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another and another, finally losing the last one the day he threatened to kill their mother with an ax, thinking she was an impostor who had come to hurt him.

“We called the authorities, and he went out on the porch and started a fire,” Linda says. “He lost my mom as his caregiver. He lost his housing voucher that day, and he got evicted. That’s the day he became homeless” back in 2007.

Robbed on the streets of Vacaville

This morning, the morning I first meet Mark, who is 59 now – “as mankind measures time,” he tells me – Linda has brought him another new sleeping bag, plus bacon, eggs, sausage and a thermos of coffee the way he likes it, with half a cup of sugar. But first, he must finish his morning routine. This involves swallowing a huge mouthful of salt – “I need sodium” – and rubbing his face raw with a toothbrush. Then he pours a bottle of water over his head and his shirt, which is dotted with cigarette burns.

Mark is not alone on the street, and his friend Teresa, who lives out here, too, shouts hello as we sit down in a shady spot to talk. Maybe to control what she can control, she’s sweeping the small strip of sidewalk in front of her with a broom.

Other people Mark knows on this block beat and rob him on a regular basis, though, and when that happens, he says, he fights back as viciously as possible, because he wants to survive. Dangerous as his situation is, he believes that if he leaves this area right around the county building, he’ll lose the protection of the “force field” around it and will die.

It’s beyond ironic, Linda says, that “he always comes right back to the county building – back to the people who won’t help him.” Or can’t. Over time, she’s decided that it isn’t really cruelty, or even indifference, that keeps them from doing so.

“At first I was angry with the police, and then I figured out that they’re only following the laws, right? And then I was angry with the city, because my God, this is his hometown, where he has lived his whole life, and how can they go past him every day and not try to do something?” Now, she says, she believes that it’s laws that have to change.

Meanwhile, authorities “don’t even go to Mark when we call. They just say we know who he is, and he has the right to refuse any services.”

His sisters worry more all the time that it’s his “right to refuse” that will kill him. “We’re all getting older,” Linda says. “Nothing is happening, he’s getting worse, he still hasn’t been treated. He’s dying out on the streets in front of everybody.”

The many protectors of her brother’s civil rights are adamant that he should get to choose whether to be treated for his severe mental illness, says his sister Catherine, in an interview later at her place, where she’s long been homebound by blood cancer. But as the result of his illness, he effectively “has no free will.”

Linda finds it harder and harder to get out to see him. Because she’s lost sight in one eye and has no depth perception in the other, she has never been able to drive. And many of those who used to bring her to Mark have either moved away or dropped out of her life. “Some people who took me weren’t prepared for what they were going to see.”

Now, after not getting out here for a few weeks, Linda has lots of questions for her brother, like “what happened to your face?” and, “someone said you were asleep in the middle of the road?”

He’s too agitated to answer, at first motioning as if reeling in a fish, and then as if punching a ghost. “I’m not a game, sir!” he yells at no one, and later explains that the voices are being broadcast from a military submarine. Using “mind warfare” that has turned “almost every single person in my life against me,” the guilty parties are, Mark believes, doing all kinds of experiments on homeless people.

Linda has seen him in worse shape: “Some days he’s so depressed he doesn’t talk.”

But she’s also seen him a lot better, and not that long ago. He was hit by a car in February 2021, and after refusing treatment for those injuries, he fell and broke his hip during a rainstorm. Even then, he refused medical treatment for 25 more days. But during the long hospitalization that finally followed, he was put on anti-psychotic drugs for the first time in his life, other than during 72-hour psychiatric holds years earlier.

“The 8½ months he was in there,” Linda says, “we were thinking this is it, they’re going to see that this is what he needs. Look at him, he’s clean, he’s healthy, he put on weight, we’re talking to him normal.”

But as soon as he was well enough, “they just brought him back in a van, took him out in front of here and dropped him off” in the parking lot of the county building.

Before his sister leaves him, he asks her to bend down, hold both of his hands and help him “unplay” several years worth of the messages he’s been sent from the submarine. “You’re saving my life right now, sis,” he tells her.

If he isn’t ‘gravely disabled,’ who is?

It makes no sense that a man as ill as Mark is still stumbling around on his own. So why is he?

