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James Mark Rippee -blind and suffering from traumatic brain injury and paranoid schizophrenia- spent 258 days in the hospital after he stepped in front of a car last February. Today, his sisters say, a Napa rehabilitation center van dropped him off on the streets of Vacaville.
Among the injuries Rippee spent the past eight months recovering from, according to his sister, Linda Privatte: a fractured skull, a brain bleed, lung contusions, internal injuries, a shattered elbow, a dislocated shoulder and a crushed leg. https://calmatters.org/health/2020/02/mentally-ill-man-accident-treatment-conservatorship-california-mark-rippee/
Rippee's situation is well-known in Solano County: “I’ve struggled with this for the five years I’ve been here,” the county’s director of Health and Social Services told me last year. “The street is not an appropriate place for him to live.” https://calmatters.org/projects/mentally-ill-forced-treatment-conservatorship-california-debate/
His sisters are terrified about what comes next -- they are scrambling to figure out how to keep him alive on the streets. "This will always be the outcome without changes to our laws, hearts, and minds," his sister, Privatte, told me today.
The county's Health and Social Services director says he is not sure if the county was contacted about discharge planning, and will look into what discharge plans were made and what interventions were attempted.
Rippee told me last year, before his accident: “To leave a blind man outside, you know, I just figured the county could do better than that.”
