They Called for Help. They’d Always Regret It.

Photographs by Arlene Mejorado and Carlos Chavarría

When Antonietta Zuñiga woke up to smoke pouring through her bedroom window, everything she had learned about how to care for her grandson completely left her mind. It was November 2019, in the Los Angeles County city of Pico Rivera. Antonietta’s grandson, Carlos Zuñiga Jr., is schizophrenic; she had the number for ACCESS, L.A. County’s mental-health hotline, taped to her fridge for moments precisely like these. But she knew they were vastly underfunded, and it might take days for them to respond.

Frightened and half-asleep, Antonietta picked up her cell phone and dialed 911. About 10 police cars showed up, she says. When they arrived, she recalls, she told the police that Carlos had been off his medication for weeks and refusing to come inside. He’d been collecting trash in the backyard and had set some on fire to warm himself. “He doesn’t do anything because he wants to do it,” she remembers telling them. “He’s doing that because he’s sick.” Even so, Carlos was taken to jail.

Five months earlier and about 400 miles northwest, a similar scene had played out in the Bay Area city of Fremont. Police officers arrived at the door of Jose Jaime and Gabby Covarrubias, responding to a 911 call for help with their 20-year-old son, Christian Madrigal. “He needs to go back to the clinic,” Jose, Christian’s stepfather, says he told the police. “Something bad has happened in his mind.” Two weeks earlier, Christian had tried hallucinogenic mushrooms for the first time, and he hadn’t been normal since. “When you looked him in the eyes, he was not our boy,” Jose told me. “His eyes were different. His face was different. Everything was different.”

Jose said when the Fremont police arrived, they called for backup and ordered that Christian be brought outside. There, they arrested him for being under the influence of a controlled substance, although his parents maintain that he hadn’t used any drugs since he ingested the mushrooms. When they led him outside the house, Christian began crying out to his mother for help. She and Jose stood by in shock, not knowing what to do.