Teresa Pasquini, a Contra Costa County activist whose son is severely mentally ill, is well acquainted with both Mark’s situation and treatment in California. And as she sees it, Mark has essentially been “locked out” by gaps that make it absurdly hard for some of those most in need of help to get it.

In his case, that’s because as someone whose initial diagnosis was a traumatic brain injury, he supposedly doesn’t qualify for help for his severe mental illness on a medical basis. (Yes, though mental illness is a medical condition.) And in Solano County, he doesn’t qualify for a conservatorship based on his mental illness, either.

Say what? There are two types of conservatorships in California. The probate conservatorship, which is what Britney Spears had, is more typically for someone with dementia, or some other incapacitating medical problem, who needs help taking care of himself. Those under probate conservatorships can’t be put in a locked facility against their will. Because Mark’s traumatic brain injury and blindness are considered his primary diagnoses, you’d think he’d qualify on that basis, but because he’s also severely mentally ill, he does not.

An LPS conservatorship – named after Frank Lanterman, Nicholas Petris and Alan Short, the three lawmakers whose 1967 bill ended most involuntary commitment of the mentally ill – is for someone who is so severely mentally ill that he is either a danger to himself or others, or else is “gravely disabled.” People under this type of conservatorship can be forced into treatment.

Yet though Mark is certainly a danger to himself, because he accidentally wanders into traffic on a regular basis, and is also what you and I would consider “gravely disabled,” he somehow doesn’t qualify for that, either.

That’s because each of California’s 58 counties interprets “gravely disabled” – incapable of taking care of one’s food, clothing and housing needs – a little differently. In Solano County, a man whose clothing is covered with cigarette burns, who can’t keep housing and pushes around a cart full of rotten food is somehow seen as insufficiently compromised.

In 2019-20, according to the Department of Health Care Services, 1,459 people were on temporary LPS conservatorships in the whole state, and 3,672 on permanent ones.

In an email, Solano County Supervisor Skip Thompson’s office explained to Mark’s sisters that he could not be conserved because whenever he’s on even a brief involuntary hold, he improves so much that he must be released under the law: “This is not a situation that we have ignored, nor that we condone,” the email said. “Simply the law requires stringent standards to impose conservatorships – standards that so far we cannot meet.”

“Laura’s Law,” which provides court-ordered treatment in the community for a small number of severely mentally ill people, doesn’t apply to people with traumatic brain injuries.

Renée C. Byer/The Sacramento Bee/TNS

Mark Rippee uses a broken broom stick as a cane as he navigates along Monte Vista Avenue in Vacaville, July 27. He has been hit by cars and police have been called to rescue him after he’s walked out into traffic.

Solano County officials ‘do feel for him’

Solano County’s director of Health and Social Services, Gerald Huber, tells me that though Mark “may not look like it, he does have the ability to make some decisions for himself,” and that has so far made it impossible for him to get the longterm residential treatment he needs. Which, Huber adds, wouldn’t be available anyway because even the prospect of funding something like that “is pretty bleak for small counties like ours.”

“Everybody knows Mark quite well,” Huber says, and “we do feel for him. If I hear he’s in a hospital locally, that’s when I know he’s the safest.” But then he gets well, has to be released, and quickly declines all over again. And even worse, “every county has a Mark. Every county has multiple Marks.”

Vacaville City Councilman Nolan Sullivan, who in his day job is director of Yolo County’s Health & Human Services Agency, tells me that “it’s hard when folks have a TBI that leads to a mental decline.” But no one can say for sure that Mark would not have developed schizophrenia even if he hadn’t had that accident, right?

True, Sullivan says. “But from what has been represented to me, Mark has declined service, and that makes it almost impossible to serve him. I’ve wracked my brain. There have been dozens, if not hundreds of attempts to help him.”

Yet his sisters insist that he hasn’t had a proper psychiatric assessment in years, even when he was in the hospital. After they complained that he’d been arrested for nuisance crimes almost 100 times, police stopped doing that, but also stopped responding to reports of psychotic episodes, so that now, according to Linda and Catherine, he isn’t getting assessed for even a temporary psychiatric hold, much less a conservatorship.

