On the morning of Oct. 4, Robin and Todd Lawyer returned from work to find their 29-year-old son, Jordan, burning furniture in the yard of their Enosburg home. He also had a baseball bat and a hammer, according to a police affidavit.
This wasn’t the first time that Jordan, who suffers from schizophrenia, had exhibited troubling — and violent — behavior. He’d previously been charged twice with attacking his parents, court records show. But those charges were dropped after he had been deemed incompetent to stand trial.
Robin and Todd ran into the house and Jordan started smashing the windows. Jordan eventually got inside, and started beating his father with the bat. His mother, Robin, tried to get between them but Jordan hit her too, the affidavit says.
Robin later told a neighbor that Todd pleaded with Jordan during the attack: “Son stop, I love you,” Todd reportedly said, according to the affidavit. Robin tried again to shield her husband from Jordan’s blows, but she later told investigators that she knew that it was too late.
Prosecutors charged Jordan with second-degree murder for allegedly killing his father, and first-degree aggravated domestic assault for the alleged attack on his mother. He pleaded not guilty to the charges.
The Enosburg incident is one of three separate homicides around Vermont this fall that involve young men accused of killing members of their family. And while the facts in each case are distinct, court records and police reports indicate all the defendants have some level of contact with the mental health system.
Frankly, in a lot of these cases, there were red flags that, prior to the tragedy, that this person's mental illness was leading them towards that.Bram Kranichfeld, Franklin County state’s attorney
Law enforcement officials say these unusually violent incidents highlight a long-standing gap between the criminal justice and mental health systems. And they are calling for renewed attention on a concern that has plagued Vermont for many years — whether the mental health system is doing enough to prevent cases like this from happening.
“Frankly, in a lot of these cases, there were red flags that, prior to the tragedy, that this person's mental illness was leading them towards that,” said Franklin County State’s Attorney Bram Kranichfeld in a recent interview.
The incidents also raise questions about broader issues facing Vermont’s mental health system, like the shrinking number of inpatient psychiatric beds, access to mental health services, and the delicate balance between individual liberties, forced hospitalization and public safety.
In mid-September, a 22-year-old in Pawlet allegedly shot and killed his father, stepmother and 13-year-old stepbrother. Brian Crossman Jr. had sought in-patient mental health treatment at multiple facilities, and in the past two years, his unstable behavior started to escalate, according to a police affidavit. He once allegedly told a family friend he was going to kill his father someday, the affidavit says. He pleaded not guilty to three counts of aggravated murder.
Most recently, Matthew Gomes, 29, was accused of killing both his parents on Nov. 15 at their Montpelier home. According to police records, on the morning of the murder, Gomes hung up on a mental health screener who reached out after Gomes called Montpelier Police several times and made strange statements.
Gomes suffered a head injury in 2022 that appeared to affect his physical and mental health. His family, on a GoFundMe page, wrote that after the injury Gomes started acting “unlike himself with slurred and erratic speech."
Court records say in 2023 Gomes’ family had him involuntarily hospitalized for two weeks after he was determined to be a danger to himself and his family. Gomes pleaded not guilty to two counts of aggravated murder this November for allegedly killing both his parents.
In the case of Jordan Lawyer, the young man accused of attacking his parents in Enosburg, court records provide details into his struggle with mental illness and two previous alleged assaults on his parents.
Jordan, according to the 2021 competency exam filed in court, was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 2018 after being involuntarily hospitalized for a month. He was prescribed medications, which he told the examiner helped him differentiate between reality and imagination.
Some previous mental health screeners believed that his psychosis was primarily driven by drinking, but the 2021 exam said that appeared less clear and noted he “exhibits fairly pervasive paranoia which escalates when he is presented with extremely stressful circumstances.”
In 2020, Jordan bit his mother and slammed her head into the ground, according to a police affidavit. Two years later, police were called to the Lawyers' home after Jordan allegedly threw objects at his mother, and chased both parents around the house with a baseball bat.
In both instances, psychiatric exams determined that Jordan was incompetent, meaning he lacked the ability to understand his legal situation, and the cases were dismissed.
“I see and hear things,” Jordan said during a 2021 competency exam, according to court records. “I try not to deal with the voices.”
In both these cases, Jordan was placed under the care of the Department of Mental Health and ordered to participate in mental health treatment. But it’s unclear how Jordan’s treatment went, if he kept up with his mental health appointments or took his medications, since those records are confidential.
That’s one of the core problems that Kranichfeld, the Franklin County state’s attorney, sees with the current system.
