Warning: The following article includes mentions of self-harm and suicide.
This story is part of an ongoing series.
PEORIA, Ill. – He had been in the chair for 20 hours. He was exhausted. He felt helpless. He thought he’d be restrained for a few hours. Now, he was approaching a day. The whisperings of Charlie, the hallucination always with him, were growing louder.
It was the evening of Dec. 22, 2023. Amos Fenderson had been restrained since just before 11 p.m. the night before, after a correctional officer in Peoria County Jail found Fenderson lying on his left side in his cell. The officer spotted blood on the floor.
Fenderson had cut himself, again. It was the third time he harmed himself in less than one month. The three-inch cut near the pit of his elbow was no longer bleeding by the time medical staff arrived. The jail determined it wasn’t necessary for Fenderson to go to the hospital.
But he was sent to the restraint chair.
Long black straps went around him like a backpack. Shorter straps locked in his ankles, wrists and forearms. Night turned into early morning, early morning became afternoon. He clocked the passage of time by tracking when he received meals.
Then he heard someone else. Keith Clark. The two had met months earlier on Skid Row, a nickname for an area in Peoria County Jail. Clark was discharged from the hospital after he was found in a pool of blood in his cell. He cut himself with an egg shell. He, too, was being restrained in an adjacent cell.
Fenderson felt relieved there was someone else nearby. So did Clark.
Illustrations of Amos Fenderson and Keith Clark, based on photographs by Sebastián Hidalgo. (Grace Hauck, Illinois Answers Project)
Clark and Fenderson were strapped down for the next four days. They spent Christmas together – restrained.
Their treatment is not unique at Peoria County Jail, which has the distinction, in recent years, of restraining its charges in chairs for longer durations than other jails in the state and far past industry recommendations.
The jail restrained people more than 350 times from 2019 to 2023, with an overwhelming majority of the incidents involving some type of mental health issue, the Illinois Answers Project found.
Clark and Fenderson are among the scores of people who have been strapped down in jails throughout Illinois for making suicidal comments, hurting themselves or refusing to strip naked and wear a suicide proof smock.
They, and dozens of others, described their experiences being restrained as painful, traumatic and torturous. Both Clark and Fenderson have struggled with severe mental illness since they were young boys growing up in Peoria.
“I feel like I am being punished for being mentally ill just because Peoria County cannot deal with or treat my mental illness,” Clark wrote in a letter to a judge.
Experts cautioned that restraints should only be used as a tool of last resort and for a short period of time. They warned of the possibility of further psychological distress and said that restraint chairs are not adequate for suicide prevention.
“Is it a humane practice? Absolutely not,” said Sheryl Kubiak, founding director of Wayne State University’s Center for Behavioral Health and Justice. “Do I think the jail administration has their hands tied in this situation? Yes, because access to mental health hospitals is not a clear path.”
Jails, she said, are not built for and cannot properly care for people with severe mental illness.
The closing of mental health institutions throughout the state in the past three decades have forced jails like Peoria, which also struggled with staffing shortages in recent years, to become their substitute.
Peoria County Sheriff Chris Watkins declined to be interviewed for this story. In response to emailed questions, however, he wrote that people are restrained when they are a threat to themselves or to others.
Clark and Fenderson, he said, have been the “most extreme cases that go to great lengths for self harm that we have seen in at least 20 years.”
Self-harm and suicide attempts were logged in jail records as the reasons for Clark’s and Fenderson’s restraint in December 2023.
By the evening of December 26, officers released Clark from the chair, where he had spent the better part of four days. But Fenderson stayed.
Fenderson would be restrained for five days (or nearly 138 hours) – the longest recorded period of time any person was restrained in an Illinois jail in the five-year period.
“It kind of broke me in a way,” he told Illinois Answers this summer.
A tool of ‘last resort’ used for mental health crises
Throughout Illinois, the restraint chair has often been deployed in jails after a person has just tried to take their life, harmed themself or has threatened to do so, reports show.
In some instances, they punched, spit at or threatened staff. Or, like Fenderson after his 2023 arrest, they refused to follow suicide watch protocol, which can include stripping naked and wearing a tear-proof smock.
