Mother: Schizophrenic son's arrest 'a failure of system'

Donna Yocom was mortified to hear about her son's arrest for driving a car into his former dentist.

Most upsetting: She believes the incident could have been avoided if he had adequate treatment for his mental illness.

"This is a failure of the system," Yocom said.

David Yocom, 56, faces aggravated assault charges for intentionally striking a man with his car and then threatening him with a hammer about 7:30 a.m. Thursday in a parking lot at at 6104 S. Lyncrest Ave, near 69th Street and Minnesota Avenue.

The victim had minor injuries. Police said they did not know the motive, but Yocom had been a patient of the victim.

The assault follows decades of advocacy on behalf of his parents, Donna and Kenneth Yocom, who have fought to get him effective medical care since he was diagnosed with schizophrenia as a teenager in 1979.

And it comes only weeks after a letter to elected officials warned them about their son's need for help.

"This letter is written so that no one can ever say they were not made aware of the situation as regards our son, David L. Yocom," Donna Yocom wrote in a letter she sent last month to the governor, members of Congress, even the White House.

David has a history of criminal activity including indecent exposure charges a few years ago and another incident in which public nudity resulted in him losing his rent-subsidized apartment.

David is now in the Minnehaha County Jail, and his mother said she does not know what's going to happen to him.

"He's ruined his life, and we couldn't do a thing to stop it," Donna Yocom said.

She knows the issue well, as a co-founder and former executive director of the South Dakota chapter of the National Alliance of Mental Illness (NAMI), and she believes her family has been failed by the medical and legal systems.

The Yocoms' story is not unique.

NAMI reports that roughly 17 percent of adults in South Dakota live with mental illness. In Sioux Falls, that number is close to 30,000 adults, according to NAMI executive director Phyllis Arends.

One-sixth of mentally ill adults in the city suffer from a serious mental illness, Arends estimated, and David Yocom falls into the even smaller percentage of those adults who do not recognize their own illness.

"It's a small percentage of people with mental illness who go off their medications and don't know they're ill," Arends said. "But they're the segment of the population that gathers the most attention because their symptoms are serious."

For families of people in David's situation, options are limited.

Every time David has gotten in trouble with the law, he has not been on his medication, Donna Yocom said. She does not know what David's doctor has advised regarding his medication and cannot find out because of confidentiality laws.

When courts have mandated David take medication, he does, but beyond that Yocom said she does not know how to help him.

Arends gets calls a few times a month from families like these who have had a loved one arrested because they were not taking their medications or did not know they were committing a crime.

"They get into the legal system because their symptoms are not being treated like they need to be, so, by de facto, the legal system becomes mental health providers, which is not what they're designed to do," Arends said.

Adults with serious mental illness can be placed in a behavioral health facility if a commitment petition is approved. Any person can file a commitment petition, which then must be approved by the chair of the county board of mental illness. If a person is deemed a danger to self or others, he or she would be taken into custody.

Donna Yocom has filed these petitions for her son, but she said he wasn't seen as meeting the criteria. Jim Iosty, chairman of the county board of mental illness, said he was unable to comment on Yocom's case.

Sgt. Jason Gearman said the Sheriff's Office sees many requests for commitment petitions from families of mentally ill adults.

"People have to realize that there's many people in Sioux Falls with mental illness," Gearman said. "We can't just lock them all up."

One solution could be supervised living, Arends said, in which people have their own apartment, but an on-sight manager monitors them and makes sure they take medications and make doctor's appointments.

""If we had adequate, affordable, appropriate and effective outpatient treatments for people," Arends said, "they wouldn't get into the legal system."