Anguish For Son Charged In Arson -- Courts To Decide On Treatment Or Punishment In Fatal Fire

Marc Gerson always wanted to get better.

From his first psychotic episode at college, when he told doctors he was actor Matt Dillon, to the day last month when he set fire to his family's Redmond home, Gerson sought treatment, counseling, newer medications - anything to silence the voices in his head.

The courts now will decide whether Gerson, 31, receives treatment or punishment for the Jan. 22 fire that killed his 35-year-old sister and her 9-year-old son and severely burned his father, who remains at Harborview Medical Center.

His mother, Ellen, was slightly injured in the blaze. Speaking publicly about her son's illness for the first time, she wants people who hear of his actions not to fear those who struggle with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

"I just feel great sadness concerning Marc," she said. "Perhaps someday I will have the energy that will generate anger, but now I feel so sad that this is what his life has come to."

Marc Gerson always has refused to identify with mentally ill people, said his mother. Now, she says, she hopes people won't assume that all mentally ill people are like her son: "I don't want him to be set up as an example of the stereotype of a mentally ill person. I'd like people to think of ways to include mentally ill people in their lives and not reject them."

Last week Gerson was transferred from the King County Jail to Western State Hospital in Steilacoom for a 15-day mental evaluation. It's the latest stop on a decadelong odyssey through the state's mental-health system, a system that continues to search for the level of appropriate care for the chronically impaired.

To the Gersons, the fire is the latest manifestation of an illness that seemed to take control of their son's life just after he turned 19.

At Mercer Island High School, Gerson was known as an excellent student with a sharp mind and easy-going sense of humor. He played guitar in a garage band and in his junior year joined an after-school club that went on outings with the developmentally disabled. When he left for The Colorado College, friends said, he had one of the brightest futures in the class of 1985.

In the spring of 1986, on the day he was to return home from college, his parents received a call from a Colorado Springs hospital saying he had been admitted to the psychiatric unit. He and some friends had smoked marijuana and taken hallucinogens to celebrate the end of the school year. The others came down. He didn't.

After a week, Gerson was stable, and doctors told the Gersons their son most likely would be fine. But nine months later, in February 1987, the Gersons sought legal guardianship of their son. In court files, he was described as "severely disabled" with bipolar disorder. He was later diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Although Gerson took lithium and briefly attended the University of Washington the next year, he became increasingly agitated and restless.

The petition for guardianship was dropped when Gerson missed meetings with his attorney.

The family never again sought legal control, said his mother. The Gersons had legal guardianship of his developmentally disabled sister, Jennifer, who died in the fire. Marc Gerson never wanted to be that dependent on his parents.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Gerson periodically disappeared for weeks. His parents filed missing-persons reports and circulated his photograph among street people in Seattle's Pike Place Market and Pioneer Square. He felt an affinity with the poor, said his mother.

Resurfacing at the hospital

The Gersons always found Marc the same way: He'd be taken by the police to Harborview Medical Center or Overlake Hospital Medical Center and would ask medical personnel to call his parents.

It's not uncommon for police to take mentally ill people to a hospital. Roughly 30 percent of those admitted to the crisis unit at Harborview had some contact with police, said Dr. Christos Dagadakis, director of emergency psychiatry.

Patients spend up to 23 hours in the crisis unit before they are moved to another unit or released, said Dagadakis.

At Overlake, severely agitated patients are sometimes placed in the "Quiet Room," a bare, yellow-painted box with a bed secured to the floor. It can take minutes, hours, sometimes days for patients to stabilize, said Shirley Goodman, director of psychological services.

As funding has shrunk for psychiatric out-patient services, Goodman said, the Quiet Room has been used with greater frequency. Today, when patients are admitted to the hospital, they are generally in much worse condition than those admitted several years ago.

From 1987 to around 1995, Gerson was hospitalized more than a dozen times, sometimes more than two weeks at a time. Once he was released to a residential treatment program that monitored his medications and offered counseling. He stayed only a couple of weeks.

Nonetheless, hospitalization seemed to help, said his mother.

"We got the feeling that when they sent him out, he was on much more solid ground," she said.

Trying to live on his own

About four years ago, Gerson's illness began to stabilize. He rented a low-income apartment in West Seattle operated by the Seattle Housing Authority and landed a job driving a bus and picking up clients for Highline Mental Health.

He quit the job after one of the riders made what he felt was an anti-Semitic remark. He lost the apartment and moved back home.

He later moved into a Bothell apartment complex operated by Mentor Health Northwest, a Bellevue-based mental-health organization. He got a job at a nearby Safeway, and urged his parents to help him rent his own place, a normal place for normal people.

While Gerson felt great compassion for people who faced adversities beyond their control - he volunteered for the Chicken Soup Brigade, among other social services - he never wanted to be a part of the mentally ill community. He referred to others suffering from psychiatric disorders as "those people," and could never fully come to terms that he was like them, said his mother.

His parents helped him rent an apartment, but when he quit his job at Safeway about six months ago he was forced to move in with his parents, his sister and her young son.

In November, his condition began to deteriorate. The voices became louder, and he spoke to himself more often. He was hospitalized at Overlake, but only for a couple of days. Ellen Gerson said he took the bus from the hospital, and she was surprised to find him home.

Hospital stays in psychiatric wards have decreased considerably over the past decade as mental-health treatment follows the trend of reduced hospital time for almost every medical procedure, said Dr. Peter Roy-Byrne, chief of psychiatry at Harborview.

That's not necessarily bad, Roy-Byrne added. The goal of mental-health providers should be to re-introduce patients to society and to encourage them to accept life with their illness.

But with mental-health dollars always in short supply, any further pruning of state funds for intensive psychiatric care may not be in the best interest of patients or the community, he said.

"Managed care has reduced length of hospital stay over the decade, and that has been appropriate. The question is how low can you go," he said.

New medications failed to help

Gerson was hospitalized again at Overlake Jan. 15, this time for five days. The voices had become worse, and, as always, he asked his parents to admit him. Weeks earlier, he had been prescribed the new anti-psychotic drug Zyprexa, but the voices only became louder. The new generation of medications that have given hundreds of mentally ill people a new life failed to help him.

On Jan. 22, the day he set the fire, Gerson attended a day center for the mentally ill, but left early. The director promised the Gersons a psychiatrist would see him the next morning. By then, he was in jail, his father was fighting for his life in an intensive-care unit, and his sister and her son were dead.

Gerson will undergo various tests at Western State to determine whether he is competent to stand trial on two counts of first-degree murder and one count of first-degree arson. A judge will hear the results of the evaluation at a Feb. 23 hearing in King County Superior Court.

As the Gersons piece together a new life, they hope the criminal-justice system will acknowledge Marc's illness and provide the care that may someday enable him to find peace.

"He was a good man. Truly, a gentle soul," said his mother. "I think if he were to go to Western State and be given some semblance of freedom to go out and take a walk and read books, I think he will create a life that has some meaning. He will not stop helping people, even in that environment."

Alex Fryer's phone message number is 206-464-8124. His e-mail address is: afryer@seattletimes.com