Some were strapped into the chair when they returned from the hospital after suicide attempts, cuts on their wrists still fresh.
In Peoria County, an Illinois Answers analysis found that, from 2019 to 2023, jail staff indicated evidence of a mental health issue in at least 70% of the 357 known restraint chair incidents.
That includes mention of a mental illness diagnosis, suicidal comments or self-harm in reports filed by the jail.
About 44% of people in U.S. jails have a history of a mental health problem, according to a 2017 study by the U.S. Department of Justice. One recent study found Black Americans with psychological disorders, like Clark and Fenderson, are more likely to be arrested than white people with similar mental health struggles.
The first time Fenderson was restrained at Peoria County Jail, he had just come from the hospital.
He had only been out of prison for two weeks when Peoria police officers arrested him in an OSF Healthcare Saint Francis Hospital room on Sept. 5, 2023. He was later charged with aggravated battery involving a nurse. Fenderson wrote in a lawsuit that he was at the hospital because he was suicidal. The 44-year-old swallowed a die and two batteries.
“All I did know is that he needed some help. And I tried to get it.”
Wilma Fenderson said her son Amos began seeing the hallucination that he calls “Charlie” as a young child. She learned quickly that Charlie was not friendly.
Decades later, the hallucination stayed with him. Fenderson, now age 44, described it to Illinois Answers and detailed it in letters to a judge.
Sometimes Charlie just watches, Fenderson said. He’ll bark like a dog or he’ll give commands, telling Fenderson to do bad things. Fenderson described Charlie to be the CEO, he the servant.
By age 21, Fenderson was in prison. He was found guilty of sexual assault and burglary. As a teenager, he spent time at a juvenile detention center, his mother said.
When Fenderson was released from prison in 2023, he wasn’t “acting right,” Wilma recalled. She said she tried to find care for him at a long-term facility, but said she never received a call back. He was arrested within days of being released.
“I just don’t know anymore,” Wilma said. “I don’t know what happened at the hospital. I don’t know how he ended up at the county jail. I don’t know what was on his mind. I don’t know what was wrong. All I did know is that he needed some help. And I tried to get it.”
A young Amos Fenderson (Grace Hauck, Illinois Answers)
“He was in another world,” Latasher Ballard said of her brother’s mental state before he was arrested. “And we wasn’t in that world.”
When Fenderson arrived at Peoria County Jail, his booking slip read that he should be placed on suicide watch.
According to jail reports, Fenderson refused to undergo suicide protocol.
He was then placed in a restraint chair for about three and a half hours.
Peoria County Jail’s policy on the use of restraints notes the jail can only use them to “prevent self-injury, injury to others or property damage.” These restraints, including chairs, cannot be used as punishment, the policy reads, and cannot be used “longer than is reasonably necessary to control the inmate.”
The only time Peoria County policy notes a specific duration limit is when the use of “clinical restraints” are deployed. “Clinical restraint” refers to restraint when a detainee’s “disruptive, assaultive and/or self-injurious behavior is related to a medical or mental illness.”
A qualified healthcare professional can order a person to be restrained for up to 12 hours, with the possibility of a four-hour extension – if ruled clinically necessary – according to the policy.
Safety Restraint Chair Inc., the company that makes the chairs used by Peoria County Jail, suggests that people not be left in a chair for more than two hours. The company does not recommend anyone be in the chair for more than 10 hours total.
Peoria County Jail has been accredited by the National Commission on Correctional Health Care, which generally calls for a maximum duration of 12 hours in cases of clinical restraint.
Peoria County had a dozen incidents that exceeded 12 hours from 2019 to 2023. The county restrained people for more than eight hours over 20 times in 2023, the highest number of such incidents for any Illinois county that year.
While Illinois Answers obtained data for the years 2019 to 2023, there’s evidence of long-duration restraint from more than a decade ago. In 2009, a woman sued Peoria County Jail claiming she was restrained in a chair for 18 hours.
She settled her lawsuit in 2011 for $20,000. The settlement required the jail superintendent to send her a letter of the jail’s new restraint chair policies.