‘They say it helps keep the voices down’

What a surprise, then, when on another visit with Mark, I happen to arrive just as a psychiatric physician’s assistant for the county is giving him his first long-acting shot of Seroquel, an antipsychotic drug used to treat schizophrenia. He screams for just a second as the physician’s assistant, Jaron West, does this, but Mark did agree to it, he says, because “they say it helps keep the voices down.”

“We’ve been trying to help him for some time,” West tells me, “but the county doesn’t have any resources.”

His sisters are incredulous that he was even briefly lucid enough to say “yes” to a shot. Mark doesn’t think it will help, because “the sounds come from outside the ears.” Still, he’s very interested in the other thing that I heard West tell him, which was, “I’ll talk to Officer Potter’’ – Sgt. Aaron Potter, who heads the Vacaville Police Department’s Community Response Unit – “about that housing lottery.”

That’s a major incentive, because as Mark sees it, “what I need instead of a bunch of blankets is rent to get into a place.” He does need that, and in fact is worse off than when last we met, because he’s recently been roughed up and rolled again, relieved even of his cane, and so is using a broken off broom handle to help him navigate.

But without a lot more than drive-by treatment, it’s hard to see how Mark could possibly get and keep housing.

It isn’t that he doesn’t know about or believe in mental illness. At one point, he even suggests that he’s actually a little worried about his sisters on that front: Linda “and my sister Cathy have some kind of phobia; they always think they’re sick.”

He just doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with him that wouldn’t be remedied by an apartment and the extermination of the extraterrestrials who are tormenting him.

He describes his life as one perpetual “mind rape, just as bad as a woman getting brutally raped. I want privacy in the most intimate areas of my brain.”

Yet, like all of us, Mark is also more than his problems, and he tells me several times that he still wants love: “I got desire, too. It has to have meaning. It can’t be just any girl.”

As he walks away that day, toward the bus stop where he can sit but can’t board because the drivers have run him off so many times, his friend Jackie Burnside stops to tell me what a good friend he is. “I’m homeless, too,” she says, as the result of domestic violence and other experiences that inspired the hand-drawn tattoo on her arm: “Property of Jackie Only.”

Mark “gets mad sometimes and yells,” she says, “but he’s a good-hearted person. When I’m hungry, he buys me food. Don’t get on his bad side, but we’ve been there for each other,” often sleeping near See Blind, Page A8

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Fair

From Page One

Davis got the fair started.

The fair has grown more than could be imagined. Some years they have had visitors from Chicago, Texas and even Toronto.

The number of vendors has grown, too. There were as many as 330 vendors one year, and more than 36,000 visitors have come for a single day, according to organizer Jeff Jarvis.

“This year we have 310 vendors,” he said.

He attributes the decline in vendors to Covid, which postponed the event for a year during the pandemic.

Jarvis has managed to organize the event with volunteers from the church and community into a tightly working bunch of teams. They do everything from food to traffic control.

The work begins each year in January. Applications for booths are sent to past attendees in February.

They look for handmade, good quality, crafted items.

The revenue is all generated in the fees for vendor tables, the vendors themselves then keep whatever money they get from selling items.

“This year, we sold out our spaces,” he said, “but we could always move people around to make room.”

The fair extended down First Street for six blocks and offered visitors everything from toys to furniture.

Susan Hiland/DR The Benicia Peddlers Fair offers a little of everything for shoppers in Benicia, Saturday.

Deadly

From Page One

age and city of residence of the victim were not released pending family notification, police report.

One of two men shot just before 3:30 p.m. Friday near the 500 block of Markham Avenue in Vacaville died several hours later at a hospital as a result of his injuries, authorities report.

Officers who arrived in the area found the two men had been shot outside a nearby apartment building, police report. Both received medical aid at the scene and were transported to a nearby hospital, one in critical condition.

One of the injured men died as a result of his injuries, police reported at 8:15 p.m. The condition of the other injured man was not released other than to say he was stable.

Their names, ages and cities of residence were not released.

These are the 12th and 13th reported homicides of the year in Vallejo. It’s the first deadly shooting this year in Vacaville and the city’s second violent death of the year.

Anyone with information about the shooting in Vacaville is asked to call Detective Jesse Outly at 707-449-5206. Anyone with information about the shootings Friday and Sunday in Vallejo is asked to call Detective Bradley A. Phillips at 707-648-4514 or Detective Brian W. Murphy at 707-648-5430.