Family fears play out in crime

Prophetically, Green said at the time, “My son is not violent and going to go out and kill a bunch of people – yet.”

Four years after the article ran, on March 16, 2017, Brennan was arrested, accused of stabbing his grandmother, Charlene Caldwell, 71, to death when she went to his apartment in The Dalles to check on him.

Caldwell had been quoted, but not named, in the 2013 story, tearfully recounting how she’d watched her smart, caring, athletic grandson become “a lost soul.”

In 2013, Green feared that she would be her son’s caregiver for the rest of her life and she wondered what would happen to him after she died. She had set him up in his own apartment, which she cleaned for him. She shopped for him and gave him meds daily.

Awhile later, Green was laid off after 18 years at Centurylink in Hood River and she moved to Iowa to be with her husband. Garrett was institutionalized at the time, spending a year at the Oregon State Hospital following an arrest for stealing a car. But after he was released he came to live in Iowa for all of 2015.

But Green ultimately couldn’t find workable housing for him there, and he couldn’t live with her. She knew he could get housing in The Dalles, however, so he moved back here in early 2016.

Her mom basically took over the care of Garrett, and Caldwell was livid at the people who were hanging around him and taking advantage of him, Green said.

Caldwell reached out to police numerous times, complaining about shady people taking advantage of her grandson — stealing his clothes, food and valuables and using his house as a crash pad. But she was told they couldn’t do anything because Garrett let them come into his house, Green said.

The Dalles Police Chief Patrick Ashmore said he could not comment on the matter since it was an active case.

“My mom was super terrified that Garrett would get evicted. That was one of her worst fears,” Green said. “She was always in a panic that these people would get him evicted.”

They viewed Garrett as “a free place with a hot shower. He had TV, he had electricity, he had clean clothes, he had food.” Once, they took him to Portland, sold his phone and pocketed the money, and left him there, she said.

While Garrett is accused of a horrific crime, statistically, the mentally ill are more often the victims rather than perpetrators. His ill treatment at the hands of the hangers- on who took advantage of him is an example.

Caldwell was so upset about it that in March 2016 she caught a particular man by Garrett’s apartment, a six-unit complex for people with mental and emotional disabilities in the 1000 block of East Ninth, and threw a bat, hitting him in the back, and then maced him in the face. She threw the bat at the truck he rode away in. The man’s girlfriend called police, who arrested her.

In the police report, Garrett told officers he didn’t care if the man came over, but his grandma did. Then he said he didn’t actually want the man to come over, but he “couldn’t stop” him if he did.

The officer asked Garrett if he asked the man to leave that day, and he said no.

In the police report from that incident, police noted that Caldwell had openly asked earlier if she could pepper spray the man. They told her not to, and asked her to call police if she witnessed a crime.

Caldwell told police she assaulted the man because she believed he was giving her grandson drugs.

She was asked if she felt her actions were the right thing to do, and she said, “Well, probably not, but I don’t know what to do with these people. I call you guys and you don’t do anything.”

She added, “I don’t want to be a vigilante, but I’m forced to it.”

Green said, “My mom would call me crying at least once a week over the whole situation. Just upset and scared to go there herself. [She was] trying to make sure he was going to get better and that he wasn’t going to end up homeless or in prison. She was scared to death he would do something and end up in prison.”

Caldwell did her best to police Garrett’s environment, Green said. She kicked out his friends and gave them ultimatums, making herself the brunt of Garrett’s frustration. “He blamed her for a lot of things, but he can’t really fluidly think all these thoughts, so bits and pieces would enter his mind and he’d get angry.”

His friends would tell Garrett “what a b---h my mom was and what a pain in the a— she was for telling them they couldn’t be there.”

Garrett would chase Caldwell out of his apartment, calling her filthy names. “He had done those same things to me when he was living in Hood River in his apartment,” Green said.

Last fall, Garrett went to visit his mom in Iowa and she ended up having to commit him. “He was threatening to slit our throats in our sleep and threatened to kill us.”

He went back to The Dalles, but “he had gotten worse and worse since I had him committed,” Green said. Her mom “was telling me more and more things he was doing and getting more and more aggressive with her.”

“I did fear that he would hurt my mom because he had shoved her and given her a black eye,” she said. “He was angry, super angry at her sometimes. He was surrounded by these kids who had no good intentions and they were always in his ear.”

Caldwell was afraid to report him to the police because she didn’t want to take out a restraining order against him and didn’t want him to get evicted.

Towards the end, Caldwell was saying she wasn’t going to go to the apartment anymore. Green agreed. “I told her: ‘Just don’t go up there anymore. He’s got a roof over his head. If he needs food, just leave it at the door.’”

But she couldn’t stay away. “She just worried so much about him and the people that were coming up there.”

Asked if her mom was stubborn, Green said, “She was fierce, I would say. She was stubborn, but it was more because she was super protective and didn’t want anything bad to happen to Garrett, and if that meant she had to put herself in harm’s way, she was going to do it.”

Green said Garrett was going to be sick the rest of his life, but her mom “couldn’t accept that as an outcome.”

Green said, “We did everything we could do; me when I lived there, and mom in the last year. We tried to get help but nobody was responsive; they watched it deteriorate.”

The family has asked attorney Tara Lawrence to look into the possibility of filing a lawsuit. The family has until mid-September to file. “They’re devastated by the loss of Charlene and just processing what happened, the how and the why,” Lawrence said.

