The Politics of Mental Illness

Angela Lowe has her list of reasons a bill named for her late husband should become the law of the land in Ohio.

She doesn't want another human being to die the way her husband, R & B singer Sean Levert, did a year ago in Cuyahoga County Jail.

Six days after jailers abruptly stopped his prescription medication, Levert was strapped into a chair, hallucinating and screaming for his "mommy." Then he died.

The coroner ruled that sudden withdrawal from Xanax contributed to Levert's death, which made national headlines — and not just because he was the son of The O'Jays' lead singer, Eddie Levert, and the brother of R & B star Gerald Levert.

Lowe wants every jail in the state of Ohio to have the same intake policy for inmates so that the chance of humane treatment doesn't depend solely on luck or geography.

She also wants the state to acknowledge that those who suffer from mental illness are not discardable at any time.

"Everyone is innocent until proven guilty," she said, "and even after they're convicted, they're still human."

There's another reason the 36-year-old widow is pushing for Ohio House Bill No. 84 to become "Sean's Law." Make that two reasons: her 16-year-old son, Sean Jr., and his 2-year-old brother, Chad.

They are why she granted her first on-the-record interview since her husband's death.

"I don't want my children to think their father's only legacy was that he was a deadbeat dad,'" she said, referring to Levert's guilty plea and conviction for failure to pay support for children by two other mothers.

"My 16-year-old is old enough to know what an incredible father he was, but my 2-year-old didn't know him. I want to be able to tell him, to tell both of them, that their father didn't die in vain and that he helped save other people's lives."

Lowe said that while Sean Jr. was devastated by his father's death, he didn't hit rock bottom until months later, when he saw the video of his father's last, tortured moments.

"A friend had called him to let him know he could watch it on Channel 19's Web site," she said. "I didn't know he had watched it until I found him lying on his bed with the pillow over his face."

She took one look at the screen of his laptop, and her heart sank.

"His eyes were red, but he wouldn't talk about what he saw. He hasn't been the same since."

Lowe's wrongful-death suit against county and medical staff for the death of her husband still is pending.

Ohio state Rep.

In other words, what happened to Sean Levert never would happen again.

Two other Democratic state representatives ignored Lowe's request to sponsor the bill, but when she and her lawyer, David Malik, reached out to Boyd, response was swift.

For a reason, it turns out.

"I have a friend who was incarcerated in Cuyahoga County around the same time as Sean Levert," Boyd said. "She has very bad asthma, and she had to plead over and over with jail officials to let her have the medication and the machine she needed to keep breathing. She told them, 'I could die in here.'"

The woman's plea was eerily similar to what Levert told a cellmate after officials refused to let him take his prescription drugs:

"Man, I'm gonna die in here."

Boyd will introduce the bill in the next few weeks. She cautions those who think what happened to Levert never could happen to them or someone they love to think again.

"You know, people like to think, 'Well, I live in such-and-such county, and that could never happen here.' But you could be driving through the state and end up in one of these little counties where the staff doesn't even know how to recognize symptoms of serious illness. We don't need people to die because the locals don't have a clue."

County Prosecutor Bill Mason, who cleared the jailers of any wrongdoing in Levert's case, has refused interviews, citing Lowe's pending civil suit. Mason now is considering a run for statewide office. Word to the wise and the apparently clueless: "Silence Is Golden" makes a lousy bumper sticker.

Sheriff Gerald McFaul also had insisted that his employees did nothing wrong. He recently resigned after Plain Dealer reporter Mark Puente chronicled the astonishing range of McFaul's alleged misconduct in office.

Curiously enough, despite all those assurances that everything was fine, just fine, county jail officials recently announced new guidelines. Inmates taking anti-anxiety drugs that are benzodiazepines, including Xanax, should be allowed to stay on them once prescriptions are verified. If they can't be verified immediately, they will see a psychiatrist that day or the next.

Sounds as if somebody thought we had a problem.

Sean's Law would remove all doubt.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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