Here is a sad story.

What should have been done?

The trial that would never come for Rosie Sims

Schizophrenic ran out of time while delays kept her from court

08:45 PM CST on Friday, November 10, 2006
By JAMES M. O'NEILL / The Dallas Morning News
Seventh in a series
The voices told Rosie someone was trying to steal her money.
So on the morning of Oct. 20, 2003, she took a small knife and headed to the bank up the street. The voices told her to attack the bank manager. She did what the voices told her to do.
After Rosie was subdued, the police took her back to the jail she had left only months before. Her bail was set at $35,000.
Again, she was assigned an isolation cell. Again, she spent her days chanting back at the voices.
At the competency hearing Jan. 15, 2004, Dr. Michael Pittman said Rosie was "hallucinating voices from God, and ... hallucinating voices from her sister." When he had tried to discuss her trial with her, Rosie's response was so off-topic he could "just as well have been talking about the far side of the moon."
When Magistrate Terrie McVea asked if Rosie could be faking incompetence, Dr. Pittman noted that people who fake usually have no prior psychiatric history.
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"They'll start putting on an act ... barking like a dog or complaining of seeing little green men. People who fake make good sense. Ms. Sims' ... thought processes go from point A to X to P, and there's no rhyme or reason about how she got to all those places. People with schizophrenia do that. It's very difficult to fake that sort of thing."
The doctor also noted that Rosie was in an isolation cell, similar to those reserved for people charged with capital murder. He said that people who fake mental illness and find themselves in an isolation cell "start getting better ... real fast."
On Feb. 3, when Rosie was sent back to Vernon State Hospital, the cotton harvest was nearly over. As she rode in the sheriff's van, its windows framed a view of the passing fields, punctuated by the bare, spindly, rust-colored cotton stalks. Tufts of cotton, blown off trucks heading to the gins, would have caught in the grass at the edge of the road, like the remnants of a snow squall.
Perhaps it all reminded her of Floydada, on the Texas High Plains, where she raised her children, where she helped neighborhood kids with homework, where she made pecan pies and entertained her friends while doing their hair.
Perhaps. This time when Rosie arrived at Vernon, now as familiar as any other place in her life, she refused medication, and staffers used restraints. They gave her Zyprexa. They added Haldol. They switched to Zydis. They added Lithium. They raised the dose. Then raised it some more.
Eventually, Rosie's mind responded. And she was returned to the Dallas jail.
On Oct. 29, 2004, Dr. Pittman told the judge that Rosie appeared competent for her trial on the bank attack. "Her condition is precarious, though, and it could worsen," he added.
The court system staggered along. Rosie sat in jail. A hearing was scheduled for January, then rescheduled for February. It was passed on to March. Her case was finally set for trial on April 15, tax day. Then it was cancelled and passed to May.
Rosie spent her 60th birthday in her cell. She missed daughter Tosha's April wedding.
On May 8, 2005, Rosie's older daughter, Melissa Lomack, brought her children to visit their grandmother in the jail. Melissa had not brought them to visit before because she did not want them to remember their grandmother in such a setting.
But this was Mother's Day.
Melissa sat in a plastic chair, with 6-year-old Tati on her lap. Michael, 13, stood behind her. They faced a plate-glass window. On the other side was a booth with a door that led to the jail cells.
When the door opened and the guard escorted Rosie into the booth, she was all smiles.
"She was cheesing, looking at the kids," Melissa said. Melissa and her mom spoke by way of phones hanging on the wall on each side of the window. Rosie asked how the grandchildren were doing. It was the last time she would see them.
Into November of 2005, Rosie waited for trial.
On Nov. 8, as she routinely did, Tosha called Rosie at the jail to chat. Then she called the nurse's station, because her mother didn't sound right.
Five days later, on the night of Nov. 13, the nurse's station received an urgent call from Rosie's cell: Inmate down.
E-mail rosie@dallasnews.com