Peoria County Sheriff Chris Watkins wrote to Illinois Answers in an email that people are put in a restraint chair when there is a “clear active threat to themselves and or others,” including self harm, refusing suicide watch protocol or being combative towards staff or others detained.
Clark and Fenderson have been the ‘most extreme cases that go to great lengths for self harm that we have seen in at least 20 years.’
Chris Watkins, Peoria County Sheriff
Some people, the sheriff said, have asked to be put in the chair “because they can not control themselves.” Clark said he has asked to go into the restraint chair in order to get out of certain cells because of the gross conditions. Some cells, he said, have feces caked on the walls.
“An individual’s mental health does not mean they are automatically placed in the restraint chair,” wrote Watkins. “Active threat is the key word.”
Older jails, Watkins said, were “not designed with a purpose to house detainees with serious mental illness so other measures had to be utilized to protect this specific population.”
The jail has had incidents in which someone was not initially put in a restraint chair and was later hospitalized for a severe injury, Watkins wrote. If the person was in the restraint chair, he wrote, “they would not have been able to harm themselves.”
Jails also must continue to care for those who have been declared mentally unfit for trial and are awaiting a bed in a state psychiatric hospital. According to the Illinois Department of Human Services, the average wait time was 70 days as of June.
In 2022 a group of sheriffs sued Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s administration over court-ordered and frequently delayed transfers of those declared unfit for trial. The governor later signed legislation to triple the period of time a defendant deemed unfit for trial can sit in jail from 20 to 60 days.
Illinois Answers identified at least seven people who were restrained in Peoria County Jail between 2019 and 2023 and were also remanded to a state hospital.
Christine Tartaro, a criminal justice professor at Stockton University in New Jersey who researches jail suicides, said detainees who are suicidal need constant supervision and to see a mental health professional as soon as possible.
She was one of several experts interviewed by Illinois Answers who questioned why someone would need to be restrained for such long durations.
Restraint chairs, she said, “really are intended to be a tool of last resort and a tool that you use for the absolute minimum amount of time that is necessary.”
Clark, the inmate Fenderson befriended, was often placed in a restraint chair after being hospitalized for cutting himself.
He spent dozens of years incarcerated before he was released in November 2022, he said, but he had never been restrained in a chair before his time in Peoria County Jail. After he was released from prison, he struggled to adapt, he said.
“I don’t know if he’ll ever be right again.”
With both parents incarcerated throughout his childhood, Clark, now age 30, was raised by his aunt Valerie Edwards. Edwards began to notice her nephew withdrawn in the corner as his brothers played together.
She and her husband would find him under the bed balled up, rocking. They held him as he cried.
Edwards said she arranged for 7-year-old Clark to start seeing a psychiatrist at Methodist Hospital. She recalled how the boy told the psychiatrist he didn’t like himself, that he wanted to die.
He had started self-harming around this time, as well as attempting suicide.
In 2005, Clark’s 7-year-old brother shot and killed their 4-year-old brother. The boys were playing with a loaded gun while visiting their grandparents.
Clark later got his late brother’s name, Jamerious, tattooed on his left arm.
His struggles with self-harm continued into adolescence. He spent time at a juvenile detention center, ultimately never finishing high school.
“I don’t know if he’ll ever be right again,” Edwards said. “So many things happened to him. And I don’t know if he’ll be right again. I don’t know.”
A young Keith Clark (Grace Hauck, Illinois Answers)
In April 2023, Valerie Edwards, Clark’s aunt, took him to the hospital.
She told doctors her nephew was “delusional and paranoid.” She explained how he attempted to hang himself that day. He was not taking his medication, according to court documents. Clark was sent to the psychiatric unit.
He was arrested for aggravated robbery and booked into Peoria County Jail shortly after. He was quickly placed on suicide watch.
Two days later, a correctional officer found Clark lying face down and saw a “massive amount of blood,” according to jail reports. The officer applied pressure by holding a roll of toilet paper to the cut on his arm.
He was sent to the hospital. When he returned, according to emails between jail leadership staff, he was placed in a restraint chair for the first time. It’s unclear how long, since no report about Clark being restrained upon his return appears to have been filed to the Illinois Department of Corrections.
