want a kid with a developmental disability and the developmental-disability places didn't want a kid with a mental-health issue. In the state of North Carolina, you had to be one or the other; you were not allowed to be both."

A downward spiral

Davenport did not set out to write this book.

One day in 2004, she says, as she was "raging about mental health reform in North Carolina," a friend suggested that she submit an essay to a local newspaper. After a week of writing, she had 100 pages. "Then I started to cry, because I knew what it was. And I wondered if I had the strength and courage to go forward."

The result, "The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes" (Algonquin; $23.95), is a story of a mother's fierce love and a portrait of a system that fails some of its most mentally ill citizens.

Some scenes are so sad they're painful to read. They were excruciating, Davenport says, to write.

When Chase spiraled into psychosis, he was a 6-foot-tall teenager who comforted himself by chewing on the nose of his stuffed brown bear. When he was first admitted to the hospital at 15, he confided to his mother that he'd seen "the nailers" the previous night:

"'They come up to you and they kidnap you and they hold you down and nail you to a chair,' he said. He began to weep.

"'They're not real,' I began, but he shook his head.

"'They were outside, Mom. Right outside last night.'

"I found some toilet paper in the bathroom. 'Can I help you wipe your face?' I said. He stood still and held his face still and I gently wiped his tears and then held the toilet paper in front of his nose and told him to blow.

"'It'll be okay,' I said. 'It's going to be okay.'"

But it wasn't. UNC doctors tried antipsychotic drugs. Chase got worse, until he no longer knew his mother.

Davenport searched the state for a place that could help her son. Finally, she found a program willing to take Chase's complicated case - the Murdoch Center in Butner, north of Raleigh. But there was a problem: It had no openings.

Would he die there?

After more than seven months, Chase's insurance refused to keep him at UNC Memorial Hospital, so he went to Umstead. There, doctors increased his antipsychotic drugs until he was semi-conscious and drooling much of the time. No one thought this was the care he needed.

Mental health workers at the Orange-Person-Chatham mental health agency wanted to help Davenport, but didn't know what else to do. They suggested she call state mental health officials.

When she did, she was referred to a customer-service representative who told her to call the local workers. Later, she learned the customer-service man had sent e-mail to the local staff, noting that Davenport didn't seem litigious, "so all was well."

About that time, one of Chase's social workers gently told Davenport that her efforts to get Chase to recognize her were only agitating him. It might be better, he said, if she just accepted Chase as he was:

"'You may never be anything more than the lady who brings him a sandwich once a week, but at least you can have a relationship with him as the lady who brings him the sandwich. You can have that relationship with him for the next 30 or 40 years.' He paused and reached behind the sofa and found a box of tissues and handed it to me so I could wipe my eyes."

Davenport appealed to everyone she could think of - the director of the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services, her congressman, her state representative. She got nowhere.

"And all the while," she writes, "Chase staggered around Umstead with drool hanging in drippy strings from his lower lip, a towel laid open and flat across his chest when he dozed in the dayroom chair. He slept and slept and slept and slept. After our visits, I walked back through the long halls of the hospital and thought it was entirely possible that Chase would die there."

One powerful person

Her boss suggested she appeal to one more person. Davenport omits or changes most names in her story, and she doesn't name this man, at his request. But she describes him:

"I knew that everyone said he was the most powerful man in the state, that three governors were indebted to him, that John Edwards had had to get his okay before he got into politics. I'd heard those stories. I knew they were true. But I could not imagine that he would take an interest in me or in Chase."

He did, though. The man telephoned Carmen Hooker Odom, then-director of the state Department of Health and Human Services. Within two weeks, a bed had opened at Murdoch Center.

At first, Davenport worried that Chase got a bed because someone was forced out. Officials assured her that was not the case.

At Murdoch, doctors gradually cut back Chase's drugs. Therapists worked with him. He improved.

"It took a year," Davenport writes, "but there came a time when Chase always knew me."

Chase's life today

Today, Chase is 22. He lives at Murdoch, where he takes classes and works as a messenger, delivering items around campus.

He comes home for weekend visits, but by Sunday afternoon, Davenport says, he's ready to return to his structured life at Murdoch.

And who was the powerful man who came to Davenport's rescue? Bill Friday.

In an interview with The Charlotte Observer, the 89-year-old president emeritus of the University of North Carolina system admitted, "She let me be a part of it, yes."

Davenport thinks Friday saved her son's life.