( D I S ) I N V E S T E D
The Downward Spiral
Caught between Mental Health, Criminal Justice systems, families struggle to Break the Cycle Story and photos by Chris Bowling
This is the first installment in a three-part series from The Reader about Omaha’s mental health and criminal justice systems: how they work, when they fail and what we can do to make them better.
M
ary Angus wants to know where it all went wrong.
The grandmother wrings her hands from a recliner in a basement apartment while late November snow dusts Omaha. Family portraits overflow corners of the living room. Warm lamp light illuminates princesses and ponies colored with markers. They’re windows into the life she thought she’d have by 69 — too many birthdays to remember, big family dinners, an ever-growing group of grandkids to spoil. Instead she has to wonder why she’s still alive. Why police stormed her apartment. Why no one helped her grandson — the kid with too many diagnoses, the teenager who got violent, the il-
legal drugs that made everything worse, the young man who went from courtroom to jail to probation over and over again. The signs never got by Angus. She’s spent her career advocating for those with mental and physical disabilities, working among the state’s leaders in the field with organizations like the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s Munroe Meyer Institute and Disability Rights Nebraska. She herself lives with a mental illness and knows healing is not a straight-line journey. People don’t fail treatment, she often says. Treatment fails people. So who failed Gage Walter, 27, when, on Aug. 13 of 2022, he allegedly murdered his grandmother and great-grandmother in their South Omaha home with a hammer? For Angus, the answer is simple. The system failed Gage Walter. At an October court hearing, prosecutors read off Walter’s criminal history while his attorneys asked for him to be released on bond due to his mental health history. Walter talked about terrorism and nanobots in his brain.
Mary Angus has advocated for those with mental and physical disabilities.
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The other surprise is the end Angus hopes for. They tried everything to get Walter help and now the worst has happened. Even though it’s against everything she believes in, Angus sees no other option than to hope her grandson never walks free again. “We didn’t want to be one of those families that people would say, ‘Look what this guy did. Where was the family during all of this?’” Angus said. “We wanted to make sure we did everything we could.”
‘Adverse Circumstances’ Although the ending may be different, Angus’ story of a family struggling in the gap between mental health care and the criminal justice system is similar to many. Short staffed, underfunded and mired by legal obstacles, Omaha’s mental health system often leaves many with the most serious, per-
sistent mental health issues cycling in and out of local courts and the Douglas County jail, which by default has become the area’s largest mental health facility, costing taxpayers money and leaving many families running in circles. At any given time, about 20% of people in the Douglas County jail have a serious mental illness — defined as a severe condition that, when untreated, can inhibit someone’s basic life functions. The cost for housing, medical expenses, prescriptions, staff salaries and more is about $2 million annually, according to Douglas County Department of Corrections Director Mike Myers. They also spend almost twice as many days in jail as other inmates and are much more likely to come back, according to county data. The jail was also never built to treat people with mental illness. “[We’re] working in a facility that, environmentally and aesthet-
One of the few surprising things about all this to Angus is she’s not dead. Instead it was Linda Walter, Gage Walter’s other grandma, and her 93-year-old mother. Angus was escorted back to her home with police before fleeing to Missouri for safety.
January 2023
Douglas County Public Defender Tom Riley.