In May, Clark was sent to the hospital twice after suicide attempts. He was also restrained for 16 hours, 9 hours, and 4 hours respectively.
Clark said he feels there is no treatment for the mentally ill at Peoria County Jail. He felt the staff didn’t know what to do with him.
“I’ve never seen nothing like here,” he said of Peoria County Jail. “It surprised me. This can’t be right. No way can they be doing this.”
In June 2023, Clark was sent to the hospital again following another suicide attempt.
He was placed in a restraint chair, according to jail reports. He stayed there for the better part of 45 hours.
‘This is not a mental health facility’
Amid staffing shortages at Peoria County Jail and general disinvestment in mental health care services throughout Illinois, Clark and Fenderson’s mental health continued to land them in the restraint chair in fall 2023.
In the span of a month, Fenderson threatened staff and was accused of throwing feces at officers, resulting in additional criminal charges. He was tased and pepper sprayed.
He was taken to the hospital following a suicide attempt. And he was restrained for about 9 hours.
Clark also continued to harm himself. He was rushed to the hospital twice in November 2023 – the first time for swallowing a handful of pills. The day after he returned from the hospital, he was sent out again because he cut his arms while on suicide watch.
When he returned from this hospital visit, Clark was restrained in a chair “due to stitches in his arm and his current mental state,” according to a jail report. It does not say for how long.
Emails indicate the jail medical team wanted Clark to have an officer watching him 24 hours a day.
“We do not have the staffing to accommodate,” Carmisha Turner, jail superintendent, replied in an email. “We can follow the restraint chair guidelines which allows him time out of the chair to eat, stretch and use the restroom until mental health clears him to return to the restraint cell.”
“In my opinion,” she wrote, “the medical and mental health responsibilities have continued to be placed back on security staff.”
Access to mental health care in Peoria crumbled in the 1980s (click details to expand)
Throughout the country, jails and prisons often care for more mentally ill inmates than many psychiatric hospitals. The Treatment Advocacy Center estimated that there are 10 times more mentally ill people incarcerated than in state hospitals.
State psychiatric hospitals began to close across the country in the 1950s, with the idea that deinstitutionalization would allow people in need to receive care in the community, according to Arthur Lurigio, a Loyola University professor of psychology and criminology who has worked in jails.
But there has never been adequate funding nor the proper safety nets for where people with mental illness can go, Lurigio said. So, many people found themselves in jail.
A 2013 study estimated that 4% to 7% of the growth in incarceration between the 1980s and 2000s can be linked to deinstitutionalization. Researchers found that a “sizable portion of the mentally ill” were behind bars at that time who wouldn’t have been incarcerated previously.
Amos Fenderson and Keith Clark came of age at a time when access to mental health care in Peoria crumbled around them.
In the early 1990s, the state began cutting funding for Zeller Mental Health Center, which around this time cared for more than 250 patients from Peoria and much of central Illinois.
By 2002, then Gov. George Ryan closed the hospital. The hospital was targeted for spending the most amount of money on its patients and having the highest employee-to-resident ratio.
Three other state psychiatric hospitals also closed between 1997 and 2013. From 2009 to 2011, the state cut an estimated $113 million in community mental health treatment. Advocates warned against this.
“On paper, [Zeller is] expensive,” Randy Wells, executive director of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) of Illinois said in 2002. “But you know what? It’s going to be more expensive if these people can’t find care somewhere and they wind up in the criminal justice system.”
Watkins, the sheriff, said in an email to Illinois Answers that the jail did have an officer watching Clark for 24 hours a day for about two weeks. Despite this, Clark “still attempted self harm,” the sheriff said.
Jails are obligated to provide medical and mental health care. But health care often looks different at each jail, with counties each having their own policies and varying resources.
Peoria County’s health care provider – Advanced Correctional Healthcare – has a qualified mental health professional at the jail weekdays for eight hours and for four hours on Saturday and Sunday. A psychiatrist is available remotely every Friday.
Peoria City Councilwoman Bernice Gordon-Young works as a psychotherapist at the jail. She did not provide comment after several emails and phone calls from Illinois Answers.
