Every time I think I couldn’t be more shocked by the depths of how little Republican elected officials care about the weakest & most vulnerable in our society, people like Gov. Brian Sandoval (R-NV) come along and prove me wrong:
San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera today announced a formal investigation into whether the State of Nevada improperly “dumped” psychiatric patients to his city and across California.
In a letter to the director of Nevada’s Department of Health and Human Services sent this morning, Herrera demands that the state turn over documents related to its aggressive practice in recent years of discharging mental patients to Greyhound buses and transporting them across the country. The letter, copied to Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval and Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto, cites a Bee investigation detailing how the Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital in Las Vegas bused roughly 1,500 patients to other cities and states from July 1, 2008 through early March 2013.
A Bee examination of Greyhound bus receipts found Rawson-Neal bused 500 patients to California during that period; roughly 30 of them were transferred to San Francisco. One of the patient’s clients, James Flavy Coy Brown, recently turned up suicidal and confused at a Sacramento homeless services complex after he was discharged via Greyhound to Sacramento, with no prepration for his housing, care or treatment.
Two things. First, after multiple mass shootings involving mentally ill shooters, including Virginia Tech, this is how Nevada is treating people suffering from mental illness? Second, remember this the next time you hear a Republicans say we need stronger mental health care, not stricter gun control laws. This Republican governor is dumping mentally ill people out of his state like human trash.
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