Lamont Cathey was a promising Chicago basketball prospect, a dominating 6-8 center who had the potential to play at a Division II college until he was arrested and charged in the theft of money from a pizzeria safe more than a year ago.
Unable to post a $5,000 cash bond, the West Englewood 17-year-old languished in Cook County Jail as legal wrangling over his low-level burglary charge dragged on. Eventually, after months stuck in limbo when a plea deal fell through, something inside the teen cracked. He began to swallow anything he could get his hands on in his cell — screws, needles, a thumbtack, a 4-inch piece of metal, even strips of leather from restraints, according to jail officials.
At one point, Cathey had swallowed so much metal that doctors couldn’t tell which items were newly ingested. He destroyed a $50,000 hospital bed, a camera in his jail hospital room and even dismantled a medical device so he could swallow a metal piece inside, officials said.
According to jail officials, at least $1 million has been spent so far on Cathey’s medical care — more than any other inmate in recent history — as he has been hospitalized two dozen times in the nearly 16 months since his arrest and had multiple operations to remove objects from his digestive tract. Adding to the expense, jail officials said they have been forced to post a 24-hour guard outside Cathey’s cell to prevent him from harming himself further.
“He’s literally eating the jail,” the jail’s executive director, Cara Smith, said in an interview. “This case to me is a perfect example of the failure of the criminal justice system … It’s been a crushingly sad and very frustrating case.”
The jail has long been a dumping ground for the mentally ill, a byproduct of widespread cuts in mental health services at the city, county and state level over the last decades. Currently, the massive complex on Chicago’s West Side identifies nearly one-fourth of its roughly 8,000 inmates as mentally ill; that population, according to jail officials, is about three times as expensive to care for as other detainees.
In many cases, inmates are locked up on relatively minor charges but do not have the money to post small bonds to be released.
So what began as a boot-camp sentence for Cathey will likely end with the teen going to prison, as he has been accused of threatening and shoving a jail guard and was allegedly found with contraband — a catheter needle — in his cell last October. The incidents led to new charges.
“He was a young kid coming into our custody, an impressionable young man, and he has taken on probably every negative behavior he has seen others exemplify,” said Dr. Nneka Jones Tapia, a clinical psychologist who will become the jail’s new executive director. “For him now to come into a correctional institution at such an impressionable young age, he’s relied on us to parent him. And, at times he will allow our staff to do so, and at times he would rather be parented by the other inmates.”
Cathey’s family said he was never depressed or suicidal before he was arrested. They blamed the jail for his deteriorating condition.
“It’s probably the jail that done that to him,” said his older brother, Kenneth Barber, who talks to Cathey by phone from the jail. “I don’t really know why they’ve still got him locked up. He’s trying to make it seem like he’s OK, but I know he ain’t. He’s trying to stay happy for us, I guess.”
Attorneys from Northwestern University law school’s Bluhm Legal Clinic, who represent Cathey on his criminal charges, declined to comment. But in their court filings, they argued that Cathey desperately needs mental health treatment the jail isn’t equipped to provide.
“In over 13 years of practice as a social worker and attorney, I have rarely encountered a young man who is in greater need of treatment than Lamont,” one of his attorneys, Marjorie Moss, wrote in a court filing seeking to have Cathey sent to a psychiatric facility. “One thing is clear: Lamont requires structured, long-term psychiatric residential treatment. Without that treatment, Lamont will continue to deteriorate.”
By all accounts, Cathey had a rough time growing up. His father was absent, and his family was not always supportive, according to his coaches. He was arrested 16 times as a juvenile, although none of the cases resulted in a conviction. Police records identify him as a gang member. Not long before his first adult arrest, he enrolled in Community Youth Development Institute, an alternative charter high school in the Gresham neighborhood.
There, the basketball coaches took to calling him “Big Boy” because of the left-hander’s size.
“This is a second chance school; you understand what I’m saying?” Cathey’s former coach, Jerry Ewing, said last week walking through the school’s busy halls echoing with the shouts of students and staff. “Sometimes, this is the last stop.”
Sometimes, Cathey lacked even the bus fare for school and had to call one of the coaches for a ride.
“He just wanted to be successful, I think,” said Cathey’s cousin Charles Drake, 20. “He just needed the right guidance and he wasn’t getting it right then. He’s got a good heart. He just got some wrong turns.”
Said Coach Jarmichel Williams, 36: “I was going to teach him to lay carpet because he’s always like, ‘Man, coach, I need to make some money.’ It was always going back to the family structure, not having this, not having that. … He talked to me about certain things he just didn’t have. He didn’t feel like he had his family’s support. Because I would say, ‘Why don’t you have someone come to the game?’ He’s like, ‘Coach, man, you here, that’s enough.’ “
About five months after he started at the alternative school, Cathey broke into the manager’s office of a Near North Side Lou Malnati’s on Super Bowl Sunday of 2014, according to court records. The manager opened the door and saw him crouched over a pile of money next to an open safe. Cathey told the manager that he hadn’t taken anything, showed him his pockets were empty and walked out, the manager testified at a hearing.
Police arrested Cathey moments later after the manager called 911.
Cathey was locked up on that case when police learned that he had also stolen a set of car keys from a Ukrainian Village yoga studio in November 2013, court records show. Three days after that incident, Cathey allegedly broke into the security office of a Wicker Park nightclub and was arrested, records show.
Cathey pleaded guilty last year to burglary in a plea agreement that called for him to get boot camp, but his mental health issues and a suicide attempt while in jail kept him from being accepted, court records show. A few months after the boot camp deal fell through, jail officials said, he began engaging in self-destructive behavior.
Doctors said it can be difficult to determine whether an inmate is mentally ill or is acting out in the hopes of being moved to a hospital.
“Whatever chance I get, I am gonna kill myself,” Cathey told a forensic psychiatrist who was ordered by a judge to examine him in December. “They can’t stop me from killing myself.”
Last September, Cathey refused to give his food tray to a guard and, when the guard entered his cell to remove it, the teen allegedly shoved him, according to court records. Still, a few weeks later, a judge agreed to have Cathey released on electronic monitoring and confined to his home except to attend mental-health counseling, court records show.
But while out of the jail, he continued acting “erratically” — leaving rambling messages requesting therapy on the phone service attached to the ankle monitoring device, his attorneys wrote in a court filing. Three weeks later, he allegedly cut off his electronic monitoring band and was taken into custody at his mother’s home. He yelled and screamed all the way back to the jail, according to an arrest report.
He’s been in jail ever since, and his troubling behavior has continued.
Cathey’s case — though not his name — came up this month at the City Club of Chicago, during a discussion by four leaders of the Cook County criminal justice system. There were murmurs and a few gasps in the room full of judges, prosecutors and politicians as Sheriff Tom Dart mentioned the case.
“We have a guy right now that has cost us — has cost all the people in this room — close to a million dollars in health bills because he constantly eats the jail,” Dart said. “Across the country, the easy thing to do was cut mental health services and they’ve done it. So people don’t get better, they don’t get treatment — they go to jails and prisons and emergency rooms.”
Last week, the sheriff’s office moved Cathey into a newer section of the jail where he seems to be doing better.
Twitter @SteveSchmadeke
