The inquest into the death of Jordan Keil, 25, has now heard from his father, Mike Keil, who spoke of frustration at his son’s treatment at Middlemore Hospital’s secure mental health unit. David Fisher reports.
Warning: This article discusses mental health issues.
The grieving father of a young man who later died in a suspected suicide has praised police for their extraordinary life-saving efforts during an agonising eight-hour stand-off at Auckland’s Sylvia Park shopping mall.
Freight administrator Mike Keil contrasted the care and professionalism of police who talked his son, Jordan Keil, down from the upper levels of the shopping mall car park with the treatment received from health workers that he alleged contributed to Jordan’s death eight days later.
Jordan Keil, 25, was found dead on February 8, 2022, by his mother, Debbie Thorpe, the day after he went missing from Tiaho Mai mental health unit at Middlemore Hospital. Thorpe found his body while searching the garden immediately around the unit.
An inquest into his death is being held with Mike Keil’s and Thorpe’s evidence recounting their son’s unexpected slide into mental breakdown, as he suffered delusions and paranoia after a perfect family summer holiday.
Increasing distress on Jordan’s part led to Thorpe taking Jordan to Auckland Hospital on January 31, 2022, in search of help.
With no mental health beds available, he was discharged to his parents’ care but fled into the hospital carpark and was later found by police on a bridge where he said he was preparing to jump.
That led to Jordan being placed under compulsory mental health care on the basis of substance abuse - a finding his parents have challenged, saying medical workers misconstrued three recreational uses of MDMA into a serious drug problem.
Back at Auckland Hospital, Jordan was collected by two nurses in a car for the trip to Middlemore Hospital - a transport plan his parents greeted with scepticism. They feared the two lightly built women could not restrain their athletic son.
Mike described how he and Thorpe later found the car at the roadside on the Southern Motorway. He said the nurses explained Jordan’s absence as a result of their son throwing himself out the rear window from the back seat where he had been seated alone.
From there, Jordan made his way to the Sylvia Park shopping mall carpark and was found by police about 10pm on the fifth level, outside the safety barrier and threatening to jump.
Mike then described the exacting and painful eight hours that followed before Jordan came down to hug his parents.
In doing so, he praised police for their compassion and efforts over the traumatising period as they waited nearby but just out of sight so as not to be exposed to the potential horror of seeing him jump.
“I could hardly contain my emotions. I stood there all night with Debbie beside me in support. I prayed for Jordan to come down to safety.
“We both thought we would have a heart attack from the immense state of desperation and fear we might lose our boy.”
Mike said police set up an area around Jordan’s location and, to their relief, one motorway police officer with experience in negotiations began talking to the young man while the formal negotiation experts raced to the car park.
He spoke of the care and support shown by the police constable who acted as liaison to the negotiators, and how they arranged the recording of video messages from himself and Thorpe to show their son.
“I said I loved him and not to harm himself and to trust the police and the people at the hospital because they were there to help him.”
Hours after the negotiators began speaking with Jordan, his parents were told their son wanted to speak with his father.
In a moment showing the knife-edge on which his son’s life rested, Mike spoke of how the call was cut off just after it came through “and I felt desperate that I had lost my chance to help Jordan come down”.
In desperation, Mike urgently phoned back “but the call failed” and he searched for police to let someone know. It was then the police constable told of how the negotiator had disconnected the call because of a “gut feeling Jordan wanted to say goodbye to me before jumping”.
“My heart dropped when I heard this. We had come so close to losing our boy again.”
Just before dawn, police drew back from the carpark in the hope Jordan would come down by himself. He didn’t, climbing another level higher.
When a constable told him, “Your son is strong”, Mike Keil reflected on that and how it had been seven hours since his son had stood on a ledge, holding on to a guardrail.
Just before 6am, Mike was told to “move my ute just inside the police cordon near where Jordan was threatening to jump”. He parked where police asked and moved to stand at the back of the ute.
“I couldn’t bear the thought of Jordan dying and broke down and cried.”
Not long after, Mike found “my heart lifted with a great sense of relief” after he and Thorpe were told Jordan was coming down.
The relevance of the events, Mike said, was that the entire sequence from leaping out of the speeding car to the eight hours on the car park building were classified as “moderate”, not serious, by health workers.
“The nurses’ incident report stated that the incident was only a minute and that it was of a moderate level. That description does not describe what occurred,” he told the inquest.
“The incident report is completely fabricated and did not describe the event at all.”
He said the official record was completed by a nurse who was not present at either the leap from the car or the shopping mall stand-off.
“I am very concerned Jordan’s risk was minimised by the hospital staff and, sadly, the minimisation meant the treatment plan was inadequate.”
He said police treated their son with “dignity and respect” and “should be commended for their efforts” whereas “the nurses left the scene of the motorway and failed to properly report the incident with the severe adverse effect”.
Mike said it was the “first of many indignities” his son “was to suffer from Tiaho Mai” until his escape from the unit on February 7 and the discovery of his body five metres from the building in which he was meant to be kept securely.
Mike’s evidence followed that of Thorpe’s, and, like her testimony, he said Jordan had been wrongly diagnosed as a substance abuser which had led to him being treated in an inappropriate way.
The diagnosis Mike believed was wrong was in part based on medical notes that recorded Jordan Keil as saying he had used MDMA - an illegal empathogen - on a daily basis in the weeks leading up to his admission with delusions and paranoia.
In contrast, whanau and friends of Jordan said he had used the drug only three times with one of those a week before his admission.
Mike said one of the hopes he had for the inquest was to restore his son’s “mana and good memory” by correcting the “false impression and many errors” that led to him being “profiled” as suffering “psychosis secondary to substance abuse”.
“Jordan was not suffering any addictions and certainly was not heavily into drugs and alcohol as had been grossly exaggerated in the hospital’s forms and notes.”
Mike detailed other criticisms of Jordan’s care and the treatment of the family, including an absence of a te ao Māori lens on admission and care and a lack of tikanga, the access to whanau support was wrongly restricted.
He said medical notes recording care and observation of Jordan were absent or flawed and that a comment reflecting risk appeared to have been edited out of his treatment plan on the day he died.
Keil said in one conversation while his son was in care, he was asked if “he had what my father did” - a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia that was later revealed in cross-examination by the hospital’s lawyer, Paul White.
“I said he was getting the help he needed to work out what was causing his illness and trust his doctors to make him better.”
Jordan was found dead five days later by Thorpe, who called Mike to break the news.
He said: “The loss of Jordan is so overwhelming ... because he should not be dead. If only the people in Tiaho Mai had just done their jobs our boy would be with us now.”
David Fisher is based in Northland and has worked as a journalist for more than 30 years, winning multiple journalism awards including being twice named Reporter of the Year and being selected as one of a small number of Wolfson Press Fellows to Wolfson College, Cambridge. He joined the Herald in 2004.
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