(Father and Son, Maricopa County)
John Fox and his son Joshua Fox are the inspiration for the Arizona Mad Moms movement. Joshua was a millennial baby, born in the year 2000 to John and Crystal Fox in Phoenix, Arizona. John was an amazing artist with a passion for helping teenagers. His son Joshua was a peaceful child who loved art, rap music, and wolves. As a teenager, Joshua developed severe schizophrenia, which caused dangerous hallucinations. His parents first tried to get involuntary psychiatric treatment after he stabbed his leg with a knife, jumped out of a moving vehicle, ran into traffic, and started asking to purchase a gun.
Joshua was a classic example of being a danger to himself and others, but he was repeatedly released from involuntary screening centers because of Arizona’s severe shortage of acute psychiatric hospital beds. Currently, Maricopa County is releasing hundreds of dangerous and disabled individuals every month without treatment.
During one attempt to get Joshua into a hospital, he was jailed for domestic violence instead. A psychiatrist diagnosed him with severe psychosis requiring psychiatric medications, but the county jail didn’t follow up on the report. Tragically, Joshua never received SMI designation or treatment. A total of seven mental health agencies failed to recognize or treat Joshua’s schizophrenia. Several of our legislative bills seek to hold SMI programs accountable for providing treatment: we must pass SB1311, SB1609, SB1688, and HB2744.
Like many individuals with schizophrenia, Joshua was too sick to recognize his illness or to voluntarily accept help. He was over 18, legally an adult. Multiple agencies refused to speak with Joshua’s parents because they were not his legal guardians. During a trip to the grocery store, Joshua’s hallucinations caused him to hear “clicking sounds like Morse code” coming from his dad’s SUV instructing him to kill his father. On June 4th, 2021, 20-year-old Joshua Fox stabbed his father, John Fox, to death in his vehicle.
Severe gaps in Arizona’s treatment of SMI cost John Fox his life. We must pass SB1309, “John’s Law,” requiring psychiatric screening agencies to obtain patient history and listen to families. We must pass SB1611, which will help caregivers by facilitating medical evaluations for protective guardianship orders.
Arizona has the fewest state hospital beds per capita of any state in the nation. We have no secure residential options, and a woeful shortage of civil mental health court hospitals. This is directly responsible for Arizona’s excessive homelessness, death, and incarceration of individuals with SMI. We must pass SB1682 to remove county-based restrictions at the Arizona State Hospital. We must facilitate secure treatment by passing SB1678 and fund critical SMI programs by passing appropriations bills SB1598 and HB2782. These investments will pay for themselves by reducing incarcerations, “revolving door” hospitalizations, and community costs.
While jailed on murder charges, Joshua jumped off a second-floor balcony – twice – crushing his vertebrae and both heels. Joshua later explained he thought jumping off the balcony would “bring a dead girl back to life.” Despite his extreme self-harming behavior, the county jail allowed Joshua to refuse medications. Instead of obtaining a court order for involuntary treatment, Joshua was placed in solitary confinement and allowed to deteriorate – to the point of near death – for an entire year. This was negligent and inhumane, and inconsistent with both Title 31 and Title 36 of the Arizona Revised Statutes.
It wasn’t until Joshua was found incompetent to stand trial that he finally received court-ordered antipsychotic medications. He slowly regained his ability to eat, speak, and function. One day, he called Crystal to say that he wished he hadn’t killed his dad. She explained that he didn’t kill his father, his untreated schizophrenia did. John Fox died trying to get his son to a hospital; he did not want his son in prison. Maricopa County prosecutors refused to consider any plea options for a psychiatric hospital. Joshua was declared medication-restorable to competency and accepted a plea agreement for manslaughter. He should have received psychiatric prison services. Instead, Joshua was transferred into Alhambra prison’s general population. Without appropriate supervision, Joshua hung himself just 30 hours after his prison intake. One final negligent mistake in Arizona’s continuum of care for the Seriously Mentally Ill resulted in Joshua’s death on December 23rd, 2023.
In the three weeks following Joshua’s death, there were four more suicides in Arizona’s state prisons. In Pima County, jails are experiencing extreme overcrowding in mental health units. Inmates are dying. Tucson must either build a new jail or a new psychiatric hospital.
We must stop criminalizing SMI and pass bills like SB1597 that will enable psychiatric treatment instead of incarceration. We must start holding our criminal justice system accountable to treat prisoners with SMI or move them to hospitals. We must stop letting the sickest among us deteriorate and die in our streets, jails, and prisons.
