The attorney for a Vermont woman set to be sentenced next week for four murders says if Rutland Regional Medical Center hadn’t been “reckless” and “negligent” by releasing his client from its psychiatric unit, the fatal shootings would have never happened.
“On August 7,2015, Jody Herring should have remained involuntarily hospitalized for the mental health crisis she was in the midst of as she was clearly a danger to herself and to others,” David Sleigh, Jody Herring’s attorney, wrote in sentencing memorandum filed in Washington County Superior Court this week.
The attorney added, “Jody Herring should never have been allowed to leave the psychiatric ward at Rutland Regional Medical Center on May 29,2015.”
Peg Bolgioni, a communication specialist with Rutland Regional Medical Center, in an email seeking comment Friday on Sleigh’s filing, replied, “We cannot comment upon the care of an individual patient nor on open legal matters.”
Herring, 43, pleaded guilty in July to four counts of murder in the killings of three relatives, Rhonda Herring, Regina Herring and Julie Falzarano, as well as well as Lara Sobel, a social worker for the Vermont Department for Children and Families.
Herring’s sentencing hearing is set to begin Monday.
Sleigh submitted his sentencing document to the court in preparation for that hearing. Seven Days was first to report on the filing Friday.
In addition to trauma the defense attorney says he client suffered as a child growing up as well as abuse at the hands of others later in life, he points to Herring’s treatment at RRMC just weeks before the fatal shootings.
“On August 7,2015, the date when the four victims were shot, Jody Hening should have been on Day 68 of a 90-day involuntary hold in the psychiatric ward at Rutland Regional Medical Center,” Sleigh wrote in the filing. “However, Rutland Regional Medical Center erroneously released Ms. Herring, with the Attomey General’s office blessing, in spite of knowing of her highly volatile unstable mental state.”
Attempts on Friday seeking comment on Sleigh’s filing from the Vermont Attorney General’s Office were not successful.
The Rutland hospital released Herring, Sleigh added, to “cover-up two errors” for which it was liable.
RRMC’s first error, the attorney wrote, was informing Washington County Family Court that Herring was in the hospital’s psychiatric ward, despite her “express” written denial of consent to do so.
And, the second error, according to the Sleigh’s filing, stems from an incident in which a man broke into Herring’s locked room on the secured floor of the psychiatric ward, attempted to get into bed with her and then used her bathroom.
“Jody Herring was prematurely released from Rutland Regional Medical Center without having ever completed any of the requisite ‘Discharge Documentation Programming,’” Seigh wrote.
“In an effort to silence Jody Herring’s protestations, about how her rights had in fact been violated, and a man had gotten into her room, the hospital simply let her go home.”
Up to that point, Sleigh wrote, the “mental health system safety net” had been working.
On May 24, 2015, a mental health screener from Washington County Mental Health, who had been called to Central Vermont Medical Center in Berlin, determined that Herring was a threat to herself and others.
“Emergency Medical Services had broken down the door of Jody Herring’s Barre apartment, after her cousins Rhonda and Regina Herring had called to report that they believed Jody was suicidal,” Sleigh wrote in the filing. “Jody was found sitting on her bed, bereft and destitute, surrounded by empty pill bottles and photos of her children. All alone.”
Dr. Jesse Ritvo, the staff psychiatrist on duty at Central Vermont Medical Center, who
saw Herring when she arrived at the facility on May 25,2015, determined that she
needed to be held for 90 days, involuntarily, for psychiatric evaluation and treatment, according to Sleigh’s filing.
Herring was taken by the sheriff’s department “on an involuntarily 72-hour psychiatric hold” to Rutland Regional Medical Center, Sleigh wrote
“The first two stages of a 90-day involuntary psychiatric hold were in place. It was the final, and third stage, where the system fell apart,” the filing stated.
The Vermont Attorney General’s office dismissed her case, according the Sleigh’s filing, and a hearing never took place to “solidify” the 90-day involuntary hold.
“There was never a final hearing to involuntarily hold Jody Herring for the ninety days, for psychiatric evaluation and treatment,” Seigh wrote. “Sixty-eight days later, four people were
shot and killed.”
He added, “These four tragic and unnecessary deaths are the result of one the biggest failures of the mental health system in the State of Vermont’s history.”
Sleigh, in the filing, termed the actions of the Rutland hospital “reckless” and “negligent.”
Herring pleaded guilty in July to to one count of first-degree murder in Sobel’s death and three counts of second-degree murder in the slaying of her three relatives.
She told a judge at that July hearing that that she used a rifle to kill her relatives in their Berlin home on the morning of Aug. 7, 2015. That afternoon, she said, she then shot Sobel in a parking lot outside Sobel’s workplace in Barre.
Herring admitted that she told her relatives “they better stop calling DCF” or they would be sorry. And she blamed Sobel for efforts to terminate her parental rights to her youngest daughter.
As part of the plea agreement, Herring will be sentenced to 20 years to life on the second-degree murder convictions, with those sentences to be served concurrently.
On the first-degree murder conviction, she faces a possible sentence of life without parole.
Sleigh, speaking after his client entered the guilty pleas to the murder charges in July, said the plea agreement allows Herring to avoid a mandatory life sentence without parole.
“We had an opportunity to argue for a sentence that would allow her to be released on parole at some point,” he said.
And in his recently submitted sentencing memo that includes stanzas from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” Seigh asked the judge for leniency.
“Jody had no long-term friends, and very few friends at all; she’d faced abuse from
every man she’d ever been involved with; and her accounts of very real problems were
dismissed as fantasy or paranoia,” he wrote. “Jody felt alone, and full of rage and righteous
indignation. Her world was a horrible ‘Theater of the Unfair.’”’
And, he later added, “Today, Jody Herring wishes that they had not released her from the psychiatric hospital.”
