A Mother's Plea -- `Oh God, Won't Anyone Listen To Me?'

In the last few years before he was accused of brutally killing a 63-year-old woman on Queen Anne Hill, James William Cushing began to trouble his mother deeply.

Her son, then in his mid-30s, took a sharp turn for the worse, his behavior becoming increasingly bizarre. He told mental-health workers he might kill someone ``one of these days,'' and in his stays at home, his mother noticed that his conversations with imaginary companions were growing violent and angry.

In his mother's apartment, he slashed furniture and broke windows, leaving her a note threatening to kill her. In February, he began prowling the apartment at night, something he had never done. One night, his mother awakened to find him crouched near her bed in the dark.

She ordered him out, barricaded the door, and in the morning, as she had done so many times in the past, begged state agencies and the court to help her troubled son.

Once again, state agencies balked, judges and court commissioners turned him loose, and government officials carefully explained why they could do nothing. In the end his mother, a warm, intelligent woman who speaks of her son with affection, found herself caught between fear and despair.

``Oh God,'' she wrote in her journal, just weeks before Geneva McDonald was found hacked to death with an ax, ``won't anyone listen to me?''

Every day since her son was arrested in September, Mrs. Cushing has talked to or visited her son, who has pleaded not guilty and not guilty by reason of insanity to the murder of Geneva McDonald and other crimes with which he has been charged.

Today, she plans to visit him at Western State Hospital near Steilacoom, where he has been sent for a psychiatric evaluation before the trial, which has been scheduled for Jan. 22.

Now 72, Mrs. Cushing has several grandchildren, and she asked that her name, which changed when she remarried, be withheld to spare them pain. But she agreed to tell her story because she hopes it might help another mother - another child - get the help she believes her son should have had.

Despite Jim Cushing's troubles, he and his mother have always been close.

Right after he was born in 1953, Jimmy Cushing contracted spinal meningitis. Stubbornly resisting the doctor's predictions that he was doomed, his mother nursed him night and day for two years. It created a bond that hasn't broken to this day, she says.

Very early, it became clear to his mother that her son wasn't normal. He was slow to sit up, slow to crawl and had trouble with coordination.

Finally, a doctor told Mrs. Cushing what was wrong with her son. She heard the word ``retarded,'' picked up her son and walked angrily out of the office, hurling her indignation at the nurse on the way out: ``Did you hear what he said to me!''

In the next few years, she found that doctors didn't always agree. ``One doctor told me, `There's not a thing wrong with that child; he's just spoiled,' '' she recalled.

But as he grew older, the opinions and evidence converged: Jimmy's brain had been damaged. At first, his mother dwelled on the past, but she soon focused on the future - his future - and it filled her with fear.

``I was so bitter,'' she recalled. ``Quite a few people tried to talk to me. I was so mad at God. It wasn't so much what was happening to me, but what was happening to Jim.''

Finally, she said, she ``came around.'' Her son was cute and lovable, an affectionate child whose two older sisters protected and helped him. ``He was such a cute little geezer,'' she said. ``He's brought me more joy.''

His father, Mrs. Cushing said, never accepted Jimmy. He left the family after an incident in which he slapped his 7-year-old son so hard he skidded through two rooms.

Before her husband left, he taunted his wife that she wouldn't be able to survive without him. But she went to work as a hostess in an inn, later deciding she would become a bookkeeper.

Finally, she landed a job as a cost accountant for a major firm, earning praise for saving them thousands of dollars.

But as Jimmy grew older, his sweet, cooperative disposition began to change and caring for him became more difficult.

Silly mischief became more and more serious; breaking windows became a way he expressed frustration. After he smashed a plate-glass window and chopped up a live chicken with an ax in a spree at a south-end residential complex when he was about 12, a judge sent him to Rainier School at Buckley.

At Rainier, he seemed to thrive. ``I would say he was a very happy little boy,'' his mother says. ``The structure seemed to really do him a lot of good.''

But when he was 21, as was his legal right, Jim elected to leave Rainier.

Judged to have ``mild mental retardation and mild anti-social behavior,'' he seemed a good candidate for placement in a private group home.

In his first placement, in Bellingham, he set some fires when he grew frustrated with a change in his routine.

In another group home on Bainbridge Island, he seemed to do well. But a staff worker warned his mother about conditions there. ``She said, `You know, I wouldn't let a child of mine stay over there.' So I told Jim he could come home and live.''

For a few months, everything went well. But one night, just before Thanksgiving in 1978, Mrs. Cushing came home to chaos.

Every window in the house had been broken, and Jim was gone.

After a week of searching frantically for him, she received a call from a man in a bus station in Los Angeles, asking if she had a son named Jim.

The incident came just a few months after the death of Mrs. Cushing's second husband, a man who considered Jim the son he had never had. Mrs. Cushing wonders if Jim's outburst could have been some sort of delayed reaction to the grief. But these, she added, are not the kind of questions that her son can answer.

