The Measure of Madness:. Katherine Ramsland
They accept the former leader of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, as the Messiah and God incarnate. They have prohibitions against cutting their hair and avoid eating meat, smoking tobacco, and drinking alcohol. The Rasta movement emphasizes the spiritual use of marijuana. Mr. Bailey told me he smoked marijuana every day and did not consider it a problem for him. I, of course, had a different opinion.
Mr. Bailey left home when he was nineteen and came to New York City to strike out on his own. He found a place to live with a few other young men from the Caribbean. He worked six days a week in a furniture store, yet he was barely able to support himself.
“Did you ask your family for help?” I asked. “No,” he said, “I was too embarrassed.”
Mr. Bailey was lonely and wanted a girlfriend, but was too shy to approach women. He turned to the Internet and arranged to meet a woman he contacted through a chat room.
“At the time, when I sleep with her, I didn’t trust her and my condom break,” he mumbled and looked down at the floor. “And I thought about it all the time.”
“Thought about what?”
“I start thinking that she had some disease. I didn’t trust her. That same night I start worrying. I heard on the radio that the Bronx has the most HIV. She was from the Bronx.”
“Did you get tested?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “I was too scared. Everything was building up in my mind. I start getting skinny. I got so depressed and I could feel my nerves jump all over my body.”
Mr. Bailey told me he started having frequent and debilitating “attacks” a few weeks after this sexual encounter.
“The attacks come most times at night, when I’m alone,” he said. “My heart be racing and I feel like I’m out of breath.”
“How often did this happen?”
“It be like every night,” he recalled. “I be afraid to stay by myself. I was afraid I’d take my life.”
Mr. Bailey told me that a few months after the sexual encounter he became convinced he was infected and fell into a deep depression.
“Did you ever hear voices when no one was there?” I asked.
“Yes, sometimes.”
“What did the voices say?”
“They be telling me I got the HIV.”
“Did you believe the voices?” I asked
“Yes. I start having diarrhea a month before I was arrested. I be thinking I have AIDS,” he said, now in tears. “I’d get muscle cramps, aches and pains, joint pains, I thought it had something to do with HIV. I didn’t think it could be anything else.”
It might be surprising in this day of “infomercials” and media that someone would know so little about HIV infection that he could reach such an erroneous conclusion. But Mr. Bailey relied on a strange mix of medical jargon and superstition to explain why he was convinced he was infected.
I noticed that Mr. Bailey paused before answering my questions and spoke in short, simple sentences. I began to wonder if he was mentally slow. I administered the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Test and Mr. Bailey scored a 72, placing him at the low end of the borderline intellectual range.7 The average I.Q. score ranges from 90 to 110; a score of 69 or less typically indicates mental retardation. Mr. Bailey’s low I.Q. explained his inaccurate understanding of HIV symptoms and was probably a factor in his inability to find any solution to his supposed illness. He thought suicide was his only way out.
I asked why he did not call his family for help. He started tearing up again. “I figured I couldn’t tell them I had HIV.”
“Why not?” I gently pressed.
“I was afraid they’d close the door in my face,” he replied, his voice cracking. “I thought they would tell me I wouldn’t amount to nothing. My grandmother be nice, but I don’t know how she’d act in a situation like this.”
“Did you try to tell her?”
“No,” he admitted. “Every time I thought about it, I worried. I don’t want to be around my little brother and sister, especially with a disease that strong. I was thinking I don’t want to be around people if I got HIV.”
“Why not?”
“I think it’s a total sin. A Rasta shouldn’t carry this disease. If you have HIV you can’t have kids or family. You don’t get to marry. If you got HIV no one want to marry you.”
Mr. Bailey told me that he was afraid to kill himself. He said, “I always hear if you kill yourself, you go to hell. Sometimes I’d think I didn’t want anyone to know what was happening to me. If I just pass, no one will know.”
“What happened during the weeks before the shooting?” I asked.
“I found a gun in a trash can. I thought everything was matching up. I got the gun now. God was working on a way for me to go home.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“I was thinking God wanted me to go to heaven, that’s why he put the gun in my hand. I was thinking everything was matching up. There was no need for me to stay here anymore.”
I asked him how he spent the night before the shooting. He told me that he was riding the subway because he had no place to sleep. He dozed fitfully until the idea came to him, as if sent by God.
“All I could think of was dying,” he remembered. “I didn’t want to live. I realized that if the police saw me with a pistol, they’d try to kill me.”
“What happened next?” I asked.
“It was very early in the morning.” He spoke softly, as if lost in a dream state. “I get off the train and start walking. I saw the precinct and I knew I got the pistol. I start waving it. The cops see me. I knew they are going to shoot me. I was trying to get killed. I wasn’t trying to hide. I was standing up to take the bullet.”
He paused, and I waited for him to continue.
“One shot was very loud and I thought it hit me. I went down. Then they start to hit me. I tell them to kill me and just get it over with.”
Mr. Bailey insisted that he never had any intention of shooting the police officers. He never loaded the gun and did not think the gun could fire. A police ballistics expert who later examined the gun found it loaded with eight bullets. It was a 9 mm Luger which held ten bullets. No one knew what had happened to the two missing bullets. It was never determined whether Mr. Bailey fired the gun or not.
After the second session with Mr. Bailey, I was nearly convinced that his was a case of “suicide by cop,” but I needed to be sure that he was not lying or faking. Malingerers—those who exaggerate or fake mental illness—often have trouble keeping their stories straight. I needed to reexamine Mr. Bailey’s police and medical records to see if the story he told me matched the story he told everyone else.
Mr. Bailey’s stories were consistent. Two days after his arrest, he told a psychiatrist that he wanted to die but saw no way out. He also told hospital staff that he had been hearing voices before the shooting. They diagnosed him with major depressive disorder with psychotic features and marijuana abuse.
I called Mr. Bailey’s grandmother to get a clearer picture of his childhood and mental state before his arrest. She seemed to be a caring, well-intentioned woman, and I felt tempted to console her when I heard the guilt and self-reproach in her voice. “His friends told me he messed around with a girl and he thought he had AIDS,” she recalled. “They told me he was very depressed and talked about suicide a lot.”
“Did you speak to him around the time of the shooting?” I asked.
“No, but later, a friend told me that the night before everything happened, my grandson was depressed and talked about suicide. He told them to give