The company’s CEO, Jessica Young, declined to be interviewed and did not respond to more than a dozen detailed questions Illinois Answers sent via email.
Advanced Correctional Healthcare has been the provider since 2022. The county previously contracted with Wellpath, one of the largest for-profit providers of health care in correctional facilities. Wellpath has faced mounting criticism, nationally, for its inadequate care and was sued for the deaths of dozens of people.
The Human Rights Authority of the Illinois Guardianship and Advocacy Commission, a state agency, found in 2020 that Peoria County Jail and Wellpath provided inadequate treatment to a detainee with mental illness and did not properly provide the person his medication.
The Peoria County Board voted in October to reinstate Wellpath as the health care provider in 2025. The contract’s budget for its first year will be about $2.8 million, a significant jump from the previous medical budget of $1.5 million.
Years earlier, in the summer of 2020, the jail’s mental health services were in jeopardy. The Peoria County Board made millions of dollars in budget cuts due to pandemic-related revenue drops.
The board later restored $450,000 for the sheriff’s office, about one-quarter of the $1.75 million cut to the department. Then-sheriff Brian Asbell criticized the cuts made to his office and warned the Peoria County Board of the jail’s staffing crisis. In 2022, he requested the creation of a task force to figure out how to tackle the two dozen vacancies at the jail.
We have a depleted workforce. When you are this far down, even when we hire someone, it is hitting them like a ton of bricks when they come in.
Brian Asbell, former Peoria County Sheriff
A county spokesperson said she did not know if a task force was ever formed and referred the question to the sheriff’s office. Watkins did not respond to Illinois Answers’ question.
“We have a depleted workforce,” Asbell said before the Peoria County Board. “When you are this far down, even when we hire someone, it is hitting them like a ton of bricks when they come in.”
“We have hit that point where there is water cooler talk about potential resignations.”
Asbell resigned in the summer of 2022, months before his term ended.
“I just don’t have much gas left in the tank,” he wrote in his statement at the time.
A 40-year-old man died by suicide in the jail one month later. An officer who was tasked with securing a mental health examination for him found him unresponsive in his cell. He had been in the jail for four days. He was later pronounced dead at the hospital. Illinois Answers chose not to identify the man by name due to the sensitive nature of his death by suicide.
The jail was understaffed on that day, in part because another inmate was sent to the hospital and required an officer to escort him. This left one officer to man intake, which is typically staffed by three. It resulted in gaps in expected checks in the hour before the man was found, according to an Illinois State Police investigation.
Suicide has been a pervasive crisis in jails for decades and was the leading cause of death in U.S. jails in 2019. There were 33 confirmed jail suicides in Illinos from 2019 to 2023, according to state data.
Cook County leads all counties with nine recorded deaths by suicide during this time period. Peoria has the second highest with three deaths by suicide.
Staffing continued to be a problem in 2023 as the jail’s population ballooned to its highest in years.
Assistant Corrections Superintendent Brian Johnson wrote in a June 2023 email to the sheriff that staffing was “likely to get worse before it gets better.” The jail, he wrote, was down 13 correctional officers.
In October, the IDOC cited the jail for “inadequate supervision of detainees.” Documents showed staff were only completing 30-minute observational checks 44% of the time.
The jail should either, the IDOC recommended, hire more employees or “enact other measures” to ensure enough supervision.
Watkins told Illinois Answers that staffing issues are not factored into the jail’s use of restraint chairs. As of August 2024, the jail has 15 correctional officers vacancies.
Turner, in a brief interview with Illinois Answers in the spring, said placing people “in the chair is based on their actions.”
“This is not a mental health facility,” she said. “That’s all I can say about that.”
‘It’s not going to get better. It’s going to get worse.’
During the week of Christmas 2023, Clark and Fenderson were restrained in nearby cells following attempts of self harm.
Just after 8 a.m. on Christmas Eve, incident reports show, they both received a check by a mental health professional. Fenderson told the social worker that he no longer had thoughts of self-harm but he couldn’t explain how or why he “feels better,” according to medical records he provided to Illinois Answers.
The social worker wrote that he should be evaluated daily by mental health.