There were also good times with her son, and Jim's mother remembers them fondly. A trip to England in 1984, after she sold the house, was a delight for both of them.

Back home, Mrs. Cushing resumed her struggle to find her son places to live.

She finally found him an apartment in Center Park, a facility for those with disabilities run by the Seattle Housing Authority. His oldest sister, who had been born with a progressively crippling lung condition and eventually became confined to a wheelchair, also lived there.

For about three years, says his mother, Jim was happy at Center Park, taking his sister to the grocery store and helping her out. But because the complex was being renovated, Jim was moved out of his apartment to one near the alarm system, which rang constantly. ``One day, he just got up and wrecked the apartment and sold everything in it for $15 and left,'' his mother said.

Typically, after such an incident, Jim would vanish for a while, turning up on the streets, where he was often beaten and robbed. Now on her own and getting along in years, his mother wanted desperately to find Jim a supervised living arrangement where he would be safe if something happened to her.

But she ran into one snag after another.

Some of the difficulties had to do with the fact that Jim, it appeared, was not only developmentally disabled but mentally ill as well, often bouncing back and forth between the two systems.

For some time, a caseworker from the Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) insisted that Jim was not developmentally disabled, his mother recalls. ``When I tried to talk to her about placing him, all she would say to me was, `Your boy is crazy, he's not retarded!' So they wouldn't place him.''

Sue Elliott, director of the division of developmental disabilities, told Mrs. Cushing that Jim's ``challenging behaviors'' had made it very difficult to place him, since all community residential placements were privately operated and could not be forced to accept him.

Constantly twirling and talking to a little piece of wire was OK; Jim's behavior in a number of residences, which included brandishing knives, breaking windows and smashing furniture, was not.

The mental-health system, it seemed, had an equally difficult time with Jim Cushing.

By mid-1988, he'd been seen at Harborview Medical Center for psychiatric evaluation, and Western State Hospital for evaluation and treatment.

Although mental-health evaluators often insisted that he be ``monitored closely'' or placed in in-patient treatment, there were several reasons why that was difficult to do.

For one thing, there was a shortage of services, including housing, for someone such as Jim, with a dual diagnosis and such extreme behavioral difficulties.

For another, Jim didn't always accept help. Without his cooperation, the only alternative was to have him committed involuntarily.

But the involuntary-commitment system - written in the days when memories of gentle mentally ill persons locked away forever in dingy institutions still burned in the minds of civil libertarians - demands ironclad evidence of dangerousness to break its judicial insistence on freedom.

``It's a system of checks and balances,'' says Karen Stegeman, coordinator for King County Crisis Intervention Services. ``It's very careful about protecting people's rights.''

Although the original law was modified in 1979 to make it easier to commit those who have lost ``cognitive or volitional control,'' Stegeman noted, in this state, it remains very difficult to commit a mentally ill person for even a short period of time.

``I think you will find a lot of advocates and families who will say it does a better job of protecting people's rights than it does getting them treatment,'' Stegeman says.

Mrs. Cushing isn't an expert on the laws or on the state's regulations, but she has always believed she knew what her son needed: a stable, attentive environment and someone to help monitor his medications.

She faults DSHS and the mental-health system for not helping him find housing and for changing medications without adequate supervision, among other things.

``Right now, I don't think Jim should be in a trial. I think our governor should be on trial, and DSHS and mental health,'' she said.

The words reflect the bitterness she feels after many years of trying to help her son. A journal kept over the years is filled with drafts of letters, some sent, some not, venting her anger and frustration upon hearing time and time again that nothing could be done.

She was particularly offended last year when the outcry rose up over Earl Shriner, a former Rainier School resident who was convicted of sexually assaulting and mutilating a young Tacoma boy.

Angrily, she wrote Gov. Booth Gardner. ``I said, `Now, if that boy (Shriner) had received help, this wouldn't have happened. You wait until they are beyond help, and then you crucify them.' ''

When he wasn't living in some sort of residence or on the street, Jim would spend time with his mother, sometimes for months at a time. But more and more, those visits were marred with outbursts. During one, about two years ago, he threw garbage all over the apartment, slashed chairs and left his mother a note saying he was going to kill her.

On the advice of Jim's mental-health caseworker, Mrs. Cushing immediately sought help from King County's involuntary-treatment services. ``They checked him out, told me there was nothing to worry about and that I was worrying and I didn't have to. They made me feel foolish, like I was making a mountain out of a molehill.''

From there, he was in and out of different types of housing, including an apartment in the Morrison Hotel.

When he smeared the walls of his apartment with grape jelly, his mother came down with cleanser and made him clean them. ``All he did was laugh,'' his mother remembers. But later, when he smeared the walls with feces, his mental-health caseworker had him picked up and sent to Western State for evaluation.

