By DAVE RANNEY
KHI News Service

OSAWATOMIE — Two multiple murder cases have been tied to men who were brought by police to the state hospital here because of their threatening behaviors but were released several days later after hospital officials deemed them no danger to themselves or others.

The ensuing tragedies have left many wondering what went wrong and whether the state’s mental health system and the way it works with law enforcement is adequate.

Prosecutors said the two cases — which left families sundered and emotions raw in the small towns where they happened — were unusual only because of the levels of violence involved and their proximities in time and place.

“You can go just about anywhere in the state and find cases that involve people who’ve been in one of the state hospitals and (subsequently) committed violent crimes,” said Riley County Attorney Barry Wilkerson, who also is president of the Kansas County and District Attorneys Association. “I’m not saying they’re all homicides, but, yes, they are violent crimes.”

Wilkerson, a veteran prosecutor, said laws and policies that allow some patients to leave the hospital too soon or without proper local follow-up have long troubled him.

‘Stabilize them and turn them loose’

“The mental health system we have in Kansas is underfunded,” he said. “There aren’t enough in-patient places for people to go anymore. So, now, instead of taking the time and committing the resources to really treat people, we stabilize them and turn them loose. It just doesn’t make any sense. If someone’s been declared a danger to themselves or others, and then all we do is stabilize them, I wouldn’t say that’s enough.”

The man first brought to the hospital was 35-year-old Kevin Welsh of Eureka. Police brought him to Osawatomie in late August 2013 after he was charged with kidnapping 26-year-old Catherine Scheff and her two young children. Scheff was a former girlfriend of Welsh’s.

Welsh spent 11 days at the hospital and then was briefly returned to jail. There, he posted bail and was released on Sept. 10. Three weeks later, he shot Scheff and her parents at the parents’ home in Eureka.

Scheff survived multiple wounds, but her father, 54-year-old Keith Kriesel, and mother, 52-year-old Sheila Kriesel, were killed.

Welsh died two weeks later in a shootout with agents from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation.

The second man was 22-year-old David Cornell Bennett Jr. who was taken to the hospital after being picked up by Parsons police on Oct. 30, 2013 for what they described as murder-suicide threats posted on Facebook.

Bennett now is charged with the first-degree murders of 29-year-old Cami Jo Umbarger of Parsons and her three children, ages 9, 6, and 4.

‘We don’t go a day without talking about her’

Their bodies were found the Monday before Thanksgiving after Umbarger — who was known as a reliable employee at Good Samaritan Center, a Parsons nursing home — failed to show for work.

“She’d talked about how he’d been stalking her,” said Joanna Wilson, the nursing home administrator. “It was like he’d become obsessed with her.”

The murders were hard on the close-knit staff and still are, Wilson said.

“We don’t go a day without talking about her,” she said. “I haven’t gone an hour without thinking about her, day and night. Many of the staff are the same way.

“When Cami started working here seven years ago, her first child was a baby,” Wilson said. “She had two babies while she was working here, so in a lot of ways those kids were raised here. Everybody knew them. What we’re going through now is horrible.

“I know that the rights for mentally ill patients are very strong and that those rights stem from years and years of them not having any rights and being put away when they didn’t need to be,” Wilson said. “But when things like this happen, I wish, of course, that they’d found some way to keep him.”

According to recent news reports, Bennett is now in the Labette County Jail on $5 million bond, awaiting trial for the murders and related charges including rape and the threats that got him sent to Osawatomie State Hospital.

Details about the treatments and evaluations that Bennett and Welsh likely received at Osawatomie remain sealed from public view because of patient confidentiality rules and gag orders placed by prosecutors and courts.

State mental health officials and others involved declined to comment on any specific aspect of either case.

How the process works

But state officials and others agreed to describe the system, its rules and processes, as they apply in general.

John Worley, director of clinical services at Osawatomie, said evaluations of patients being considered for release, as a matter of routine, would take into consideration any dealings the patient had with law enforcement.

“They look at the major issues to be addressed for stabilization to allow discharge from the hospital,” Worley said, referring to teams comprised of nurses, psychologists, therapists and social workers.

“They’re asking things like: Is this individual a danger to (himself or herself)? Are they talking about killing themselves? Do they have a plan? Have they made an attempt? Do they have a history of making attempts? And, likewise, are they a danger to others? Have they made threats? Have they acted on those threats? Do they have a history of arrests or being involved with law enforcement?”

Each final discharge decision is made by one of the hospital’s staff psychiatrists.

Typically, patients are released with a three- to five-day supply of medications. A refill prescription is sent to the pharmacy of their choice. They also are given an appointment with a local community mental health center.

‘You do your best’

But it isn’t always easy to figure out how troubled a patient might be, Worley said.

“Forty-nine percent of our admissions involve patients who’ve had no prior contact with the mental health system,” he said. “So, essentially, we have no prior history on them.”

And many patients’ conditions are masked by “co-occurring disorders,” usually drug and alcohol abuse. “It can be an incredibly complex picture to try to unravel,” Worley said. “But you do your best.”

The majority of patients are treated and released to return to their homes, assuming they have one.

According to the Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services, which oversees the state hospitals, only about 5 percent of the patients released are facing some sort of criminal charge that requires them to be returned to a jail.

Generally, though there are exceptions — once a patient is released from the hospital or from the hospital and then jail — there is nothing authorities can do to compel a person to continue treatments.

“The vast majority of (community-based) behavioral health care in Kansas is voluntary, and that’s as it should be,” said Matt Atteberry, executive director of the Labette Center for Mental Health Services in Parsons. “I say that because in this country, all of us, I think, value personal liberty. But what does that mean?

“In Kansas, it means an individual has the right to decline services at a mental health center just like they have the right to decline care at a doctor’s office,” he said. “So absent very specific court orders ordering people into care, it’s a completely voluntary thing. And even with a court order — which is rare — how enforceable is it?

“People like to think that because someone is an expert in behavioral health, they can somehow compel someone to do whatever it is we want them to do,” he said. “But a community mental health center is not a law enforcement agency. We have no more ability to make someone seek care at our facility than the donut shop can make someone come in and eat donuts.”

‘This is about resources’

And there is the separate but related issue of having enough resources to adequately treat those willing to be treated.

“We’re never going to have a perfect system,” said Johnson County District Attorney Steve Howe. “But, really, this is about resources. We’re going to have to house these people somewhere. But as it is now, we have limited hospital-bed space, which is why the Johnson County Jail has become one of the largest — if not the largest — mental health facility in the state.”

The demand for mental health services, he said, has outstripped the abilities of the state hospitals and mental health centers to meet them.

“There are people who have a serious mental illness who, given the resources, are able to live successful and productive lives in the community,” Howe said. “That’s as it should be, but for that to happen those resources have to be there and they have to be adequate.”

“Those of us in law enforcement would say those resources are inadequate,” Howe said. “And they’ve been inadequate for a long time.”

KDADS officials said they don’t track how many state hospital patients are convicted of violent crimes after release.

But the Kansas Department of Corrections keeps track of how many of its inmates have been diagnosed with a mental illness. Agency officials recently announced that 38 percent of the state’s prison population had been diagnosed as mentally ill.

Since 2006, the number of mentally ill inmates in Kansas prisons has increased 126 percent, according to corrections department officials.