First, let me say that this article is probably the second on out all of the articles that I have posted here and on my blog extensions, where I will be writing at the first person. If you look at all of the articles on this blog, you will see that I write very formally, like in a book, but not just any book – the kind of writing you find in serious academic books. However, in this article and others in this series, I will be writing about police and hospitals, and therefore I will be writing more informally. I write formally for a reason: I do not want to contribute to dumber. But these two issues are too important, and are very personal to me. I despise liars; but even more so, I refuse to give a pass to lying cops and hospital workers. These are two categories of people whose lies can cause serious damages. In fact, people who work in these two professions should be held to higher standards and accountable for their actions. Police, in particular should not lie, ever, at any time, for any reason. If they want to lie they can do that on their own time – at home. The reason is, police departments in this country hold so much latitude and discretion that they’re bending the parallels and tipping the equator. But instead of using such awesome power for the good of the people, they misuse and abuse it. So long as they continue to get away with this, they will have no reason to stop. Today, in this country, a police officer could be found standing over a dead body, holding the bloody knife, and their DA buddies, BFF judges, and ignorant jurors, would find that they did nothing wrong. Now fasten your seat belt because I am about to turn the first person writing button on, and it is up close and personal.    

                                                                                                        Photo_socialhead.com

I am a Black immigrant woman with three children, and have been married for 29 years. Despite serious problems with my husband and damage he had caused our family, I am still married to him, because it was his personal problems that was wreaking havoc and causing me great hardships. But he was never abusive in a domestic violence type way or under the court’s definition of domestic abuse, until 3 and half years ago. Don’t worry, I never betrayed my principles; my husband knows that I am writing this blog right now and knows what’s in it. I believe in full disclosure. There was a pattern to this; I would ask him to acknowledge the wrong he’s done to me; he’d start parsing his words like in a tactical military avoidance kind of way. I would get upset; He would try to outdo my upset; that would get me more upset; then he would go enlist the children to his side with all sort of lies about why the argument started: your mother is crazy - she needs to be committed. Since the children are on the third floor of the house, as soon as I see him go up there I would stand at the bottom of the stairs and could hear all of it. Many times these arguments would happen after he’s had a few drinks. I can’t drink alcohol – Sometimes I wish I could -- but I have an acute Gastro condition, so I can’t. Then the argument would escalate until I consider it too verbally abusive. One time he pushed into the closet; he’s grabbed me and pushed and showed. Don’t take me wrong, I never stood there idle or cry, but I only weight about 90 pounds on a good day. So, before I get really hurt, I would call the police.

I called the police 4 times in 2012 (I don’t have to deal with that anymore, because my husband came close to dying last June from a catastrophic illness of unknown origin). The first three times they came, they made him sit in their patrol cars while he called someone to pick him up. While in their cruiser, they chitchatted with him, one of them even shared a carrot with him. And each time, they would first take his story before they even talk to me. In other words, by the time they get to speak with me they already recorded his lies. On the fourth call, he was arrested. But the next time the argument and the yelling and name-calling started, I told him I was calling the police. So he preemptively went to the police station and spoke with them. I didn't know that, and since the police station is so close to our house, I walked there to tell them what happened. Even though he had left, I wanted it documented. At the time, I had a broken wrist and my orthopedic surgeon had just prescribed me 40 Percocet just 4 days earlier.  Because of my stomach problems and my very - very low weight I can’t take too many medicines. Also, the pain killers Percocet and Vicoden particularly don’t agree with me. If I take a whole pill, I feel like I dying: I feel faint—not a good feeling. So, I always take a half.  And sometimes that’s all I take in a day. I just don’t like this medicine. But that day, he had raided the medicine bottle, and the 40 Percocet were gone. So, as a fool, or a really naive and innocent-minded person, I brought the empty medicine bottle and the empty alcohol bottles he had been drinking to the police station to show (at least in my mind) what was at the core of these problems.

