State Hospital Settles Suit - Mother died alone in '08 after release

Concord Monitor Novemeber 17, 2010

A wrongful death suit that addressed the balance between civil rights and the state's role in providing care for the mentally ill has been settled out of court for $275,000.

Caitlin Bishop Murtagh of Rochester was awarded compensation nearly three years after her mother, Linda Bishop, was found dead in an empty house in Concord. Bishop, who suffered from bipolar disorder, died of starvation shortly after New Hampshire Hospital had granted her release.

She had been dead for four months when discovered in May 2008. Two notebooks describing her fear and loneliness were found by her side.

Bishop's sister, Joan Bishop of Goffstown, filed the suit on behalf of Murtagh, 24, saying the state was negligent when it failed to diagnose the severity of Linda Bishop's illness and released her prematurely while failing to verify that she had somewhere to go.

The state claimed Bishop did not exhibit enough symptoms to merit keeping her involuntarily, adding that Bishop had no court-appointed guardian and therefore was not deprived of her capacity to manage her own affairs.

The suit was mediated in September in private session by retired Judge Harold Perkins. A jury trial had been scheduled for last week.

"We agreed to a private mediation," said Manchester attorney Jamie Hage, who represented Murtagh. "We certainly were prepared to try the case if we could not achieve a satisfactory result."

Bishop's death ended her 10-year battle against mental illness, which tore apart her family and led her to the streets of New York City shortly after Sept. 11, 2001. Her erratic behavior and arrests forced Murtagh to move in with relatives during her high school years. Bishop also isolated herself, becoming estranged from her sister.

"I'm happy that it's settled, happy that it's over," said Joan Bishop, who works for the court system in Concord. "I would love for something to be done that's going to change how the system works, but realistically and honestly, that's probably not going to happen."

Linda Bishop showed no signs of mental illness from childhood through her 30s, her sister said. She earned an art history degree from the University of New Hampshire and was an honors student.

She also traveled through Europe, riding the rails with friends, and she taught Murtagh to fish, camp and appreciate wildlife.

"I have a ton of great memories up until I was 13," said Murtagh, who works at Walmart in Rochester.

By her early 40s, Bishop, living with her daughter in New Durham and waiting tables, began acting irrationally. She'd call her sister, telling her she was being followed and her car had been bugged.

Murtagh soon moved in with her grandparents in Rochester as her mother continued to fight her illness, sometimes taking her medication and improving, sometimes not.

Eventually Bishop was found in an abandoned building in Colebrook, near the Canadian border. She experienced several more episodes connected to the illness, the most bizarre of which included a trip to ground zero and a stay at Bellevue Hospital Center in New York City for treatment.

"I've been dealing with this since I was 13," Murtagh said. "You get used to hearing about this and this and this."

In October 2006, after Bishop was arrested for driving drunk and then threw a cup of urine on a corrections officer, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and involuntarily committed to the state hospital for three years.

There, in January 2007, the state hospital petitioned to name Joan Bishop as her sister's guardian, a request the probate court denied.

"People's rights have to be protected, and they have to be allowed to leave if there are no guardians over them," said Anne Edwards, part of the attorney general's team that defended the state. "Because she didn't have a guardian, she had the right to make her own decisions."

Hage countered by saying the very fact that the state hospital sought to name Joan Bishop as her sister's guardian proves the state knew she wasn't fit to live on her own.

"The state by its own admission in filing a petition for guardianship believed that she was a danger to herself or others," Hage said. "Just because (the petition) was denied, it was our position that that shouldn't have altered the state's view of why it brought the petition for guardianship in the first place."

With no legal guardian, Bishop was free to reject medication, which she did, insisting that she was not mentally ill. Her behavior, while irritable at times, suggested she was healthy, leading to increased freedom as a patient and her release in October 2007, after one year at the hospital.

"She had clearly, for more than eight months, maintained her independence outside the hospital . . . with no problems or challenges in the community," Edwards said.

Court documents said Bishop planned to receive support and follow-up care at the New Horizons Shelter in Manchester, but she instead wandered aimlessly before taking refuge in an empty house for sale on Mountain Road in Concord.

Her journal said she lived on apples that had fallen from a nearby tree, which she retrieved at night. She was spotted through a window by a potential buyer 2½ years ago, having died roughly four months earlier in January 2008, according to medical reports.

"It's our opinion that there was a failure on the part of the state to provide proper diagnosis, evaluation and treatment," Hage said. "She was given an absolute discharge without any safety net to protect her if she failed."

Joan Bishop said she received nothing from the settlement. Murtagh was awarded $275,000, one-third of which went to Hage, Joan Bishop said. A cap of $475,000 had been predetermined by state law.

Murtagh plans to buy a car and go to college to study accounting. "I can be who I want to be," Murtagh said.

Both sides said emotions played a part in their decision to settle. Edwards cited the feelings of a potential jury.

"It's a very sympathetic case," she said. "Linda Bishop had maintained a diary that you get to read about her dying, and that is a very difficult thing for a jury to hear. There is often an emotional reaction to all of that."

Hage spoke about the feelings of his client and her aunt.

"Any trial takes an emotional toll on people to have to relive the tragic events," Hage said, "because this was a tragic case, a tragic outcome."

Bishop's death and the subsequent legal action have shone a light on the problems the medical community faces when assessing a patient with mental illness.

Said Edwards, "There will probably be a closer review at the hospital through the administrative review committee of each patient before they are discharged. But people's rights have to be protected, and they have to be allowed to leave if there are no guardians over them.

"It's a very delicate balance."

<< Return to News