Green was critical of the Center for Living back in 2013, and said the agency knew he was dangerous and didn’t take action.

“Then five years later he kills my mother,” Green said. “It’s just outrageous, really, what happened. The thing that was really mind-boggling to me, we did every single thing [there was] to do.”

Barb Seatter, executive director of the Center for Living, said, “Center for Living is very sorry for the losses this family has due to this event. However, Center for Living cannot comment on specific families or people that we may have been involved with. However, we do everything in our power to respond when families come to us with questions and concern about the people we serve.”

Garrett would take monthly psychosis shots, but wouldn’t take oral meds used as mood stabilizers and to treat side effects of the anti-psychotic meds. So, Caldwell tried to get the Center for Living to go up there to administer them, Green said.

“They were too afraid to go up there, they quit, so they clearly knew he was dangerous or they felt he was anyway,” Green said. “Maybe that was a wise choice but they should’ve realized my mom was in the same amount of danger.”

She said they should’ve given her an escort, taken weapons out of the apartment, or had a plan to meet him at the door.

Green said he never harmed the CFL workers “because he’s really not an aggressive person. He’s kind of docile and afraid of people and doesn’t like to get in trouble. The only people he felt comfortable being angry around were me and my mother,” Green said.

Though she’s critical of CFL, Green sees it as a systemic problem. “It seems like it’s from the top, it’s not just the local people, they’re just following suit and doing what their bosses are telling them,” she said. “Somewhere up above they’re not getting it.”

Changes in law since the 1970s have made it extremely difficult to forcibly medicate or even civilly commit a mentally ill person.

Garrett had “always been inappropriate,” his mother said in 2013. But it wasn’t until his late teens that he’d started bitterly fixating over the fact he was circumcised at age 5, instead of as a newborn, in order to fit in with his new stepfather. His rage was directed at his mom.

He had a mental break close to his 18th birthday, and it was at the hospital that Green first heard schizophrenia mentioned.

But workers at CFL initially believed he had drug-induced psychosis, not schizophrenia, and in the 2013 story Caldwell allowed that she may have helped support that opinion.

She admitted she was in denial about Garrett’s real problem, and insisted to counselors early on that he only acted crazy when he was smoking pot.

She simply couldn’t accept the reality of his illness, as she watched him slip into his own world.

After his break, he had lived with Caldwell and her husband for 18 months, and then moved back in with his mom. His bizarre behaviors included taking down photos and turning them around because he couldn’t stand them.

His teen sister was especially terrified of him. He’d begun seeing a private psychiatrist, who diagnosed schizophrenia and started him on medications.

Green’s husband hid the knives in the house, but she finally admitted it was time for him to move out after two incidents: First, he beat up the family dog as it was chewing on a toy because he believed it was gnawing on his sore back. Then, when a neighbor was using a chain saw, he believed his mother was stabbing him in the back. He called police.

Later, as the disease took further hold, he began to think he was a grizzly bear. Green worried every day he’d get lost in the wilderness, since sometimes he’d take off with nothing but a lighter and steak knife.

Then he felt his back was molten lava and he would feel it running down his back. Other times he thought he was a saber-toothed tiger or a gorilla.

By 2016, his new obsession became stabbing people, Green said. “He’s threatened us and that’s why we had him committed. He would repeat this over and over. I’m sure my mom heard it a hundred times: he was going to stab her or kill her. We should’ve been more, I don’t know – thought more about what that meant.”

She said, “We should’ve realized, now that he was changing subjects and was focusing on something else, that he was more likely to act on those things, because those were the thoughts in his head every day.”

At Green’s urging, Caldwell began keeping a journal of her efforts to reach out for help to local police and the CFL, but she never thought her mother would end up killed by her son.

Caldwell was even down talking to the police just a few weeks before she was killed, Green said.

Green said, “There’s a problem where there’s been sick people, really ill people, they’re out in the community and not able to care for themselves and we don’t have very good solutions for this problem, and bad things happen because of it.”

One homeless man she knows lost his fingers to frostbite last winter, and her cousin lost a son to suicide.

“It seems to me like we treat mentally ill people worse than we treat animals. We would never leave a dog in that situation. If there’s a sick animal we take care of them and put them in a shelter,” Green said.

She said the mentally ill are effectively told, “’I know you’re not capable, but good luck.’ It’s a horrible way to live.”

That was her fear for her son, who she said was not capable of getting or maintaining his own place, or even getting himself food. “He would probably just not eat if he didn’t have food. His brain just couldn’t think far enough ahead to plan for anything.”

Garrett was taken to the Oregon State Hospital a few weeks ago for a psychiatric evaluation to assess if he is capable of assisting in his own defense against murder charges. The quest is to see if he is “recoverable,” and can be made well enough to participate in a trial, he said.

She doesn’t think he is recoverable. “He’s been on several different medications for seven years and they’ve not been able to make him well yet, not even well enough to function,” she said.

Kelly said her mom didn’t share her dilemma with many people. “It was so hard and difficult and people weren’t very understanding and it hurt her, so she didn’t bother talking with them.”

The National Alliance on Mental Illness has chapters in Hood River and The Dalles. They serve as support for people and families struggling with mental illness. In the Dalles, they meet the first Thursday of every month from 6 to7:30 p.m. at One Community Health, 1030 Webber St.