Death at West Oaks Hospital

Still, the around-the-clock personal attendant strategy ultimately didn't work. "It certainly wasn't enough to keep my client from being hurt, but realistically I suppose if you had three people and Mr. Vidaurre lashed out against one, that one would have still been injured before he could be controlled," Azzo says.

"My client is not a big man — no more than 5'8", and he's not fat or muscular," Azzo says. "He doesn't have weight to him where you could put pressure with your own weight vs. like a 350-pound person who could just sit on someone."
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The thing Mario Vidaurre wanted above everything else was to have a job. But Chazz says that time after time that didn't work out. "He worked when he was about 24 at Veteran's Hospital, but he got nervous. He worked at 31 Flavors, but he couldn't remember the flavors. He was going to try welding."

In fact, Mario did take some basic academic courses at the University of Houston, but that didn't lead to anything because he'd get just as nervous before going to class as he would with a job.

"I even let him have an apartment by himself. He didn't eat. God forbid, there was no picking up," Chazz says.

He often got in trouble because he was gullible. A woman paid him with a fake $100 bill once and the police came to their house after Mario, Chazz says. "I said, 'Please, he's counterfeiting?'" They arrested him anyway. He ended up spending about three months in jail. Why so long? "Basically, the reason they were keeping him there was the judge didn't know what to do with him."

On the day he was admitted to West Oaks, the nurse assessing his condition wrote that he was experiencing "auditory hallucinations telling him to hurt ­someone."

On the second day his brother was at West Oaks, hospital personnel called Chazz complaining of Mario's behavior. A counselor told Chazz that if Mario hit her, she'd call the police, he says. Hospital records show that he was talking fast, nonstop and that he spoke of "beating up people." He was listed as "actively psychotic."

The third day, Chazz brought cigarettes to Mario, who asked him to let him come home. He says his brother was weak that day, saying the people there didn't like him. Chazz told him he had to calm down, kissed him goodbye and said he'd be back soon.

That was also Mario's best behavior day. Records repeatedly state that he was "compliant with staff."

On Thursday morning, Mario called Chazz. "He called me; he always called me. I said, 'I love you.' I told him I would try to come see him."

Instead, later that afternoon, Chazz got a call from the hospital. There had been a confrontation. They had tried to do everything they could. Chazz was desperate. How was his brother; was he dead? The tech who called him handed the phone over to a nurse, who told Chazz to get over to Memorial Hermann. "She tells me he's fine. I go there. He was dead."

"How did it go from smoking a cigarette to being dead?" Chazz says.
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The hospital's records chart a number of drugs administered to Mario. Chazz doesn't understand it. "If he'd had that many drugs in him, he'd be sleeping, not walking around. Medicated, my brother falls to the ground."

He didn't think his brother was getting better at West Oaks. He asked Mario's psychiatrist, Dr. Eileen Starbranch — who'd diagnosed Mario as a schizophrenic with aggressive tendencies years before — to send his brother to the state mental hospital at Rusk. But she said that was not a choice, Chazz says. It is also noted on Mario's chart on June 13 that one of the nurses on duty said she was going to ask the attending physician to send Mario to Rusk. Starbranch did not return phone calls from the Press for this story.

According to MHMRA executive director Schnee, Rusk is available for civil admissions if a patient demonstrates he "exceeds the capacities of the acute care hospital to treat him appropriately." Part of that commitment, done by a judge, is the so-called "dangerousness" test, in which it must be demonstrated that a patient is a threat to himself or others. It is not enough to be merely really crazy.

Chazz believes that if they had just left Mario alone, if the tech had just backed off from him or gotten help in subduing him, everything would have been all right. Some of that is wishful thinking, for, as attorney Aziz puts it, when Mario was left alone at West Oaks, he would get into fights.

Chazz says West Oaks should have taken better care of his brother. "They don't see a life."