An Andover police officer whom I have spoken with before, and frankly a person I like, because he looks so genuine. He shows his emotions; when he disagrees with something I say, like “that’s a lie,” he gets all excited and he starts raising his voice. I felt that was very human. The first time I spoke with him it was springtime and he told me we can sit on the bench outside and talk. He was a Sergeant at the time, and he told me he’s a veteran. He either fought in the Golf war or in Iraq. I was impressed, but yet again, I’m always looking for an excuse to like people. I guess “I was born that way.”  When I got to the police station on the day of the incident in question, Sargent Guy was on duty, I didn't know he was there, so I was glad when he came out to speak with me. Go ahead, you can call me a fool for trusting a policeman, but I refuse to give up on everybody just because I might be dealing with a not so good person. Besides, my roads in life have been lined with angels, so I have absolutely no reason to change and become a misanthrope. In any case, I showed Sargent Guy the empty bottles and told him what had happened. He said, “I think you should have that wrist checked, since you said that he pulled your arm.” My wrist had just come out of the hard cast and Dr. Brady had transited me to a brace. So, I said, yes – maybe it’s a good idea. Now Lieutenant Guy left and the paramedics came where I was seated. In Andover, the fire department where paramedics are housed is across the hall from the police, just a few feet away. The paramedics asked me if I could get on the stretcher, I said yes and climbed on it. But since it’s so awkward dealing with ambulance people when you’re not like near death, I decided to make small talks and pleasantries. I told them how I respected paramedics because when I took care of my mother with strokes, heart attacks, and congestive heart failures in my home for almost 10 years, paramedics were my lifeline. At the time, I lived in North Andover, which is now separate from Andover. They used to be one town, but like all “good” marriages, they broke up and went their separate ways. Anyway, next thing I know, the men took me to a mental institution, in the not so holy – Holy Family Hospital in Methuen. Well, after I talked to Lugo on the second day and threatened to sue her and the hospital if I was not let out of there rat hole immediately,  I was out there within hours. That did not fix the fact that I had been essentially falsely imprisoned. The loss of freedom is a violation of the XIV Amendment of the Constitution. And the fact remains that Steward Holy Family Caricas Hospital is as holy as the priests who molested dozens of children. I am a devout Catholic, and taught in Catholic schools. Therefore, if anyone should understand the meaning of the word 'holy' , I should be one who knows.

 

Dr. Susan Lugo who was the attending psychiatrist tried to slime her way out of the straight jacket I had prepared for her, by saying, the only reason she did not discharge me the first day was for my own protection, because since this started with a domestic abuse complaint, she was afraid that if she sent me back home, I would be at risk from my husband. This lousy excuse makes no sense at all. However, I was still perplexed about why I ended up there. I could not imagine that Sargent Guy had  caused this. The paramedics didn't tell me they were taking me to that hospital under the emergency commitment law. The closest hospital is Lawrence General. So, there was something very curious going on.  But for the one day I was there, I took time to read the voluminous handbook they threw by the window, as if someone with a real mental illness was going to read anything like that. In fact, the person who was in the same room with me was yelling all night and day about something or somebody chasing her. But somewhere in the huge handbook, which was littered with typos and grammatical offenses, I came across a section, which the state requires, whereby people who are put in places like that against their will can contact a lawyer. So, I called a lawyer and told him what had happened; he told me what to do, but I had already written a note to Dr. Susan Lugo, informing her that I wouldn't eat a thing until I am let out there, in addition to filling a complaint with the Board of Registration in Medicines against her personally. There is another useless institution: The Board of Registration in Medicines. So, I am now in a locked place, just like a jail. Imagine what would have happened if I showed any kind of emotions or express signs of being upset, which I had legitimate reasons to be. But I understood that this type of institution has a fundamental self-interest in keeping people locked up, crazy or not - it's called collecting health insurance money. Don’t take me wrong, I know that they will deny every bit of this. But that is a part of corruption. Not only was I being locked up in the mental ward of this hospital, when the doctor sat down to talk to me – after I threatened to sue her—she said, “I'm getting discharge papers ready for you to go home right away;" Then she proceeded to say, "You have a problem with pot.” I said what.You tested positive for marijuana, she said. Number one, I never believed that any government has any business telling people what they can and cannot put in their own bodies. But the bigger problem is that I would not recognize the so-called “pot” if someone was robbing it on my nose, since I've never seen the thing in my life. If anything, I should have been using the stuff; I heard that it makes people eat, and I hardly eat. In fact, I don't like to eat; it feels like a bother. So, there go the health care standards: giving people false positive test results for drugs they do not use. This is one in dozens of reasons why I will be writing the series I announced earlier: “Good Doctors – Bad Doctors & Hospitals that can kill you.”

While I was talking with Dr. Lugo, I tried to make her understand who I am, because I am very esoteric and therefore not easily understood by others. So I told her that I was initiated at 19 years by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi one-on-one, in person, in transcendental meditation and the study of meta-physics, worked on radio here in the US and abroad while I was teaching, and have traveled widely in South America, Europe, and North America. For that, this fraudulent psychiatrist wrote into the records, “the patient appears to suffer from ‘delusion’ of grandeur.” You can see why the woman is a fraud. Even if I had made up these things I told because somehow they came from some delusion of grandeur, delusion of grandeur is not a mental health emergency, neither is it a condition for which anyone ever gets hospitalized and committed to a mental institution. So, once I was home, I wrote complaint letters to the Commissioner for the Department of  Public Health,  Department of Mental Health, The Board of Registry in Medicine, my Health Insurance Company – asking them to not pay that hospital—and I wrote separate complaints to the Board of Directors of the so unholy – so not-family-like, Steward Holy Family Caricas Hospital. As for the individuals on that Board of Directors, they’re probably the same people who sit on Mitt Romney’s vulture Ben Capital. There is also the useless shell Caricas group commission located in Washington DC, which is supposed to have some type of quality control responsibility over that hospital. But from my communication with that particular  body, I realized that they are nothing but another shadow organization. Once corruption enters an institution it spreads like mold; it’s pervasive and it permeates every aspect of an organization. I have no doubt that there will be plenty of nitwits out there who will be ready and willing to defend Andover Police and that hospital, but I have records of everything and the records speak for themselves.

