﻿Adam was a sensitive, loving, compassionate, affectionate, overly generous,
intelligent human being. Adam Collier was 43, imprisoned, and diagnosed
with several mental health disorders. Collier was transferred by the state of California
9 times in 48 months — going between various state prisons and mental health wards.
Dear Mom, With all these transfers, I'm fucking dizzy. There is no hope in my opinion.
Susan Ottele, Collier’s mother, documented his experience.
I’m having a hard time holding it together. 6/26/2020
These are Ottele’s letters from the final months of her son’s life.
“Everything felt so wrong, … all of it felt wrong. It felt like, this has to be told.”
By 2020, Collier had 10 documented instances of self-harm and had been to a
mental health crisis bed at least 14 times. And on October 17, 2020, he killed himself.
He wanted help. Nobody was helping him. It's like they, they couldn't hear him. And the
louder he got, the less they heard. A spokesperson for the Department of Corrections
and Rehabilitation, declined to discuss Adam’s case, citing mental health privacy laws.
She said the state provides "quality medical and mental health care"
and transfers inmates when necessary to ensure they get the right level of care.
Every time they moved him, they would lose his property,
and he only had a box full of stuff. As COVID-19 spread inside California prisons,
transfers stopped. For inmates like Collier, the loneliness was devastating.
Isolation makes no one better. This is complete torture.
Collier found some companionship in a pet cricket that lept into his prison cell. He wrote,
Just like Delano and Tehachapi, Pet mysteriously shows up. the cricket prefers darkness.
He's desperate.
Jiminy cricket. My God-sent blessing. Out of a hundred cells, He chose mine. Love you, Mom.
In May 2020, Collier tried to take his own life. His clinician wrote it off by saying,
Collier’s behaviors were “calculated in an effort to avoid safety concerns on the yard
and to gain placement at a state hospital. Two days later, he sent me an email,
"Dear mom, I just came back from crisis bed, the back pain. I hope you can advocate for me to get
to the Department of Mental Health or a Department of State Hospitals to do an intermediate program.
Please contact my clinician." Now Collier, who had been transferred so many,
many times, couldn’t get a transfer to a state hospital. Instead, he grew sicker.
On 6/24/2020, he writes, "I'm loosing it (sic), mom."
Collier had been imprisoned for exposing himself several times in public. He often
wrote about castrating himself, something he had attempted in the past.
I hoped that the doctors would remove all my male genitals. These put me in prison.
His mom, Susan, tried to reassure him. My letter to Adam.
You are our precious son who we love and adore. You mean the world to us. I talked to your
counselor. She said, you are at a higher level of care and supervision area. She said a therapist
comes by daily and there are many more guards on your area than any other place. She also said,
if you feel threatened and not safe to let the guards or therapists know,
and they will help you. I hope this is true. Instead, his mental state only got worse.
August 13th, 2020. This is insanity. To proclaim that
COVID 19 is the problem can no longer be. I'm willing to go without packages and canteen
either. I get justice and semi-freedom, or I exit by starvation unless the governor pardons.
Collier never made it to the State Hospital or out of prison.
The Office of the Inspector General found the department’s mental health clinicians,
“improperly delayed” Collier’s “referral to a higher level of care.”
He spent the last 7 months before his suicide inside Kern Valley State Prison in Delano.
It was his longest stay at any prison since 2016.