You Can't Make This Stuff Up (update on my brother)

This most certainly falls under the "you can't make this stuff up" category.

I don't even remember where I left off with my brother. For anyone who doesn't already know, he has bipolar disorder, and has been having lots of trouble with it lately. He was in NYC for, I don't know, maybe 6 weeks?, and was hospitalized twice there (this after being hospitalized twice here in two different hospitals since early February). He finally came back to Boston in mid-May, but it was the day before my mom, Jordyn, and I left for Denver, so I didn't see him much.

Then the following weekend, Memorial Day weekend, my parents and my sister went to Omaha for a family friend's wedding. We were all invited, but I chose not to take Jordyn back across the country a mere four days after we returned from Denver, and my brother was in NY and in no state of mind to be able to RSVP when he needed to, so my parents declined for him. My parents had told him they were going out of town for the weekend, but purposely neglected to tell him where they were going... until Thursday night, (they were leaving Friday morning), when he asked where they were going and they told him.

He got all upset because he wanted to go to, had lost track of when the wedding was, didn't realize it was that weekend, and it was very important for him to be there.

Let me be clear. He was (and is) manic. It wasn't "very important" for him to be there - he would have liked to have been there. He decided he was going to buy a plane ticket to Omaha and go to the wedding. Forget the fact that you can't just show up unannounced/last minute to a black-tie optional, sit-down dinner wedding. Forget the fact that buying a plane ticket the day before costs an ungodly amount of money. Forget the fact that he had no place to stay in Omaha. Forget the fact that he desperately (and I mean desperately!) needed a haircut before he could show up to an event like a fancy wedding. And forget the fact that he wasn't in anywhere close to an appropriate mental state to be at such an event.

My parents told him if he could get everything figured out to be there, then fine, but he had to get an "ok" from the groom's parents before showing up (I mean, what else can they do, he's 32 years old). He of course did not get that "ok"! Which is good, because none of us actually thought he should have.

So, instead of going to Omaha, he decided to go to Chattanooga for the weekend. He bought a ticket to Atlanta (for who knows how much $$), rented a car (actually a Ford F150 pickup - I don't think he's ever driven a pickup a day in his life until then), and got on the road to Chattanooga.

Or so he thought.

He's probably driven from Atlanta to Chattanooga a hundred times in his life. But somehow he got on the wrong highway and ended up in Greenville, South Carolina. Where he managed to get pulled over for some reason, and the cops thought he might have been under the influence, so they tried to give him a sobriety test.

He refused.

So they charged him with DUI, and he spent the night in jail.

This was on Saturday of Memorial Day weekend. On Sunday, he called my dad, who was in Omaha, on a three-way call with the lady in charge of bail. She was really nice, and helped my dad bail out my brother, who didn't have enough cash on him to bail himself out, and only had an AmEx card with him, which they didn't take. She also helped him get his car out of where it had been towed, and got him on the road to Chattanooga. He called my dad again sometime Sunday late afternoon or evening, and said he was on the I-75 headed to Chattanooga.

And that was the last anyone heard from him...

...until my dad managed to track him down on Friday.

Yep! Friday, five days later.

Guess where he was?!? In jail! Yes, again! With another DUI charge! (See, I told you you can't make this stuff up!)

Again, let me be clear - he was NOT actually driving under the influence, either time. In fact, he SHOULD have been on prescription medication, but wasn't. The bad driving was caused by mania, not drugs or alcohol. Clearly, he needs to lose his license, but the DUI charges shouldn't stand.

Somewhere around 4am on Monday morning, he had been pulled over by police in Georgia, just north of Atlanta. Now, when he spoke to my dad Sunday afternoon or evening, he said he was in about that same spot, so we have no idea what he did between then and when he got pulled over at 4am. The charges are DUI and inappropriate lane change, or something like that.

The judge originally set bail, but then revoked it, because she decided/realized that my brother should be held and given a psychiatric evaluation. Apparently, they can hold him for up to 30 days in jail for this evaluation to take place (not that it takes 30 days, but that they have 30 days to do it). The "correctional facility" he's in has a psychiatric team on staff, so that's who does the eval. He's supposedly not in with the general population but in some kind of holding area, and the judge he has is a mother and wants to see him released without a record, which is good. My parents have hired him a lawyer to fight the DUI, which is what the judge basically suggested they do.

So, back to the five day period between Sunday evening and Friday afternoon... My brother was missing. He never arrived in Chattanooga, at least that we could figure out (his friend that he'd wanted to visit there never saw or heard from him, and neither did several other of his friends who we contacted), and he didn't return multiple calls, texts, and emails from us. That's not like him, even when manic. See, when someone is manic, they love to talk! He becomes a real chatterbox - it's very annoying, actually, especially since you can't hold a real conversation with him, and very little (if any) of what he says makes any sense. So, it was weird that he wasn't responding. Even his friend in Chattanooga was really worried.

My thoughts ranged from he was just sick of us and went off the grid on his own, to that he was dead in a morgue somewhere as a John Doe. Or maybe in the hospital, in an ICU, in a coma. Or in a ditch on the side of some back road somewhere. My dad thought he'd checked himself into a hospital, which I doubted very much. His phone went straight to voicemail, so it could have been turned off, out of juice, or lost. There was no way to know.

We eventually started to do some detective work. My dad made phone call after phone call, first tracking down the tow company who'd towed his car in Greenville to find out the license plate number, and then having a friend of his check the parking lot at one of the psych hospitals in Chattanooga where he's been before. He called the car rental company to see if by chance the car had been returned, only to find out it had been rented for a month. A month?! We thought my brother was going to Chattanooga for the weekend! WTF! But I digress. My dad called AmEx and told them my brother's name, DOB, SS#, etc., and tried to get them to tell him whether or not charges had been made, and if so, where. They wouldn't give out much info at all. Eventually, it got to the point that any further detective work would have to be done by the police. So, on Friday, my dad started to call police departments in Georgia to file missing persons reports. Somehow, he was able to find out about my brother being charged with the second DUI and being in custody.

So, at least we finally knew where he was, and that he was safe - physically, anyway.

As of now, he's still in jail, but supposedly he's now taking medication. They can't force him to, but apparently he wants to get out of jail (go figure), and he doesn't want to go into the hospital. We don't know if that's even an option, but we'll see. I just hope this is rock-bottom enough that he'll realize he DOES have a problem and he DOES need help/medication/some kind of treatment.

Meanwhile, we wait for the psych eval to be finished and for the lawyer to figure out what to do. And hopefully for the medication to kick in.