OVERWHELMED: She calls her autistic brother's time at Arizona State Hospital an 'awful failure'

In part three of the special report OVERWHELMED, KJZZ’s The Show sit down with the sister of a man diagnosed with both schizophrenia and autism who was recently a patient at the Arizona State Hospital. She says her brother only got worse at ASH — which worries her because autism runs in this family.

"What do you say, Ryan, can you say hi?" asks Sommer Walter.

"Hi!" says Ryan.

In early November, Sommer Walter and her son Ryan welcomed visitors to their Mesa home. The house was already decorated for Christmas, per Ryan's request. The tall, dark-haired young man is curious about the visitors’ radio equipment.

"Hello!" Ryan says loudly into the microphone.

Ethyn, Walter’s older son, keeps a distance. Both young men, 18 and 20, have autism — but it presents differently in each. Ryan is physically affectionate and has a lot to say. Ethyn is a little more complicated.

"He's my lover," she says. "… He's my, he's the non-verbal one, Type 1 diabetes. A lot of the health stuff, you know."

Every couple hours, including during the night, Walter pricks Ethyn’s finger to check his blood sugar.

Both Ryan and Ethyn tower over their mom. Toddler toys like stackable rings and a Little Tikes plastic keyboard crowd the kitchen table. On the fridge, there’s a hand drawn valentine, an arithmetic worksheet and phone numbers for doctors.

Ryan retreats to his bedroom, obviously bored. Ethyn wanders the living room, iPad in hand, watching “Sesame Street.” After a bit, he trades the tablet for a big pink ball and stands patiently by the back door till Walter opens it. Outside on the concrete patio, Ethyn bounces the ball repeatedly. His mom says he can do it for hours.

Theo Grace Quest

On this warm autumn afternoon, the house is calm. That’s not always the case. A few weeks later, Walter posts a bathroom mirror selfie on Instagram. She’s looking straight ahead, wearing giant safety goggles over her long brown hair.

The caption: “When your kiddo has autism and likes to poke your eyes out when you’re trying to assist him in the bathroom … this becomes your new safety attire!!”

Walter added a laughing emoji to the post, but in the photo her eyes are exhausted. The threat to her safety is real.

But she worries more about her sons than herself. She knows the worst-case scenario.

Autism was not new to Walter when her sons were diagnosed. She has both a half-brother and half-sister who are autistic. Their upbringing was traumatic, Walter says, and she’d fallen out of touch with her brother, Darren William Beach Jr., for more than a decade when she saw a familiar face one day on the television news.

Newscasters were reporting an arson attack on a Phoenix LGBTQ youth center called One-n-Ten.

Walter watched the security footage of a tall, wide set man in a blue hoodie walking around the inside of the building, pouring gasoline.

Walter visited her brother in jail as soon as she could. Since she’d last seen him, Beach had been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and was living on the street.

He was found guilty but insane in the arson case and sent to the state hospital in 2021.

Walter says Beach got worse at ASH — not better, in part because he was not given accommodations for his autism.

“He just kept getting increasingly aggressive,” she says. “You take someone with autism and you throw them into this sensory overloading, stimulating unit where patients are constantly attacking each other, or staff is being attacked by the patients. And so that is what really made the shift in Darren’s stay at ASH. That's when they started increasing all the meds, changing meds, flipping the meds … I mean it was, it's abusive. It's just abusive, what they did to Darren.

Theo Grace Quest

Not only did ASH not provide accommodations, she says hospital medical staff removed Beach’s autism diagnosis.

"They took the time to have him evaluated by somebody who is not someone that is credentialed or versed in autism, especially for those with adults that is not clinically trained to do that," she says. "They undiagnosed him with autism at ASH. So that they're like, 'He doesn't have autism.' And I'm like, 'But he does.' He’s had this longstanding diagnosis since he was like, 4. You don't magically not have autism anymore."

Almost two years into his stay at ASH, Beach was found guilty of aggravated assault against an ASH employee and sent to jail. The nine medications he was on at the time did not follow him, and Walter says Beach began having a physical reaction that culminated in a psychotic break.

Beach declined KJZZ’s request to be interviewed. He has not spoken to media since the arson incident.

Walter is disappointed in the system — and herself.

"I was very naive in thinking like, 'Oh, this is gonna be a piece of cake. I'm gonna be able to get Darren all kinds of help. This is gonna be great. He's gonna get outta jail, and life is gonna be awesome for him.'" Walter says. "… I don't even think there's a word to describe what has happened with Darren and his situation. … Just, epic failure. Just an epic, disgusting, awful failure."

Watching her brother's experienc ehas forced walter to rethink how she approaches difficult situations with her son Ethyn.

That naiveté is gone, particularly when it comes to her sons.

"We stopped having in-home providers come in because I didn't want them to get hurt. So I'm Ethyn's habilitation provider now, because I just, I just feel awful. I know some families are like, 'Oh, well that's their job and if they just get beat up,'" she says. " I'm like, 'No, no. That's how you lose providers.' My husband and I have a deal. We're like, 'No, we're just gonna let Ethyn beat the [expletive] out of us,because we're not calling the police.'"

It takes too long for help to arrive, Walter says, and when it does, the officers are often not trained to deal with people with autism and mental illness.

Walter pauses as Ethyn, done with the ball, hands her a container of Reese’s peanut butter cups.

OK, she says, but first his blood glucose needs to be checked.

Can we sit?" she asked Ethyn. "You pick it. Which one? Which finger? ... Good number my friend. Good number. OK. You want one or two? No, we can't have five. OK.”

Ethyn blows a kiss to his peanut butter cup before he eats it.

Unlike her brother, Walter’s sons have received therapies and other services for their autism since they were very young. Walter wonders what would have happened if Beach had received that kind of care. But even with it, she worries about her sons — particularly Ethyn.

"With someone like Ethyn, it's very isolating,” she says, “… ‘cause you don't know when that behavior is gonna pop off with him. You don't. And he's gone after me in the store and I get it. It looks frightening, you know? Um, and the police have been called, you know, and the police show up in the Target and I'm just like, ‘No, no.’ Like, they come in and I'm like, 'Back the hell up,’ and they're just like, ‘What?’ I'm like, ‘Back up, back up. I got it. He's autistic, he's non-verbal, he's aggressive. I got it.’"

And she does. Until the day that maybe she doesn’t. Walter worries all the time about what will happen when she’s not around anymore.

"As you age it just gets harder and harder. Like, yeah, I'm 41, but I've now started thinking, OK, what happens to my kids? And even caring for Darren, I'm like, 'God, I pray I outlive him.' ‘Cause I know what's to come for them," she says. "Like Ethyn, he'd probably die soon after, you know, I passed because they couldn't do, it's very hard to place someone like Ethyn who's aggressive and medical, you know? … And then Ryan, I couldn't imagine the heartbreaking, you know, positions that they would, that he might be placed in. You know?"