The jail’s policy says an inmate who is restrained must be consulted with mental health “as soon as possible, but within eight hours of placement in restraints.”
When “clinical restraints” are used in instances of mental health issues, a face-to-face observation by a health care professional must be completed within one hour of the restraints being applied and every 15 minutes afterwards to determine the need for continued restraints.
Peoria County Jail’s policies on “clinical restraint” (click details to expand)
In its policy, Peoria County Jail says the following is required to happen when a person is restrained:
- Staff conduct face-to-face checks at least twice every 30 minutes.
- When “clinical restraints” are used in instances of mental health issues, checks must occur at minimum every 15 minutes by a qualified health care professional.
- Bathroom breaks at least once every two hours.
- Food will be provided during “normal meal periods” and hydration will be “provided no less than once every two hours or when requested.
- An opportunity to move their extremities for at least 10 minutes every two hours.
- Medical assessment by a health care professional within four hours and every six hours after that.
- Evaluation by a mental health professional within eight hours.
The following is required when “clinical restraints” are used:
- A face-to-face observation by a health care professional within one hour of the person being restrained in order to determine the need for continued restraints.
- Checks by a qualified health care professional at minimum every 15 minutes.
It’s unclear if this ever happened. In incident reports obtained by Illinois Answers, there are regular mentions of medical staff checking Clark and Fenderson’s vitals and restraints. But those records show Fenderson had only two interactions with mental health personnel in the time he was restrained and Clark had three in the four days he was restrained.
Watkins, the sheriff, wrote in an email that the jail follows protocols for mental health checks and regular breaks, and did so for Clark and Fenderson. The mental health checks, he said, are noted in cell logs, not in the incident reports Illinois Answers reviewed.
Illinois Answers earlier this year submitted a public records request to the county for all documents related to Clark and Fenderson being restrained in 2023. Cell logs were not included in the limited documents received by Illinois Answers.
Following the sheriff’s comments, the newsroom submitted requests specifically for all cell logs related to the December restraint incidents involving Clark and Fenderson. As of publication, Illinois Answers has not received those documents. A request was also submitted for jail policies related to documentation.
Illinois Answers received the two reports for the December incident for Clark and Fenderson as part of a public records request made to the IDOC, which revealed hundreds of other restraint chair incidents at Peoria County Jail.
Citing privacy issues, the county declined to release the corresponding incident reports – which could include information about breaks, medical checks, meals – for the hundreds of people restrained at the jail over five years.
Illinois Answers has filed lawsuits seeking these documents.
Since 2021, three people, including Clark, have filed federal civil rights complaints against Peoria County Jail, in part for its use of restraint chairs. Fenderson has also filed a lawsuit against the jail staff, alleging poor treatment while incarcerated.
It kind of broke me in a way.
Amos Fenderson, 44
After Christmas, the men were becoming more frustrated and uncooperative, causing an officer to email a warning to jail leadership.
Fenderson was given a blanket to serve as a cushion for his back and buttocks, records show.
Clark told Illinois Answers that he felt he was losing circulation in his wrist and feet. He said his feet swelled.
Most days, records show both went to the bathroom once or twice.
“It seemed like we were just forgotten about,” Clark said.
Clark was taken out of the restraints on December 26 and moved into a different cell. The seven times in 2023 that Clark was restrained totals to just under 200 hours. Cumulatively, it’s the longest recorded amount of time that anyone in an Illinois jail has spent in a restraint chair in a single year, according to Illinois Answers’ analysis.
On December 26, a mental health professional wrote that Fenderson said he is unable to sleep and the lack of it is “harming his mental health,” according to medical records.
It was advised in these records that Fenderson “could be removed from the restraint chair and placed on modified watch.” But he remained in the chair until December 27.
Fenderson was on suicide watch a handful of times in the early months of 2024. In May, he was in the restraint chair again.
He swallowed nail clippers and told a correctional officer he cut his genitals with his fingernail.
Fenderson was temporarily released from the chair when he had a scheduled visit with an Illinois Answers reporter on May 7.
“It’s torture,” he said through the video screen, “they got these torture chairs.”