Kranichfeld, who is prosecuting Jordan, declined to comment on specifics related to the case. But he said broadly when people are found incompetent, or legally insane, they go into an opaque system that is focused on treatment — and not public safety.
“The day-to-day monitoring of those orders is just between the Department of Mental Health and the patient,” Kranichfeld said. “And we, as prosecutors, have no way of knowing how well somebody is doing … or if they’re complying with the order.”
Mental health experts and advocates disagree. They say the treatment process includes an assessment of whether a person is a danger to themselves or others, and if they are, they can be put into a secured treatment facility or hospitalized.
“The level of risk to the public is very much a part of the proceeding, and is definitely one of the questions that the court takes into account,” said Jack McCullough, the director of the Mental Health Law Project at Vermont Legal Aid.
Experts also point out that it can be tough to draw a direct line between violent acts and a person’s mental health, and it risks stigmatizing those with mental illnesses.
Research has shown that people with mental illness are more often the victims of violence, rather than perpetrators. In Vermont, there’s a long-standing pattern of police shooting mentally ill people, including the 2016 killing of a Burlington man in the midst of a psychotic break, and a man who was fatally shot in Montpelier in 2019 after brandishing a pellet gun. A review of that 2019 Montpelier incident found gaps in mental health services contributing to the fatal shooting.
“Violence in any circumstance is often happening for many complex reasons,” said Karen Barber, legal counsel for DMH, in an interview. “It's important to remember that you shouldn't assume that mental health plays a role in anything — the media has some facts, but certainly not all the facts.”
Report: Gaps in mental health services contributed to 2019 fatal police shooting in Montpelier
There have been some changes in recent years to address the concerns raised by prosecutors. In 2021, the legislature passed a bill that requires DMH to notify state’s attorneys when a person is discharged from the department’s custody, or from a secure treatment facility or hospital. That change came after a trio of high profile murder cases involving the insanity defense were dismissed by Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George. All three cases were later refiled by then-Attorney General TJ Donovan after a request from Gov. Phil Scott.
Prosecutors say that the 2021 change still doesn’t provide them with enough information, including whether the person complied with their treatment orders. But Barber, with DMH, says those directives aren’t meant to be punitive.
“Treatment is not a punishment, and it is problematic when some in the criminal justice system attempt to use [it] for that purpose,” Barber said.
Lawmakers have also considered creating a forensic mental health facility, which would specifically serve people involved in the criminal justice system. Other states have these types of facilities, though they don’t always have great track records; a report this year found routine violence, forced restraints and mold at Bridgewater State Hospital in Massachusetts.
Plans to create a forensic wing at the Vermont Psychiatric Care Hospital in Berlin fell through this year, according to Vermont Psychiatric Survivors. But the Legislature did make a change that allows people to be placed directly at River Valley Therapeutic Residence, a secure treatment facility in Essex. Previously, people would need to be committed to a hospital first, then moved to the 16-bed facility when they no longer required acute in-patient psychiatric care, but still needed to be in a locked setting.
But DMH hasn’t been able to operate River Valley at full capacity yet due to staffing shortages, and the department isn’t sure when they’ll be able support a full patient load, Barber said.
We just don’t have a society where we really decide to spend a lot of money to care for the people that can’t take care of themselves.Sandra Lee, public defender in Chittenden County
These conversations about the interplay between mental health and the criminal justice system come as treatment capacity in Vermont is shrinking. The University of Vermont Health Network announced last month it was closing Central Vermont Medical Center’s eight bed in-patient psychiatry unit.
With the state’s mental health care system operating at a diminished capacity, there’s concern that people at the intersection of the courts and mental health system will get stuck more often.
“We just don’t have a society where we really decide to spend a lot of money to care for the people that can’t take care of themselves,” said Sandra Lee, a longtime public defender in Chittenden County, in a recent interview.
Lee represented Aita Gurung, one of the defendants in the 2019 insanity cases that were dismissed and refiled. A jury found Gurung guilty of killing his wife and attacking his mother-in-law in 2022, and he was sentenced to more than 20 years in prison.
Over the years, Lee has seen many clients with mental illnesses get caught in a revolving door — picking up charges, being found incompetent and having the cases dropped — only to pick up new charges.
“There's really no good place, and no real set of services,” Lee said. “Everybody wants them to do better — literally, everybody. The prosecution wants them to do better. The judge wants them to do better, the defense … families, parents. But they're left with, ‘Well, what do we do?’”
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