Precautions for all staff at risk of attack like the one that killed Scanlon
OMH boosts safety measures statewide

By SHERRY HALBROOK

Judi Scanlon did not die in vain. PEF members have worked tirelessly for better worker safety since the intensive case manager was murdered by an outpatient during a home visit just before Thanksgiving in 1998.
Those efforts are paying off and they would make Scanlon proud.
“Judi loved her job and loved helping people,” said Paul Shea, council leader of PEF Division 180 at Buffalo Psychiatric Center where Scanlon was a PEF member and assigned to work as shared staff with the Buffalo Federation of Neighborhood Centers.

“Judi was an activist who had been advocating for safety,” Shea said. “She fought for cellular phones and state vehicles for employees who work in the field.”
Finally, two cell phones were requisitioned and given on a rotating basis to staff.
“But when it was Judi’s turn to have the state phone, she gave it to a co-worker and relied on her personal cell phone, instead,” Shea said. “Sadly, on the day of her death, she had no time to use that phone.”
Scanlon was stabbed and struck in the head with a hammer at the apartment of outpatient Diane Wylie, who admitted to the attack during the recent trial in which she was convicted of second-degree murder.
Building safer system

With the help of the PEF President Roger Benson and the union’s Department of Occupational Safety and Health, Shea convinced managers at the psychiatric center to stop all home visits to patients until better safety measures could be put in place.
Buffalo Psychiatric Center and the community program adopted stronger safety policies recommended by PEF and developed by Scanlon’s co-workers before the state Labor Department’s Bureau of Public Employee Safety and Health (PESH) ordered the improvements in September ’99.
And on January 27 of this year, the state Office of Mental Health directed that the same measures be implemented throughout its facilities and programs statewide.
The precautions include:

• Ensuring that case managers are trained to deal with potentially assaultive patients;
• Establishing a system (such as phoning in and checking out at the end of the day) to account for the whereabouts of all employees assigned to work in the field;
• Establishing formal safety and communication protocols for case managers when they visit patients’ homes. If the employee asks to be accompanied by a second person, the supervisor must evaluate the danger and decide if it merits sending two people. Also, employees must not make the visits alone if the supervisor has instructed them that they must be accompanied;
• Providing for accompanied visits when a patient has a history of assaultive behavior; and
• Providing case managers with a cell phone or other means to summon help when it’s needed.

OMH is recommending non-state mental-health programs also adopt the measures for staff who face similar hazards.
“It’s good to see OMH extend these protections to vulnerable employees throughout the system,” said PEF Health and Safety Director Jonathan Rosen. “We have been working very hard with OMH to eliminate the threat of violence in the workplace.
“Last year, the unions helped the agency develop the Safe and Therapeutic Environment program and begin training staff in it,” Rosen said. “And now we are working with OMH under a $680,000 federal grant to study the effectiveness of federal guidelines for reducing violence in the workplace.”

Much more to be done
The union is also working with two Buffalo-area legislators — Assembly Member Sam Hoyt and state Sen. Richard Maziarz — to get legislation passed to improve protection for state mental-health workers.
“Judith’s Law passed in the Assembly last year, and Sen. Maziarz has vowed to keep working for its passage in the Senate,” Benson said. “We hope the lawmakers and governor who showed their concern for public safety by passing Kendra’s Law in 1999, will show their concern for public-employee safety this year by enacting Judith’s Law.”
Another important way for them to show that concern, Benson said, is by restoring budget cuts to staff at some psychiatric centers and staff shared with some community mental-health programs.

Psychiatrist: attack was planned
Judge finds outpatient guilty of murder in Scanlon death

The sad ending is finally being written to a grim tragedy that began more than a year ago in western New York.
An Erie County judge found a psychiatric outpatient guilty of second-degree murder on February 25 in the death of her intensive case manager, PEF member Judi Scanlon, 44.
Scanlon left a large family, including her husband, three children, two grandchildren, her parents, siblings and other relations.

Diane Wylie, 46, testified that she attacked Scanlon during a home visit to Wylie’s apartment in Buffalo on Nov. 24, 1998. Wylie said she feared Scanlon wanted to remove Wylie’s 4-year-old daughter from her care.
Scanlon and other professionals had talked to Wylie about temporarily putting the child in foster care while Wylie’s anti-psychotic medication was changed.
Wylie waived her right to a jury trial and did not plead insanity.

