On the day his request to be moved to a less-restrictive ward at the state mental hospital was denied, Sergio Taylor slid under a mound of blankets, put a garbage bag over his head and suffocated himself.
He was 23.
About a month before he died, Taylor signed a petition complaining that the new $69 million hospital complex in Pueblo was understaffed — and that residents were paying the price through lost privileges and an inability to advance to less-restrictive, but less- staffed wings.
“The sense of hopelessness has set in,” the Aug. 3 petition signed by Taylor and 19 other patients says. “History has shown here … that when patients are feeling bored, hopeless and warehoused, that assault and suicide attempts transpire.”
Colorado Mental Health Institute officials are now reviewing the suicide to determine whether any lapses occurred. Hospital Superintendent Dr. John R. DeQuardo said that staffing was adequate at the new hospital, though a proposal is being considered to reduce the number of patients in some wards.
But DeQuardo said that had staff known that “the person who committed suicide” was distraught, they would have responded immediately.
Today, Sergio Taylor’s father, Cal, questions why the staff — with video monitors hooked up in each room — didn’t watch his son more closely after his transfer request was denied and privileges had been cut. He said he suspects a staffing problem.
He further criticized a system that blocked him and his wife at every phase of his disabled son’s criminal proceedings after he turned 18.
He didn’t learn until his son was dead that Sergio Taylor had agreed to be locked up at the hospital for an indefinite period. The depressed, bipolar and homeless Taylor signed the paperwork after he was charged with attacking a police officer while being expelled from a Colorado Springs convenience store on a cold morning.
“We definitely would have discouraged him from doing that,” his father said. But, with Taylor older than 18, federal law prohibited his medical records from being shared with his family without his consent.
Sergio Taylor was a “happy-go-lucky” boy who loved art and had an affinity for disabled people he volunteered to help. But he also sometimes exploded in anger and hit people, including teachers, his mother and other kids at school, Cal Taylor said.
It wasn’t until he was 12, shortly after the family moved to Colorado Springs, that signs of a mental illness were identified. By the time he was 14, he became so assaultive that therapists recommended he be sent to a Colorado Springs residential treatment facility for children, his father said.
Taylor was in and out of group homes and treatment facilities until he was an adult. His parents regularly visited him and were always involved in decisionmaking about his care until he turned 18.
They were told they were no longer entitled to information about his care because of medical privacy rules, and Taylor wouldn’t confide in them.
In the early morning hours of Feb. 8, 2006, Taylor, who was cold and homeless, entered a convenience store at 3 a.m. Colorado Springs police brought him to a station and let him stay in the warm lobby until daylight.
Minutes after he left the station, Taylor called police from a 7-Eleven store at 503 S. Nevada Ave. When police arrived, he told them he was a movie star who needed police protection after he gave his bodyguards the day off. In a disjointed diatribe, he also said he was a karate black belt trained by Bruce Lee, a rap artist and an undercover police officer.
Police told him he couldn’t stay in the store. In the parking lot, Taylor attacked the officers, striking them with his fists and injuring one of the officers in the eye. The officers used a Taser on Taylor, but he kept fighting.
Cal Taylor didn’t learn his son had gotten into trouble until he received a phone call from Taylor, who said he was at the Pueblo hospital.
His son never fully divulged the extent of his troubles. Taylor claimed in February 2006 that he would only be at the hospital for observation for a few months. When Cal Taylor tried to get answers from therapists at the hospital, they couldn’t talk unless Taylor signed a release form, and he refused to.
His parents never heard that in January 2007, Taylor’s public defender and he entered into an agreement with prosecutors in which he was found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to the state hospital indefinitely.
At the Pueblo hospital, patient Gary Hilton said patients called Taylor “GQ.” He composed Christian rap songs, wrote poems and joked around much like a teenager. But he had his flare-ups.
He was progressing toward less-restrictive living until June, when he hit a hospital guard. He was charged with a felony and moved to a more secure ward.
In early August, Sergio and other patients on the medium security ward signed the patient petition written by Hilton, who now says he feigned a mental illness after he was arrested for armed robbery in Aurora in 1988.
In a phone interview, Hilton said hospital staff had told patients that when the new complex was opened, the state would hire new staff to meet the additional demands of monitoring the larger facility. But no new staff were hired, he said.
Patients told Cal Taylor at a memorial service that they had warned staff that his son was distraught, but the staff didn’t heed the warnings, he said.
“He was very sad,” fellow patient Hilton said. “He always came to me. He was always asking how he could get out of here. I cared about that kid.”
