3,000 words in yesterday’s News-Gazette about the life and death of Toto Kaiyewu:
The article paints a picture of a disturbed young man on the losing end of a struggle with mental illness, basically committing “suicide by cop,” as one commenter so eloquently put it. The article is essentially uncritical of police action in the case, with the exception of the denial of immediate paramedic access to Kaiyewu until it was clearly too late.
Here are some relevant pull quotes:
As the only black man who’d been in all day, Oluwatofunmi “Toto” Kaiyewu immediately drew the attention of clerk Rosalind Howard when he walked into the Mobil Super Pantry in Villa Grove about 10:15 p.m. April 26.
After Kaiyewu was stopped by police in Villa Grove, he made some non-sensical statements, according to police reports:
When Deckard asked why Kaiyewu had stopped in the road, he said Kaiyewu replied, “Because I thought I knew you.” When Deckard repeated the question, he said Kaiyewu replied, “Because I felt a connection between us.”
The most interesting portion of the article dealt with medical treatment that Kaiyewu had received from Texas psychiatrist, Dr. Deena Gandhi. Dr. Gandhi stops short of blaming Kaiyewu’s behavior on demon weed, but not by much:
Gandhi told Kaiyewu that he needed to stop smoking marijuana and discontinue Vyvance, an amphetamine she had prescribed to treat attention-deficit disorder. She also changed her diagnosis, to an unspecified “psychosis” and prescribed an anti-psychotic drug, Invega.
The forensic psychologist on the case is the unfortunately-named Dr. Jeckel, whose opinion is likely more reliable than that of his alter ego. He’s convinced that Kaiyewu was psychotic:
After examining police reports about the incident as well as Kaiyewu’s medical records, Jeckel said, “I think it’s safe to say that he was psychotic, that he suffered from a paranoid psychosis when he was shot.”