All of this was triggered by the misuse and abuse of a little known Massachusetts law, Chapter 123 Section 12 – “Emergency restraint and hospitalization of persons posing risk of serious harm by reasons of mental illness.” It is credible to believe that this law was written with good intention, and it used very carefully by ethical psychiatrists as a preventative measure, but only as a last resort, to commit people who pose actual "serious" risks to themselves and others. But of course, police in this country never saw a law they couldn't get their cronies in the legislative branch to write them in. Consequently, police are given power under this law, which – by the way – they never actually use this law to help people with real mental illness. There are plenty of people with serious mental illness on the streets. So, I must give it to Andover police: it was wicked cleaver to use that law to try to get me to stop calling them for domestic violence. After all, I am not only a tiny Black woman with an accent, I’m also very unassuming. As a meta-physician, I am supposed to be unassuming. I do have a few words of caution: if you’re going to engage in combat, particularly when it comes to standing up for your rights, expect to sustain some wounds – even serious ones. Those are badges of honor, but they still don’t feel good. Standing up for one’s individual rights is a hand-to-hand combat. The person, people, or institutions that are corrupted enough by power to end up violating your rights, are also corrupt enough to inflict serious damages upon you. This is not for the faint of heart, but like I suggested at the beginning, this will not be a defense either in the final analysis.

Anyway, it was the Department of Public Health Commissioner’ Office who wrote me a letter outlining the lies Sargent Guy wrote in his report that night: I was belligerent with the EMTs; I looked like I was a risk to myself; I took 40 Percocet in 4 days and I might have been drinking. As for the “belligerent” lie, according to the DPH letter, the EMTs reported that. Lying police is bad – lying EMTs is not cool, but it was Haverhill Massachusetts EMTs who got caught in a State audit buying certification instead of attending the re-certification class. It was also the Haverhill Fire Department who tried to frame my then 12-year son for a fire he had absolutely nothing to do with. There’s also the problem of those town mayors and managers being puppets of their police departments, like Jim Fiorentini of Haverhill. Back to the letter from DPH, since I found out about those lies, I've tried to get both departments to acknowledge the lying on the records and to apologize. I don’t believe in second chances, I believe in 1000 chances, giving people as many chances as possible to do the right thing. Andover Police ran out the clock. I did speak with Sargent Guy recently about this, but he had all sorts of excuses: there was another officer there that night and they both wrote reports, so the DPH letter might have referred to things that other officer wrote; I bully them and always come and say “oh, I’m going to blog about you.” This must be a first for policemen with guns and bombs, batons and tear gas, to say that a civilian bullied them. I thought that was hilarious. But there’s another just a bit of a small problem: my website is so new it’s not even funny. There’s absolutely no way I could have been talking about blogging when it didn't occur to me to get myself a website until February 18 of this year, and the incident I’m talking about took place on February 8, 2012. After you get a domain, it takes Google 3 to 4 weeks to include your website in the search engine, because they have a verification process. Then you have to build the website, which takes times. As a result, this website did not get its first ranking on Alexa until May, four months ago. These small details alone back up my assertion that Lt. Guy was making up excuses when what I wanted was an acknowledgement of wrongdoing and an apology. I have come to believe that one of the courses in police academy curriculum is how to lie. Police lie when it's not necessary and they lie about lying. Obviously, they can prove to the public that this is not the case.

I believe in full disclosure and live by the rules of moral and ethics. Therefore, I made sure to inform the Andover Fire and Police departments, as well as the Andover Town Manager, that I was trough trying to find out if anyone there was big enough to admit to lying and consequently I would be posting this article today. I do not agree that you can contort the truth, torture it, dress it up, stretch it, embellish it with phony accessories and lipstick, and twisting it around, and having it still remaining the truth. The truth is absolute. Many people confuse facts with the truth, but facts may or may not add up to the truth. Sometimes the facts can even get on the way of the truth, because what we call facts are largely colored by individual perception and interpretation and subjectivity of what we see, hear, or experience. In my book, there is the absolute truth, and anything other than that is a lie. But nobody lies like police. They are expert liars. But in the midst of this rotten basket of apples, I have found what I refer to as officers and gentlemen. I met one of those recently. His name is Mark, and I wish that I knew his last name. I define officers and gentlemen by their behavior and the manner in which they try to remember the “serve and protect” part of their jobs. This type of policeman stands out; they are model police officer. Police must stop lying because they’re putting crooks out of business. There’s not enough room in the lying industry for all those people. Stay Tuned.