PANAMA CITY — Linda Rivers’ blood ran cold when she saw the Nov. 30 news story about 46-year-old Michael David Watkins, a Mary Esther man who’d just confessed to a vicious homicide.
“This issue needs to come out,” said the Panama City resident.
Rivers identified with the victim in the murder. The body of Watkins’ 65-year-old mother, Gloria Watkins, was found in her home on a couch, arrows protruding from her head.
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Rivers was disheartened to learn Watkins’ slain mother had tried to have her son involuntarily committed under the Baker Act just days before her murder.
Being the mother of a grown son with a severe mental illness, Rivers also has been at the mercy of her son’s unpredictable behavior.
“I’m just happy that I’m not a statistic, and I very well could have been,” Rivers said.
Rivers became the mother of a special needs child by choice.
“When Uriah was 9 months old, I picked him up off the floor of a drug house in Vermont,” she said.
The now-retired social worker and her husband opened their arms to the infant, who’d been born to a schizophrenic mother and had brain damage from alcohol poisoning.
“We knew going in that it wasn’t going to be a smooth ride, but Uriah needed us,” she said.
The Rivers adopted Uriah when he was 2, and he became the youngest of three siblings in the Rivers family. Over the next decade, family life was relatively normal.
The illness surfaces: But things changed when Linda’s husband died unexpectedly at age 40, leaving Rivers to raise three teenagers — including 13-year-old Uriah — on her modest salary.
Two years later, Uriah began to manifest signs of schizophrenia. He had thoughts of conspiracy and believed people were spying on him through the television.
At 16, Uriah’s disturbing behavior reached new heights one afternoon when he disrobed and rode a bicycle down the street. Uriah was hospitalized in a mental health facility until his 18th birthday, the day he took a plea for exposing himself to the neighborhood children. He was charged as an adult with lewd and lascivious conduct and put on the national sex offender registry.
Rivers said Uriah was never a troublesome kid before the schizophrenia.
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“He was a good-as-gold kid, but he was sick,” she said.
Uriah Rivers moved to Florida with his mother and registered as a sex offender upon arrival. His mother anticipated restrictions on where Uriah could live, so she purchased property in Leon County, far away from places off-limits to sex offenders.
Linda Rivers moved to Panama City in 2005, but more trouble with her son followed.
In December that year, Uriah Rivers was arrested in Bay County for lewd and lascivious acts after his 5-year-old niece reported he’d touched her inappropriately. Linda Rivers said her son’s mental development is that of a 12-year-old boy, and she feels he was easily swayed to sign a confession.
“I feel that some of the things I’m labeled as are not an accurate appraisal of who I am, and some of the things they said I did — I didn’t do,” Uriah Rivers, now 35, said in a phone interview.
Following orders: Uriah Rivers served eight years in Florida prisons for his second offense and was released last September.
“As a prisoner or inmate, you don’t expect much from the system,” he said. He served his time between Zephyrhills, Dade and Charlotte correctional institutions.
The family hoped his release would be a fresh start, but it was just the beginning of new battles.
Uriah Rivers was released from Charlotte Correctional Institution under the Baker Act — Florida’s statute that permits an involuntary mental health evaluation for people who threaten to harm self or others through bodily harm or neglect — to Life Management Center in Panama City.
Linda Rivers said the mental health facility told the Department of Corrections (DOC) that it could not accept her son due to his sex offender status, but the prison transported him there anyway. Due to privacy laws, Life Management Center could not confirm any prior history with Uriah Rivers.
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“We have to follow whatever is on the court order,” said Tricia Pearce, community relations specialist at the center. She said patients must be in an apparent mental health crisis to be accepted and that patients are referred to other facilities if the center is unable to admit them.
Linda Rivers said her son was ultimately released as homeless and mentally unstable in Bay County by DOC under probation supervision, although she had informed DOC that her son had a compliant home and treatment plan waiting for him in Leon County.
“He was going to be homeless in Bay County,” she said.
