Western State patient’s family considering lawsuit

By Bill McKelway, Media General News Service
Published: October 24, 2008

WILLIAMSBURG — The state’s mental health commissioner promised Friday that a mental patient held in seclusion at Western State Hospital for the past 15 years will be moved.

Commissioner James S. Reinhard and other officials outlined an array of new treatment plans incorporating the patient’s native language of Spanish that could accelerate his progress and serve as a model for mental health care statewide.

But a lawyer involved in years of effort to place 58-year-old César Chumil closer to his family and to provide language-based treatment regimens to the native Guatemalan said the promise lacks specific target dates.

“We appreciate what the commissioner is saying today, but without deadlines, it’s only a vague promise of effort ... this could go on for years with no real changes,” said Nathan Veldhuis.

The state’s Human Rights Committee, however, decided Friday to accept Commissioner James S. Reinhard’s plan for attending to Chumil, concluding that the plan addresses its previous requests for more detail.

Veldhuis said the committee’s decision ends an appeal process by Chumil’s family that began about two years ago.

He said Chumil’s family will now consider filing a federal lawsuit alleging multiple violations of civil rights laws in connection with Chumil’s life in the state’s mental health system over the past 22 years, much of which he spent in restraints or severe confinement.

The state Human Rights Committee has recommended that Chumil be moved closer to his family in Northern Virginia and that the state implement language-based treatment to help the seriously mentally ill man.

But the committee has no authority to require changes and Reinhard said the complexity of Chumil’s history and severe mental health problems make moving him to a community-based system of care very difficult.

Chumil lives out his life in a locked suite of three rooms equipped with accessories not available to others, but Veldhuis said hospital officials acknowledge that Chumil has lost all desire to socialize or to engage staff.

Over two decades, Chumil has been involved in thousands of assaults, and Veldhuis said Friday that this behavior has continued to a limited extent.

The in-hospital violence contrasts with visits Chumil is allowed to make outside the hospital with his family to shopping malls and restaurants, according to his lawyers.

Bill McKelway is a staff writer for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.