There, Dr. Kamran Naficy and Dr. Daniel Kolb petitioned to have Jim held for 14 days. ``Respondent requires intensive supervised 24-hour restrictive care and is not ready for less-restrictive care,'' they wrote in their report. In addition, ``patient says he may kill someone one of these days,'' they noted.

With her son at Western State, Mrs. Cushing penned another note to herself in her journal: ``Please Dear God, please keep him there,'' she wrote. But it was not to be.

For reasons that remain undisclosed, the court denied the petition.

``They let him out that day,'' said Mrs. Cushing, a trace of anger in her voice. ``Just sent him out on his own. And not only that, to find his own way home from Western State. I picked him up in Tacoma. They just let him out the door.''

About a year ago, Jim's oldest sister died, cutting off another link with reality. As her son's behavior seemed to get increasingly bizarre, Mrs. Cushing became increasingly desperate for help, sending off another round of pleas to state officials and politicians.

Once again, their responses chilled her. The state was unable to find a place that would take Jim and that he would accept; Rainier had a freeze on admissions; the courts, she already knew, wouldn't allow Western State to keep him for more than a few weeks at best.

The only home Jim Cushing would have, it seemed, was the street.

After his sister died, Jim began withdrawing even more deeply into a strange ``never-never land,'' his mother recalled. In the past, Mrs. Cushing had always been able to bring him out by offering him something to eat or drink or talking to him. ``But when he was home in February, it didn't do any good to talk to him. He was off on another planet,'' she said.

In her apartment, Jim would lie on the couch, talking to himself. ``It would get so kind of violent, the laughing,'' she said, imitating the way he would wave his arms around in the air, hitting the pillows. ``His actions just weren't Jim. You could tell that something really was going on.''

His mother had never seen Jim act violently toward anyone, and didn't believe he would hurt someone. But she was concerned one day when she came home to find him watching a television movie about Lizzie Borden, a woman accused of the ax murders of her father and stepfather.

Mrs. Cushing was horrified when she glanced at the screen.

``I said to him, `Oh, Jim, we don't want to watch that, do we?' and he just laughed. I said `Do you mind if I turn it off?' and he said no, so I turned on the news. He just laughed good-naturedly.''

That night Jim laid out the contents of his mother's tool kit on the table - screwdrivers and chisels and hammers in rows. When his mother awoke, he was crouched beside her bed, naked, a large carving fork in his hand.

``What are you doing in here?'' his mother asked him, frightened. ``He just grinned and said ``Hi!' and went back to bed,'' she recalled. He left the house about two hours later, and when dawn broke, his mother called Jim's mental-health caseworker, who started the ball rolling, once again, for an involutary commitment.

He was evaluated by Highline Evaluation and Treatment Facility, whose team recommended he be involuntarily committed for 14 days because of a ``likelihood of serious harm to others.'' He was ``gravely disabled,'' they concluded, because of his ``repeated and escalated loss of cognitive or volitional control over his actions.'' At a hearing Feb. 20, however, the prosecuting attorney agreed with Cushing's lawyer that he should be released to less-restrictive, out-patient treatment for 90 days, conditioned on his receiving daily counseling and medications.

He was also told not to come near his mother for 90 days, something she said she never wanted.

``I'm so angry that I called mental health now, but what I wanted them to do was to hospitalize him and stabilize him on medicine,'' she said.

``I told the judge and the prosecuting attorney the reason why I was frightened was that he really needed care, that I couldn't give it to him; that I wanted him to get it before something serious happened,'' she said.

``But they told him he couldn't come near me, so that cut off his only link. I thought, my God, he's lost (his sister), now me. I think Jim thought everything had been taken from him.''

According to papers filed in his court case, on the day of his release Jim was involved in a confrontation with a security guard at Westlake Center, who removed a knife from him. He never showed up for his appointments with his caseworker.

Mental-health professionals determined that he was ``too stable'' to be forced to accept in-patient treatment, according to court records.

A couple of weeks later, in mid-March, Geneva McDonald was found dead from ax wounds in her Queen Anne home.

Throughout the summer, Cushing didn't see his mother much, but court records indicate he was seen several times by mental-health professionals. They noted that he had ``developed some psychotic symptoms'' and was experiencing auditory hallucinations, including hearing voices telling him to do violent things.

In August, he was taken to Harborview Medical Center for psychiatric evaluation after he was seen screaming, yelling and waving a knife near Kinnear Park on Queen Anne Hill. Again, he was evaluated and released to the streets.

Later that month, police identified James Cushing's fingerprints on glass panels inside a home in West Seattle. The home had been broken into in the early morning, and the intruder had scribbled on walls, eaten fruit and left an ax inside the home.

In September, the detectives investigating the death of Geneva McDonald came to Mrs. Cushing's door. ``No, no, you've got the wrong person!'' she cried, stumbling and falling forward onto a table, gashing her head as she fell. ``You've got the wrong person!''