Las Vegas inmates deemed mentally ill face long wait for treatment; some die before getting help: ‘Everybody failed him’

LAS VEGAS (KLAS) — Nevada does not have enough space to house defendants deemed incompetent to stand trial, leading jail inmates to wait months for treatment and some to die in custody — even though help is supposed to arrive within seven days.

James Chatien, 37, was killed while awaiting transport to a state forensic facility in October 2022. A month earlier, amid a schizophrenia diagnosis, a judge deemed Chatien not competent to stand trial, meaning two doctors determined he did not understand the charges against him nor could he assist his attorney in his defense.

“I miss my family before this because, everyone is just so angry,” Heaven Burns, Chatien’s cousin, said. “I find it hard to believe that they heard nothing when this man was literally killing him with his bare hands.”

Chatien and Lee Johnson, 32, shared a cell in a psychiatric unit inside the Clark County Detention Center. Corrections officers monitor and patrol the unit while Las Vegas Metro police, the department running the jail, contracts with Tennessee-based Wellpath to run the medical side.

As mental illness’ grip on Chatien tightened, his run-ins with police increased. By 2022, Chatien no longer looked like the cousin Burns knew.

“He would go out and preach God to people,” Burns said. “Sometimes that went over well, sometimes it didn’t.”

Chatien appeared in Las Vegas Justice Court on June 3, 2021, for exposing himself in public. It was his 64 ^th arrest — and his last. Clark County Judge Court Judge Christy Craig, who oversees the county’s competency court, deemed Chatien not competent to stand trial, ordering him from the jail to one of two hospitals where defendants receive treatment to restore their mental health.

The right to a fair trial — and the right to become competent to stand trial — is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution as interpreted by courts.

As of this month, there are 239 beds in two state facilities for this very kind of treatment — treatment that decrees from the Nevada Division of Public and Behavioral Health requires to be “prompt” and “restorative” and treatment that is required to begin within seven days of a judge’s incompetency ruling.

Chatien told the judge he had waited before.

“I waited like two or three months,” Chatien told a judge after his arrest.

“I’m telling you, I don’t know how long,” the judge replied.

After his arrest, Chatien was back and forth between competency and court until September 2022. On Sept. 2, 2022, Craig ordered Chatien into treatment. Oct. 18 — six weeks later — what was supposed to be his temporary holding cell would become the scene of his murder.

Johnson, in jail himself on battery charges, told police he was “tired of being disrespected… so he tried to kill him,” documents said. Documents the 8 News Now Investigators obtained reveal over all those weeks of waiting, staff in the unit repeatedly ignored Chatien’s alerts to possible trouble, writing he had “several documents cases” of misusing his cell’s call light.

On the day of his murder, Chatien activated his call light at 1:47 p.m. Records show officers deactivated it two minutes later. Chatien called for help again six minutes later at 1:53 p.m. At 2:04 p.m. — more than 15 minutes after that first sign of trouble — officers found Chatien dead on the floor.

The coroner’s office determined Chatien’s cause of death was blunt force injuries.

Metro police declined the 8 News Now Investigators’ records request for video from that day, saying it “would jeopardize law enforcement personnel and Clark County Detention Center’s security.”

“Jails are punitive in nature,” Chief Deputy Public Defender Arlene Heshmati said. “Although they provide some level of treatment, they’re not medical facilities.”

Chatien’s is one of two deaths Heshmati points to when pushing for defendants to either get that “prompt restorative treatment” or have their cases dropped.

Chatien waited 46 days – a wait time that ended when he died. Records the 8 News Now Investigators obtained show the average wait time that month was even longer at 51 days. As of this July, the number more than doubled to an astounding 128 days – more than four months treated like an inmate when the system has deemed you a patient.

“I would say that’s absolutely not acceptable,” Heshmati said. “The system is failing these people. Every day that they are in custody is certainly a day lost for them because they can’t do anything with their case.”

For more than a year, the 8 News Now Investigators have joined Heshmati, a prosecutor and Craig to watch the dismissal process in competency court. More than 1,500 competency referrals passed through Craig’s department last year.

About once a month, Heshmati will file motions to dismiss, and the prosecutor will oppose. Then it is up to Craig to decide what happens next. Oftentimes, the former public defender will hold the state in contempt for not moving inmates quickly enough. If she dismisses a case, she will first give the state one more chance at transporting an inmate within seven days.

Craig has fined the state more than $150,000 so far — or $500 a day per case, according to a spokesperson. That is money a representative for the state, who appears in the hearings via Zoom, said is better spent elsewhere.

“Issuing contempt against the division isn’t going to change how hard we work to try to work on these solutions and come up with alternatives as well as a long-term plan,” Senior Deputy Attorney General Trisha Chapman said during one hearing earlier this year.

That plan includes adding hundreds of new beds at a new Clark County facility. In 2023, the Nevada Legislature budgeted about $60 million for the project. The division was also working on converting Las Vegas city jail cells into forensic beds.

Until then, Heshmati said she will continue to fight for dismissals where appropriate. Each passing day, her clients are sitting in jail and not a hospital.

“He could tell, obviously, he wouldn’t be hitting the buzzer so many times — and they ignored him,” Burns said about her cousin’s death, believing he knew he was going to die. “I think everybody failed him — maybe he did too.”

A second man, Fernando Martinez, died in custody in 2023 while awaiting treatment. Martinez, diagnosed with schizophrenia, starved himself over two-and-a-half months, losing more than 60 pounds and dying.

As of early October, the average wait time to be transferred from jail to one of the two facilities was 78 days, according to a spokesperson. The decrease in time was due to more staff and added beds — some 50 added earlier this year.

A trial in Johnson’s murder case was not yet scheduled as he has been in and out of competency. Metro police declined to comment citing ongoing lawsuits. The Nevada Attorney General’s Office also declined, citing litigation.

As of September, about 100 people on average were awaiting a treatment bed in Clark County, records said.

8 News Now Investigator David Charns can be reached at dcharns@8newsnow.com .

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