A Miami-Dade officer warned he would kill her mentally ill son. It proved prophetic
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Chapter 1 of 4
Warning: This series includes scenes of graphic violence and language.
For the second time in as many hours, police cars converge on the Peppermill Apartment complex. Gamaly Hollis and her son Richard, who live in the tinderbox of unit B-312, are at it again late on a summer night. The officers roll in hot.
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“This lady has me really pissed,” one radios to colleagues. “Second time.”
Miami-Dade officers from the West Kendall Hammocks station are weary of the Hollis family refrain. They’ve been to the apartment for mental health emergencies, loud arguments, drug overdoses, outlandish threats and that copspeak catchall – “disturbances.”
This time, Hollis says Richard upended her motorcycle and, high on drugs, ran off with a BB gun.
The mention of a weapon sets off one officer: Jaime Pino, a 20-year veteran with the cocky manner and imposing presence of a TV cop. He’d seem at home on the set with his brother Danny Pino, who played detectives on “Cold Case” and “Law & Order SVU.”
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Pino tucks his thumbs in the armholes of his bullet-proof vest like a Wild West sheriff. He owns a Miami shooting range, Flamingo Tactical, and has chosen the Instagram handle of “Pistolero.” Spanish for gunfighter.
On the night of Aug. 10, 2021, Pino is fed up with a problem that won’t go away.
Richard is a “43” – police code for a mental health patient – and his mother is even more difficult, Pino tells colleagues.
Hollis — who at 5-foot-3 is almost a foot shorter than Pino — speaks to him deferentially but persistently. She recites her recurring struggles with Richard. He’s gone off on another rampage and she’s rushed home from Homestead, where she filled her car trunk with avocados to sell, for the night’s drama with Richard.
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Pino interrupts with a blunt warning that – 10 months and 18 police calls later – would prove prophetic.
“What you’re not gonna do to me, and you’re not gonna say in front of my face, is be careful if your son pulls a BB gun on me,” he says. “If you have a problem with the way the police deal with your son like you had the problem last time, don’t call us.
“We’re not social workers. We’re police officers.”
If the message doesn’t soak in, Pino delivers it again.
“I’m telling you, if your son takes a BB gun or a real gun out on me, I’m gonna kill your son,” he tells her. “So, if you have a problem with that, don’t call us.”
A sweet life turned sour
Looking back, Gamaly Hollis says life wasn’t always bracing for the next 911 call .
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Hollis – then Gamaly Argentina Cruz, her first name a variation on her mother’s name of Magaly – and her brother were raised by their grandmother in the countryside of Camaguey, Cuba.
When she first came to Miami at age 22 in 1994, Hollis sold hot dogs from a cart in front of the criminal courthouse. That’s where she met John Hollis, a security guard, who became her husband and Richard’s father.
Starting in 2005, when Richard was 4, Hollis raised him alone. John Hollis, a U.S. Army veteran who served in the Gulf War, went to Iraq to work for a private contractor. He remained out of the country until he died of a heart attack in Venezuela in 2015. Richard was 14.
Hollis was determined to give Richard every opportunity, moving to Kendall, vacationing at Disney World, cruising to the Bahamas, taking him to karate lessons, helping him with science fair projects.
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Richard loved football, paintball, roller skating and ice skating. He did homework and played games at the Boys and Girls Club after school. He adored animals, as did his mom, who adopted six rescue Yorkies.
Richard earned good grades and wanted to be a trauma surgeon so that he could “save people.” Hollis enrolled him at Terra Environmental Research Institute, a magnet school for science, tech and engineering brainiacs.
Hollis has documented everything in photos. As a little boy, Richard smiles at the camera – wearing a captain’s hat, dressed in a Ranger Station uniform, displaying a science award, feeding a goat, clutching a starfish, wearing a crisp, white karate gi.
But as a teenager, Richard’s brow is creased into a deep furrow. Like most moody teens, he was trying to decipher himself. His mother caught tender moments, like Richard in an apron cooking a meal, but they also had such a nasty argument over a driving lesson gone wrong that Richard called the police on his own mother. As a young adult with emotional problems, he grew hostile toward a world out to get him.
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Hollis rented an apartment at Peppermill, a collection of drab, 45-year-old building surrounded by a balding lawn. Peppermill is located across the street from the Walden Pond subdivision — names made up by developers who sold West Kendall as the American Dream. The community is home to many immigrants from Cuba and Latin America, who look out onto vast parking lots, waiting to endure tomorrow’s commute. Hollis brightened the beige-on-beige hallway entrance to her apartment by hanging a wreath of flowers on her brown door.