After the visit, Fenderson returned to the chair, where he’d be for about six more days. The sheriff declined to comment specifically about this, citing privacy laws, but said “protocol was followed based on medical staff’s advisement.”
It was a total of eight days, likely the longest reported period of time a person has been restrained in an Illinois jail in recent years. Fenderson unknowingly surpassed the record he originally set in December.
Less than 24 hours later, he was back in the chair.
Clark also continued to be restrained; he was restrained a dozen times in the first half of 2024. In February, he wrote to the judge presiding over his case that his psychosis and depression were due to the “harsh and inhumane living conditions” at Peoria County Jail.
“Who wouldn’t become worse in such conditions?” Clark wrote.
Clark eventually pleaded guilty but mentally ill to the charge of aggravated robbery this summer. Edwards, his aunt, sat in the courtroom with her hands clasped. She was there for every hearing, often in the front row.
Dr. Jean Clore, a clinical psychologist who conducted Clark’s fitness examination, testified at the hearing that Clark has one of the “most severe” cases of borderline personality disorder she has ever seen.
Before leaving the stand, the judge asked Clore how prison could “endanger” Clark’s condition.
“I haven’t seen incarceration improve anyone’s mental health,” she said. Isolation, in Clore’s view, will also exacerbate a person’s mental health conditions.
At the end of the hearing, Clark apologized to the victims, the court and the community for the crime and he said he wants to get treatment.
Illustrations of Amos Fenderson and Keith Clark, based on photographs by Sebastián Hidalgo. (Grace Hauck, Illinois Answers Project)
“I just want to be a better person,” he said. “I don’t want to continue to go through this. I don’t want to put my family through this no more.”
As he mulled the sentencing, the judge said Clark’s mental illness “looms” over this case as a “dark cloud.” The judge, prosecutor and public defender all agreed Clark needed treatment.
The judge sentenced Clark to 16 years in prison, with the chance of being paroled in about 7 years. He noted how Clark, now 30, will still be a “young man” when he is released from prison.
In the hallway of the courthouse, Edwards shook her head.
“It’s not going to get better,” she said. “It’s going to get worse.”
The following week, in August, in a courtroom down the hall, Fenderson sat next to his public defender. No family was present. The discharge hearing was to determine if he would need to be remanded to a mental hospital.
Months earlier, a psychiatrist had found him unfit for trial, concluding it was unlikely for him to regain fitness within a year.
Fenderson called the August proceedings a “judicial lynching.” He said this over and over. At one point, he leaned under the table. He said he was talking to Charlie, his hallucination.
The state asked Fenderson be found “not not guilty” and that he receive treatment at a state hospital – meaning that there was enough evidence to convict Fenderson but his mental status prevents that from happening. The judge, Katherine Gorman, agreed.
“And what my hope is, Mr. Fenderson, is that if you continue to get the help that you will not suffer as much,” Gorman said.
He will go to a state hospital once a bed is available. As of late October, he remained at Peoria County Jail.
Contact Meredith Newman at mnewman@illinoisanswers.org.
Contributing: Grace Hauck, Illinois Answers Project
Note on methodology: There’s no clear definition of what constitutes a separate versus ongoing restraint chair “incident” in Illinois, where people are typically restrained in repeated two-hour blocks. For the purposes of this data collection and analysis, Illinois Answers considered an incident to be ongoing if someone was held continuously in a chair, or if they were only given brief and periodic breaks over a long period of restraint. In these occurrences, county jails often identified the case with a unique incident number, kept an ongoing observation log, and submitted a single, all-encompassing report to the state. Illinois Answers considered an incident as separate if someone was released from a chair for a prolonged period of time before being restrained again. In these cases, county jails often designated separate incident numbers, logs, and reports.
When determining the prevalence of mental health issues among those restrained, Illinois Answers reviewed extraordinary or unusual occurrence reports filed by Peoria County Jail from 2019 to 2023. Reporters then identified all noted instances of a mental health issue, a suicide attempt, suicidal comments, self harm, or suicide watch, among other categories in each report.
This story was made possible by a grant from The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation to the Illinois Answers Project.
This article first appeared on Illinois Answers Project and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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