Documentary about shocking suicide examines warehousing of mentally ill people in prisons

Tristin Murphy, a 37-year-old inmate serving time on a littering charge, killed himself by cutting his neck open with a chainsaw while on work duty at a state prison west of Miami.

Murphy had attempted suicide in the past and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. A judge warned he was likely to harm himself or others. But he had been off his medication for a week and had not been receiving psychiatric treatment at the South Florida Reception Center, a state prison in western Miami-Dade. His fellow inmates knew Murphy was mentally ill because they heard him ranting through the night about paranoid delusions, such as a man without skin in his cell.

Yet Murphy was assigned to a landscaping crew that had access to machetes, pruning tools and pick axes, and handed a chainsaw by a Department of Corrections officer who was unaware of Murphy’s background. Murphy turned it on and dragged the blade across his throat in front of horrified guards and inmates.

“So, wait a minute, this guy’s an inmate and he has a chainsaw?” a Miami-Dade homicide detective is heard exclaiming on a recording of a radio call.

Murphy’s parents say their son was a victim of Florida’s criminal justice system, in which he was trapped for three years, cycled through jail, courthouse, evaluation center, probation and back to jail, where he spent months in solitary confinement, worsening his psychotic behavior.

“He was basically incarcerated for being mentally ill, and it was a death sentence,” said Murphy’s mother, Cindee Murphy of Punta Gorda. “We should be able to do better for the most vulnerable in our society.”

When WFOR-TV CBS Miami journalist Jim DeFede found out about Murphy’s death on Sept. 16, 2021, he began an investigation that would span two years and reveal how police, prosecutors, judges, jailers and prison officials failed Murphy by criminalizing him instead of treating him.

DeFede’s documentary, “WAREHOUSED: The Life and Death of Tristin Murphy,” airs Wednesday at 10 p.m. on MyTV33 and streams live on WFOR-TV’s website. Alexander Bombard edited the hour-long film. It is heartbreaking and infuriating, from the opening police body-cam footage at the scene of Murphy’s bloody death to the conclusion showing Murphy’s parents caring for their adopted grandchildren — and photos of two other inmates who killed themselves at the same South Florida prison within four months of Murphy’s suicide.

DeFede obtained medical records, courtroom audio, recordings of Murphy’s anguished phone calls from jail and internal emails that illustrate how, at every misstep through a broken system, Murphy did not get the help he needed.

“While the nature of Tristin’s death is shocking, it is emblematic of how our jails have become substitutes for our state mental institutions that were shut down decades ago,” DeFede said in an interview about his film. “Most people don’t care about a person who commits a crime. I kept asking myself, ‘Why should we care?’ I think as a society we can be judged by how we treat the mentally ill, knowing that what happened to Tristin could happen to anyone who is sick.

“It’s not just a question of morality. All prisoners with mental illness will be back on the street. They are warehoused in jail, but one day those doors will open. What happens to them then?”

Locking up people with mental illness

Miami-Dade County Court Judge Steve Leifman, recognized nationwide as a pioneer in mental health reform, has built a model program in Miami-Dade focused on long-term care and re-integration into the community. He is assisting other cities that want to copy the Miami Center for Mental Health and Recovery. Murphy’s case highlights the flaws in criminal justice systems that spend millions locking up non-violent offenders with acute illness, he said in the documentary.

“We’ve created a system designed to fail and it fails perfectly, and then we blame the poor soul who has the mental illness when we never gave them the opportunity to recover,” he told DeFede

READ MORE: We spend millions jailing people with mental illness. How that’s changing in Miami-Dade

Thorough training for police, probation officers, lawyers, judges and corrections personnel must be mandatory if the system is to change, Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said in the documentary.

“There are many mentally ill people among us but those who are called upon to deal with them most often are the least qualified to handle the situation,” he said. “If they’re lucky, officers get a 40-hour course in crisis intervention training. You still can’t have a cop at 2 a.m. doing a differential diagnosis and trying to get someone into case management.”

“Warehoused” takes the viewer through Murphy’s tumultuous life. His parents describe him as a bright kid who excelled at math. He started struggling in school in the eighth grade, then dropped out of high school, worked a series of odd jobs, took drugs and had run-ins with police.

In 2017, post-Hurricane Irma, Murphy’s parents noticed significant changes in his personality. He said there were listening devices in his attic, a tracker on his truck and cameras hidden in garden gnomes. They tried to get him appointments with a doctor but Murphy, working for minimum wage, had no health insurance and little money.

In 2018, Murphy and his wife showed up at his parents’ house and got into an argument with them. Cindee called police. Murphy fought with the officers, who Tazed him and booked him into the Charlotte County jail for resisting arrest. Five months later, a psychiatrist declared Murphy incompetent to stand trial and he was sent to the South Florida Evaluation and Treatment Center, a psychiatric hospital in Florida City. Murphy, “scared out of his mind,” according to his mother, was given a variety of anti-psychotic medications.

When his parents visited at Christmas, they hardly recognized their son. He was heavily medicated, had lost 20 pounds, was hunched over “like a little old man, and he sat down and stared off into nothingness,” Dennis Murphy said.

Six weeks later, back in court, Murphy was declared competent and released on probation — with no requirements to take medication, receive treatment or attend therapy. Once he stopped taking his meds, he started hearing voices, believed his phone was bugged.

On Dec. 17, 2019, Murphy drove his pickup truck to the Charlotte County jail, climbed out and rolled it into a retention pond. Deputies, who knew Murphy by name, arrested him and decided to charge him with littering over 500 pounds, a felony.

“Why isn’t the alarm going off that this guy is really sick? Get him treatment,” Leifman told DeFede. “But he’s on probation, so we have to follow that track, which leads to him going back to prison. Fail, fail, fail.”

Said DeFede: “The deputies knew Tristin was schizophrenic but they charged him with a crime for putting his truck in the water. He needed to be Baker Acted instead of arrested, but Charlotte County doesn’t have a real diversion program. And when the state attorney’s office reviewed the case, they somehow decided they wanted to prosecute Tristin for littering.

“Fail, fail, fail.”

Murphy was held in jail for 576 days, mostly in isolation. In phone calls home, he said he heard voices coming through a chip implanted in his brain, and that if he didn’t die, his children and his parents would be hurt.

Revolving door in criminal just system

Over the course of 17 months, he was declared incompetent, sent back to the evaluation center, then deemed competent and sent back to jail. The fifth public defender to represent him told him to plead no contest to littering. The judge sentenced Murphy to three years.

Murphy’s last stop was at the South Florida Reception Center, where he became more unstable. On an intake form asking if there were any job or housing restrictions for Murphy, the NO box was checked.

On the day of Murphy’s suicide in 2021, he was finally — after 59 days — scheduled for an appointment with a psychiatrist. He was sent to work duty instead.

“Mental illness — it’s a hard thing to get right,” DeFede said. “It’s complicated and expensive. For our state legislators, it’s easier to pass laws about culture wars. We need politicians willing to tackle tough problems.”

An internal investigation of Murphy’s case found no administrative violations. DeFede didn’t want the story to end there. He set out to earn the trust of Murphy’s parents.

“We could have put together a quick story on an inmate killing himself with a chainsaw and gotten a lot of clicks,” DeFede said. “That’s not what I wanted to do. I wanted answers. There have been many stories on the mental health crisis. I wanted to find another way to tell a powerful story.”

The story of Tristin Murphy’s life and death has never been reported until now.