However, in 1982, Wylie used an insanity defense successfully to avoid conviction on bank robbery charges in Hawaii. As a result, she was hospitalized for two years.
In the Scanlon case, the judge barred testimony about Wylie’s history of threatening her family members with hammer, knife and arson attacks, and an attack on a fellow holding-center inmate in August 1999.
A Rochester psychiatrist, who examined her after the attack on Scanlon, testified that Wylie told him she planned in advance to kill Scanlon and blame it on an intruder. She even pulled out the screen in her kitchen window to make it look as though someone had broken in.

Wylie’s lawyers argued she was emotionally out of control. They said she did not mean to kill Scanlon, and was guilty only of the lesser charge of manslaughter. They will appeal the murder conviction.
Wylie will be sentenced in May. She faces a prison term of 15 to 25 years.
During her testimony, Wylie said she did not want to be sent to a psychiatric hospital, which she described as a “horrible place.” She said she prefers to “be with the police.”

Friend, daughter: Learn from history, don’t repeat it
Professionals urged to learn from Scanlon’s murder

By SHERRY HALBROOK

A brutal murder ended the life of PEF member Judi Scanlon in November 1998. Now, the psychiatric outpatient she was visiting has been convicted of that crime, but the pain and loss have left an indelible mark on her family and friends.
PEF member Marie Kelly went through intensive case management training with Scanlon, served on the same mental-health team with her in Buffalo and was a close friend.
So, even though Kelly has moved across the state to become state shared staff in Albany, she returned to Buffalo in February for the murder trial of outpatient Diane Wylie.
“I wanted to be in the courtroom because it was the only way to understand what really happened,” Kelly said.

What she learned was chilling.
“Wylie testified that she resented her case manager’s control over her life,” Kelly said. “But that apartment and everything she had was because of all the hard work that Judi put in for her.”
Not only did the patient see the help as interference, she ended it in the most horrific way possible, attacking Scanlon with a kitchen knife and a hammer.

Murder didn’t have to happen
“Testimony showed that she planned that attack,” Kelly said. “But if she didn’t like the program, she could have withdrawn at any time. Intensive case management is always voluntary.”
The testimony showed the murder could have been prevented if the state had sent two people to the home, instead of just one, Kelly said. “Wylie told the court that she could not have done this if someone else had been with Judi. She said, ‘I knew she would be alone.’ ”

It’s important to learn from this tragedy, but Kelly said she sees a lot of denial in the mental-health community.
“People in mental-health services aren’t ready to hear these things,” she said. “Nobody is ready to admit that it could happen again; that it could happen to them.”
Whereas some of the safety precautions ordered after the murder are beginning to filter down to workplaces around the state, many others are not.

Kelly said cell phones are now provided to intensive case managers in Albany County, where she works. But information about patients’ records of violent behavior often are still unavailable and case managers may still be sent unwarned and alone into potentially dangerous situations.
Kelly cited the case of a former patient of hers whom she had been told was on probation for a minor infraction. Later, she learned he was really on parole for a violent felony.

Cutbacks threaten safety
The PEF member’s worries and grief are shared by her friend’s daughter, Kelly Scanlon.
“It was the lack of dollars and cents that killed our mother,” Kelly Scanlon told the Western New York Committee on Occupational Safety and Health at its meeting in March 1999.
She blamed state cutbacks in staffing and facility closings for creating dangers both in the psychiatric centers and in the community.

“With increasing improvements in medication and care in facilities such as the Buffalo Psychiatric Center, patients could be placed in greater care today than in years past,” Scanlon said. “However, with a lack of state funding, patients are turned away from the increasing care they need within facilities. Even more alarming is the shortage of staff available on wards to care for those patients who are institutionalized. Safety then becomes a concern for all staff and patients involved.”

Scanlon rebuked the state for sending intensive case managers, such as her mother, into patients’ homes alone and unequipped to summon help.
Scanlon urged mental-health workers to face the lessons from her mother’s death.
“Prevention and awareness of what led to the murder of my mother is the key to preventing all of you from walking in the same footsteps of hell as my family and I have been doing. Please don’t let the murder of my mother be left ignored,” Scanlon pleaded. “Learn from this tragedy. Let my mother’s story become a lingering reminder of what is taking place within mental health.”

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