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A Delaware County jailhouse tragedy - and questions abound
Sandy Morgan didn't have a receipt when she walked out of the Boothwyn Wal-Mart with more than $500 worth of dolls, toys and girls' clothes. In her mind, she didn't need one. She owned Wal-Mart, she told a manager who tried to stop her.
Sandy knew things others didn't. She knew she owned many stores and she knew the television transmitted demons. She took care to protect her family: She threatened the demons with knives and a broken mop handle; she threw away food she was sure was poisoned.
It was a strain, fighting things no one else saw. Once her sisters watched as Sandy wandered into the street and looked up at the sky. She asked God to take her.
But that February afternoon in 2006, it was the police who took Sandy. Arrested for shoplifting, the 38-year-old college graduate from Aston was ordered held on $10,000 bail and taken to the Delaware County jail.
Within the first hours of Sandy's incarceration, a physician's assistant guessed she might be mentally retarded. Within a day, a doctor diagnosed her as schizophrenic. Within eight days, a psychiatrist declared her incompetent to stand trial.
While the court waited for a competency report, Sandy waited in jail. For five weeks, she saw no visitors. She never went outside. She hid under covers and stared at the walls.
She went two weeks without a shower because the nurses were afraid to go near her.
"Time to get out!" Sandy told a nurse after a week in jail. After two weeks, "Are you here for Jesus?" After a month, "Is [that] a horse over there?"
If a local hospital hadn't released Sandy from its psychiatric ward weeks earlier, she might not have been arrested. If she had threatened to kill the Wal-Mart employees, or herself, the police could have taken her to a hospital.
If jail officials had called Sandy's family, they might have known what was wrong when she collapsed in her cell, her arms and legs flailing, her body cold.
But Sandy wasn't lucky like that.
A grim diagnosis
Later, Sandy's story would come out slowly, in dozens of depositions, after her family sued the jail, the company that runs it, and the hospital that released her weeks before her arrest.There would be many sides to the tale, a tangle that a jury is scheduled to work out next week.
But it started in 1985, when Sandy was 17 and heading off to York College. That's when her family noticed something was wrong.
The sixth of seven children, Cassandra "Sandy" Morgan had been a bright, fearless child with a vivid imagination. She excelled in school, played field hockey, ran track, and loved writing and singing contests. She wanted to be a nurse.
But the summer after she graduated from Chester High School, she became afraid. She told her younger sister, Erika, that someone was trying to break into their house. In her dorm room, she saw spiders crawling on the walls.
Sandy's brother James, seven years her senior, was a rookie in the York Police Department in 1986 when he received a call from campus that Sandy had been raped. He rushed to the hospital.
But doctors found no evidence of assault. After prolonged questioning and numerous tests, they diagnosed Sandy, then 18, with paranoid schizophrenia. They prescribed Haldol, a psychotropic drug.
Sandy tried to go back to school, but the hallucinations drove her home to her mother and sisters Erika and Jamie. She wrote poetry about her struggle to hold on to her dreams that was published in an anthology in 1988.
At home, Sandy found purpose in caring for her diabetic mother, who was bedridden. Willie Mae Morgan needed insulin shots, which all three sisters helped to administer. Sandy often bathed her mother and helped prepare her meals.
