Help Or I’ll Shoot

Michael Robb's daughter Louisa was growing. She had just passed her first birthday and was ready for a new car seat. So Robb, a popular tennis coach at Newport High School, drove his black Jetta to Southcenter Mall to pick one up. He was returning to his West Seattle home at twilight when he spied a teenager behaving strangely along West Marginal Way. As Robb stopped and rolled down his window, the boy pulled a long shotgun from a bag, stuck it to Robb's head, and pulled the trigger, killing him instantly.

The car rolled off the road, coming to rest on railroad tracks. The boy ran off toward the Duwamish River. A police helicopter and K9 units were unable to find him.

The next morning, police responded to a report of an unknown black teen on a company barge in the Duwamish who was attempting to wave down passing boats. When they reached the barge, with TV helicopters overhead, police found 17-year-old Samson Berhe in soaked tennis shoes and boat clothes. His own waterlogged attire, matching the description witnesses gave of the clothes worn by the shooter, were also onboard. He surrendered without incident.

Berhe, who is scheduled to go to trial in Robb's murder next week, has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. He's on anti-psychotic medication and is shuttled regularly to Western State Hospital for care. But the irony is that only by killing Robb did Berhe finally become subject to the mental health treatment he has seemingly needed for years.

By the time of the murder, Berhe had amassed a worsening record of erratic episodes and threatening behavior that was eventually diagnosed as schizophrenia. But because he never committed a serious crime—and because his one prior brush with the law resulted in a record-keeping snafu—Berhe never entered the state's extensive, early-intervention program for juvenile mental health, which is reserved only for young offenders. Instead Berhe and his Eritrean parents made intermittent, uncoordinated contact with unconnected authorities—the schools, Harborview Medical Center, and the cops—until the worst happened.

"That's the unfortunate aspect of our mental-health system," says psychologist Eric Trupin, director of the University of Washington's Division of Public Behavioral Health and Justice Policy. The bias of the system, says Trupin, is: "You've got to get into big trouble."

Samson Berhe is now a soft-spoken man of 20. He's polite, engaged, but barely audible over the din of the visiting lobby at the King County Jail in downtown Seattle. His broad shoulders fill out the orange prison uniform. Berhe says his lawyer told him not to discuss the specifics of his case. He says only that he's "disappointed it happened. I guess I gotta deal with it now."

He passes the time dreaming up inventions—over 1,500 so far, he says. He carefully draws them in pencil on notebook paper, adding descriptions on the back. One is a light that could attach to a car's speedometer and change colors with the driver's speed, alerting both motorists and cops when the speed limit is being exceeded. Another is a detachable muffler filter for older cars which could be used to stop pollution. He presses the back of the paper against the glass in the visiting booth. If he ever gets out he wants to go to Japan, he says—"the technology capital."

When Berhe was first taken into custody and sent for a psychological evaluation, he reported hearing voices, claimed the ability to read minds, and told the staff at Western State he was descended from African kings and had a "special relationship with the Creator," according to exam records. For more than two years, he was consistently found too unstable to go to trial.

But by January 2006, an examiner reported that Berhe laughed at the absurdity of delusional notions, such as the television talking directly to him. Last November an examiner found that Berhe was acting generally pleasant and cooperative and declared him competent to stand trial. "It is my opinion that Mr. Berhe's symptoms are currently sufficiently managed for him to assist in his defense and understand the nature of the proceedings against him," the examiner wrote.

Berhe today seems more like the son his father remembers. "When he was a little kid he was a very good kid," Yemane Berhe says, sitting in the family's dark living room with the shades drawn.

Yemane Berhe and his wife, Zodi, emigrated from Eritrea in 1984. Yemane still struggles with English and directs questions to his wife, who has a better handle on it from her work as a maid in a hotel in California. Three years after their arrival, Samson was born, the fourth of the Berhes' seven children.

The family moved to Seattle in 1991, when Samson was barely more than a toddler, eventually moving their large family into a Seattle Housing Authority residence in West Seattle. Things started out all right. Zodi Berhe says her son was like most other kids, often talkative and active.

But then around middle school, he started having trouble. It began with calls from his teacher. Berhe was taking any paper distributed in class and immediately wadding it up into a ball. His behavior became increasingly disruptive, finally leading a teacher to call a meeting with Samson's mother. "His teacher told me at that time he has problems," Zodi Berhe says. Her son eventually switched schools, something he did a few more times as his behavior became increasingly difficult to deal with. He started using alcohol and drugs, including marijuana, methamphetamines, Ecstasy, and, according to court records, "sherm"—a hallucinogen ingested by smoking joints or cigarettes dipped in a mixture of PCP and formaldehyde.