She was unable to house her son in her Panama City home due to ordinances prohibiting a registered sex predator from living close to the church, elementary school and apartment complex with a swimming pool near her home.
When asked about Uriah Rivers’ release, DOC said in an email it followed “appropriate department procedures.”
Bumpy ride continues: Linda Rivers begged Bay County authorities to Baker Act her son so he could get back on medication to stabilize his mental state, but she was told his actions hadn’t met the criteria.
Two weeks later, probation officials did give him permission to relocate to the home in Tallahassee that his mother had bought and held while her son was incarcerated.
But Uriah Rivers’ behavior deteriorated without his schizophrenia medication. One day, his neighbors called to complain when he was outside yelling and digging up bugs in the front yard. His probation officer and supervisors visited the home, but despite his acting belligerent and telling authorities he was out of medication, he once again did not meet the Baker Act criteria.
Linda Rivers called every mental health facility in the region but was told there were no available beds for her son.
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Uriah Rivers finally got an appointment for Nov. 3 — nearly two months after he was released — through a counselor to see a doctor, meaning the family would have to ride out his condition for over a month without medication.
But that’s not what Uriah Rivers wanted. His mother said her son was volatile and talked about everyone’s conspiracy to poison him with medication. “It’s scary to be around him when he gets like that,” she said.
It was Linda Rivers’ responsibility to transport her son to Leon County. She said the two hours she spent confined in her van with her son’s erratic behavior made for a terrifying ride. She feared for her life at times.
She made it to her son’s new home and hired a caretaker as she splits her time between staying with her son in Tallahassee and returning home to Panama City for a break.
“I’ve got multiple sclerosis; life is difficult enough,” she said.
Uriah Rivers couldn’t make it until his Nov. 3 appointment before his schizophrenic behaviors flared. Neighbors called to her that her son was “acting gross” in the yard and throwing lumber around.
“Meanwhile, the family, we’re all going crazy ourselves,” she said. “We had to baby-sit him. We didn’t want him to do something and have to go back to prison.”
Around Oct. 25, Uriah Rivers had another mental health episode.
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He was in the yard again, throwing wood and screaming delusions at his mother, when he smashed his GPS monitoring device and ran off down the road.
Linda Rivers said her son has no memory of the episode that caused him to violate his probation. His actions did, however, finally meet Baker Act criteria enough for deputies to take him to the hospital, where he received an injection the antipsychotic drug, Haldol.
Within two days, Uriah Rivers was well again. “Since he’s been medicated, he’s been compliant. All he needed was the shot,” she said.
On the other side of that ordeal, she’s angry multiple agencies — DOC, probation, a mental hospital and a counselor — whose hands were tied by the stringent Baker Act criteria had seen her son off without intervention.
It took a mental health emergency and more legal trouble for her son to finally get the injection of Haldol he needed to be stable.
“Uriah can be one of these happy endings, if they don’t send him back to prison over smashing his box,” she said.
Plea for change: Linda Rivers is waiting to see if that happy ending will come. When she took her son to his monthly appointment with his probation officer on Jan. 5, he was rearrested for the probation violation he committed during the mental health episode in October.
Uriah Rivers is currently in Bay County Jail. His mother has had to pass on making mortgage payments to hire an attorney in hopes that she can keep her son from going back to prison.
“It’s taken everything I have to get him well again, and I fear for him in jail anymore,” she said.
Adding up all the times she felt her son was shortchanged, she can’t help pointing out flaws in the system that society has built for handling mental illness and sex offenders.
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“There’s no common sense in this situation,” she said. “Uriah’s not unique; this happens every day.”
Linda Rivers said Florida has failed to take care of mentally ill members of society and leaves few options for loved ones who know they need intervention.
“Speaking up didn’t get anything done,” she said. “People saw him disintegrating and there were several opportunities to intervene and no one did, because the Baker Act is so strict.”
Need help?
- Families under stress due to the mental illness of a loved one can find support too. People can call Life Management Center’s 24-hour crisis line at 850-522-4485 to speak with a counselor.