The inquest began on Monday into the death of Jordan Keil. Mum Debbie Thorpe (left) stands next to Jordan's dad, Mike Keil ,who is carrying his son's ashes. Photo / Michael Craig
Jordan Keil, 25, was found dead in the garden at Middlemore Hospital’s secure mental health unit about 16 hours after he climbed out a window. The inquest into his death is under way - David Fisher reports.
Warning: This article discusses mental health issues.
The mother of a young man suspected of taking his own life has spoken of how she found his body metres away from the secure mental health unit from which he had escaped - and where staff could have seen him if they had looked out the window.
Debbie Thorpe spoke of finding Jordan Ihaia Keanu Keil, 25, in the garden outside Middlemore Hospital’s Tiaho Mai secure mental health unit about 16 hours after he had gone missing.
She described how she found him just metres from the window from which he was said to have escaped.
“I felt that he was cold and lifeless,” she said, describing calling for help. “I was crying and screaming out to the security guard. I told him to go and get help.”
Thorpe, from Auckland’s Pakuranga, said earlier in her search the security guard on duty told her he had no idea the young man for whom she was searching was missing. She said the security guard on duty the previous night - when her son had first gone missing - was also unaware there was a patient on the loose.
“How was it security had not been notified?”
Likewise, she told the Auckland District Court, police were also not alerted by the mental health unit her high-risk, suicidal son had gone absent without leave.
The testimony followed a gathering of about 50 of Jordan’s whanau and friends in support of parents Mike Keil and Thorpe. Bearing a sign saying, “Justice for Jordan”, the group waited on a kairanga from the courthouse before stepping forward to meet the call.
It was then the men stepped forward to deliver the haka, Tika Tonu.
Jordan’s brother, William, told the Herald it was chosen to convey “what is always right is right” - the setting straight of what had gone wrong.
Literally “ground shaking”, Tika Tonu was delivered with such ferocity and passion it drowned out the sound of concrete being drilled at the construction site across the road.
The hearing packed out the courtroom and heard Thorpe allege a string of failures by health workers in the eight days leading up to Jordan’s death on February 7, 2022.
Coroner Rachael Schmidt-McCleave has said those claims - and other aspects of Jordan’s death - would be studied during the course of the inquest in a bid to find if there were changes to prevent such a tragedy happening again.
Jordan Keil (Waikato-Tainui, Tūhoe, Ngāti Kahunganga and Ngāti Pūkeko and Ngāti Koroki) was a former St Peter’s College 1st XV and water polo player who had trained as an electrician, travelled the world and returned to New Zealand before Covid-19 arrived to set up his own business.
In January 2021, he was in a settled relationship and had enjoyed a family Christmas and summer holiday diving and fishing before returning to work.
But he was showing signs of severe distress, his mother told the inquest, with delusions and paranoia that pushed her to take him to Auckland Hospital’s emergency department.
That visit on January 31 was the beginning of a nightmare that would end with his death in care.
Thorpe’s criticisms included what she called “assumptions” and “inaccuracies” that she said wrongly built a prejudicial picture of her son.
One example was hospital notes that claimed Jordan wanted to kill his mother when the 111 recording actually said he had concerns “someone” was going to kill his mother - that he feared for her rather than was a threat to her.
Thorpe said other errors included notes describing Jordan as taking MDMA - an illegal empathogen - daily for weeks and binge drinking. She said his admission of occasional use had been extrapolated and cut-and-pasted across hospital notes, skewing the way he was treated.
She said in the wake of his death she had quizzed her son’s friends and found he had last used the club drug a week before his hospital admission and only three times in total.
That early attempt to seek help led to questions over why she had gone to Auckland Hospital which wouldn’t be funded for Jordan’s treatment while it would be at Middlemore Hospital, which was closer to where they lived, Thorpe said.
Many hours later, a doctor told Thorpe there were no available mental health beds for her son and a prescription was given along with instructions on how to care for him at home.
Thorpe testified about how they never got home with Jordan’s distress spiking on leaving the hospital. He began speaking of a bomb under his mother’s car and a gang plot to kill her. He grabbed the keys from his mother and ran away with police later finding him on a bridge, saying he was going to jump.
Once he was returned to hospital, medical staff organised for him to be committed for treatment on the basis of substance abuse under the Mental Health Act, with his drug use strongly challenged by family and friends.
Thorpe said two slightly built female nurses then turned up in a sedan to drive him to Tiaho Mai, leading to her voicing concerns over what she considered an inadequate escort for her athletic and distressed son.
Thorpe and her son’s father, Mike Keil, who had come to help search for their son, set out to follow their son to Middlemore Hospital.
She alleged the car sped away and that her fears were realised when they came across the nurses’ sedan stopped on the motorway near Sylvia Park. They discovered Jordan had climbed out of the moving car and had again gone on the run.
What followed was eight hours of horror with Jordan atop the Sylvia Park car park building, saying he would jump. Mike Keil and Thorpe stayed and waited, and she told the court how grateful she and her former partner were for police efforts in convincing their son to come down.
“It was like a horrifying movie unfolding,” said Thorpe. “I felt like I was going to throw up. My chest was pounding. I thought I was going to die due to the stress I was experiencing.”
Afterwards, Jordan, with injuries sustained bailing out of the car, was taken with a police escort to the secure mental health unit.
Once there, her concerns only increased, she said. There was no expression of tikanga Māori and no accommodation for whanau to stay even though Covid-19 restrictions at the nearby Middlemore Hospital were more permissive, she said.
The assumption of drug abuse was later revealed with notes suggesting mental health staff considered she might have smuggled “concealed substances” to her son. It was “insulting”, she said: “I am a loving mother, a school teacher and a law-abiding citizen.”
The poor treatment, she said, extended to after Jordan’s death when the hospital did not make contact until the family had a lawyer to send a letter. That led to a meeting at which, she said, the hospital kaumatua “kept dozing off”.
She claimed at one stage, he said: “I don’t know what I’m doing here. It has happened before and will happen again.”
She said her “heart breaks” to think of Jordan’s eight days at Tiaho Mai. She alleged issues with the medical notes, the diagnosis and even confusion over which room her son had been kept in.
The inquest also heard that Jordan escaped from the secure unit that night using a spoon to open a broken window.
“Jordan’s death has had a catastrophic impact on all our lives. Losing a child must be the most devastating thing that can happen to a parent.”
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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