My brother, Richard, has a hearing tomorrow, which will determine if he is free of medical supervision associated with his detainment last month. Law enforcement thought he was mentally ill. No doctor that has actually evaluated him appears to have found this assertion to be substantiated.

Since this is the eve of the hearing, I am posting an e-mail I sent to the Provo PD Detective I was told is in charge of this matter. I’ve received no reply.

My brother has sent a certified, notarized GRAMA request (Government Record Access Management Act) for documents pertaining to his case. He hasn’t received any reply, though he has received a judicial summons to appear in court on charges he resisted arrest. That court date is 28 June.
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From: Meg Stout
Date: Mon, May 3, 2010 at 7:11 PM
Subject: Richard ——–

Hello Detective —–,

I had the pleasure of chatting with John Wright of the FBI on Friday. His version of the story was somewhat comforting, since until then we believed my brother had been effectively incarcerated by the FBI in an extra-legal manner. As a federal employee myself, I was troubled.

Mr. Wright advised me to request the records relating to my brother’s case under the Government Records Access Management Act (GRAMA). I’m presuming that would be best handled by someone local to Provo. Is that the case?

I have spent several hours over the past week on the phone with my mother and brother. They both say they were told the individual in charge represented the FBI. Neither of them was shown a badge or provided with names and badge numbers. Neither of them was aware the intent of the officers’ visit to their home was to have Richard brought in for evaluation by crisis management at the direction of Wasatch Mental Health. They were not shown the “pink sheet” authorizing this evaluation.

I’m curious why the officers spoke in a manner that allowed two Merit Finalists (i.e., my mother and brother) to infer they were FBI. I’m curious why the pink sheet was never shown to justify the officers’ request that Richard leave the “safety” of his home. I’m curious why the officers stuffed my brother into a car rather than wait for the ambulance that arrived shortly thereafter. I’m curious why my brother was badgered in the emergency room to admit he’d written the inflammatory threats contained in the precis used to justify the operation – if Richard was merely to be evaluated by crisis management, why did it matter to the officer whether or not the precis accurately reflected my brother’s writings and position?

The psychiatric judge at the 30 April hearing allegedly said he didn’t know what justified the police tasering Richard. Given the June 9th death of Brian Cardall, linked by autopsy to being tasered twice, it is surprising that the Provo PD would have tasered my brother thrice when he was merely to be brought in for psychiatric evaluation, was unarmed and unshod, and was surrounded by five officers.

Mr. Wright thought there was simultaneous correspondence from family members to the FBI reporting concern about Richard. As far as we are aware, the only e-mail correspondence that remotely fits this description was from my mother on April 27-28 (i.e., days after the tasering incident) to Royce Hull, at the request of Royce Hull asking for Richard’s psychological history. My mother has provided these e-mails to us. Richard’s own account of his experience with autism is contained in the book “Talk with Me: Experiences with Autism in the LDS Community.” His chapter is titled “On the Inside Looking Out,” pp 166-172. I see several copies are available used at Amazon.com.

I look forward to reading the full text my brother sent to the FBI this past month and the damning precis that was derived from his full text.

If you would like to respond to any (or all) of the questions in this e-mail, I would greatly appreciate it. As Mr. Wright may have shared, I wrote to the US Senators for Utah and Virginia, as well as Representatives Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) and Gerry Connolly (D-VA). Since there are still troubling discrepancies between the understanding Mr. Wright shared with me and the eye-witness testimony of my mother and brother, I am not yet sure what update to provide those my brother and I look to for Constitutional protection.

Respectfully,

Meg Stout

Tags: Writing