Katie Moore / Eyewitness News
NEW ORLEANS -- The New Orleans Police Department is losing its most vocal advocate for mental health treatment. Crisis Unit Commander Cecile Tebo announced she's resigning effective Saturday.
That leaves only one person on staff in the NOPD's Crisis Unit to handle all calls for help when someone who's mentally ill is out of control.
Neighbors gathered for a somber prayer in March after 22-year-old John Reynolds shot his 9-year-old nephew and 10-year-old niece, then turned the gun on himself in the 7th Ward.
Police said Reynolds was schizophrenic and off his medication.
“This city is the host to a huge amount of people with chronic mental illness that are not receiving adequate inpatient care. Bottom line," said Cecile Tebo, who was head of the NOPD’s Crisis Unit at the time.
She worked with two or three NOPD employees and a team of volunteers, who would try to get the mentally ill to treatment before it got this bad.
This week, Tebo resigned. And now, the man who originally started the unit back in the '80s, Sgt. Ben Glaudi, is the only person in it.
“I have between 26 and 30 readily available volunteers,” Glaudi said.
They're volunteers extensively trained to help handle the severely mentally ill who are in crisis.
“I don’t know of another city, there are other crisis units in other cities, but they're all paid personnel, even Jefferson Parish. They have an all paid program,” Glaudi said.
Most of the NOPD Crisis Unit patients are brought to the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, especially those who need emergency care. It's a hospital dealing with a shortage of its own.
“We see the police every single day. Every single day,” said Dr. Peter deBlieux, the hospital’s director of Emergency Medical Services.
Police aren't the only ones who bring patients in.
“Anywhere between 12 and as many as 34 patients in a 24-hour period with acute behavioral health needs,” Dr. deBlieux said.
Those are patients who are often suicidal or homicidal.
“Now we have 20 beds that are for acute care. They're not inpatient beds, they're outpatient beds that are an extension of the emergency department. Those resources have been limited. However, we now have DePaw Hospital which has additional inpatient beds,” he said.
According to deBlieux, the good news is the state is drastically improving care for the patients who agree to get treatment in outpatient facilities.
He said it's cut the number of returning mental health patients to LSUHSC in half in recent months.
But experts said it's the ones who have to be committed who still desperately need better, more available treatment options.
Tebo said she's not leaving the field, just the NOPD, and plans to continue working with the chronically mentally ill in a different capacity.