Residents were wary of Richard. While they found Hollis friendly and funny, Richard was guarded and prickly. He’d get into petty disputes with neighbors, over things like smoking pot or walking the family Rottweiler, Rollie, without a leash. When delusions seized his mind, Richard threatened to shoot up the whole place.
In public, he played the smart-mouth punk, but behind the tough persona was a fragile young man — small and slight at 140 pounds and five-foot-four, just an inch taller than his mother. In body cam videos of his arrest after he shoved a neighbor, Richard cries “Mami!” Later, hands cuffed in the squad car, his body shakes as tears streak his face.
“He was a mentally ill young man who didn’t have the opportunity to get better,” neighbor Juan Alonso told the Miami Herald. He shrugged his shoulders in sympathy with Hollis. “What can you do?”
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Hollis found herself suiting up in the same armor as her son in order to protect him. She has always been argumentative, she says, and resistant to domineering authority. Growing up in Cuba in the 1980s, she hated wearing the red kerchief to school and pledging allegiance to Fidel Castro. She came to the United States to be free. Free to speak her mind. Free to build a better life.
So in 2018, when she was cited by two police officers for selling avocados and lemons with an improper license at a busy street corner in West Kendall, and ordered to leave, she flew into a fit of rage. There she was, sitting on her black milk crate, hawking fruit when the light turned red, her aspirations reduced to a rudimentary job in the roasting sun, and the police have nothing better to do than harass her?
Hollis “suddenly became loud and boisterous using profanity....stating we were only there to ruin her life,” the incident report states. Then she jabbed her right index finger in their faces, and that did it. They decided to arrest her. She refused to comply, saying she had the right license. Instead of surrendering her hands she made “various attempts to overpower the officers.” What started as a ticket curdled into a trip to the Hammocks station in handcuffs and a booking for resisting arrest at the Turner Guilford Knight jail.
The ugly scene on a suburban street was a harbinger of skirmishes to come.
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“When something is not right, not fair, I’m not going to be quiet, I’m not going to lie down like a dog,” said Hollis. During her time in jail years later, she lodged numerous complaints against guards and fellow inmates for matters she felt needed correcting, such as stale food, insufficient cleanliness or bullying behavior. “I’m not a submissive person. I came to this country to escape a police state.”
First responders in a mental crisis, like it or not
Still, Hollis grew dependent on police as Richard’s psychotic episodes became more frequent. Sooner or later, like Hollis, many parents of children with persistent and severe mental illness will find themselves dealing with police.
Miami-Dade has 2.7 million people and encompasses nearly 1,900 square miles – larger than Rhode Island or Delaware – but has only three mental health crisis teams staffed with social workers. They are based in East Little Havana, Aventura and Coral Reef, near Zoo Miami.
“We pat ourselves on the back for having mobile response teams,” said state Rep. Patt Maney, a Fort Walton Beach Republican who worked for 10 years as a mental health judge in the Panhandle. “But we don’t have anywhere near enough of them.”
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Almost all mental health calls in Florida are handled by police. It’s a role that most officers, as Pino made clear, don’t want. They train to confront criminals, an already dangerous job. Add the complexity and unpredictability of dealing with mentally ill people and the risks multiply. Get the decision wrong and people could be hurt or killed.
“What we ask police officers to do is actually beyond the scope of what they were intended to do,” said Frank Rabbito, who led WestCare, Miami-Dade’s largest mental health treatment provider, until his recent retirement. “It’s a default system that operates on default.”
“Police have only two choices - to Baker Act or not to Baker Act,” said Rabbito, former chair of the Florida Council for Behavioral Health.
In the 53 years since the Baker Act took effect, the statute authored by late lawmaker Maxine Baker has entered the Florida vernacular as a verb. One isn’t involuntarily committed; one is “Baker Acted.”
Police are supposed to take Baker Act subjects to the nearest hospital with a license and expertise to treat mental illness. “Receiving facilities” then have three days to evaluate patients and decide whether they pose a threat to themselves or others. Hospitals can ask a judge for permission to detain and treat them – against their will, if necessary. But as healthcare resources have diminished, so has the use of expensive hospital beds.
Even if the mental health system’s front door worked efficiently, which it doesn’t, the exit is like a cliff.
Critics say for-profit hospitals offer treatment only as long as insurance payments last, and public facilities, which cover the lion’s share of psychiatric care, are so overwhelmed that they release patients without ensuring they can remain stable outside. Once they leave, patients are free agents, with no case worker assigned to monitor whether they accept community treatment.
Cycling in and out of mental health care
Patients like Richard Hollis don’t get the help they need and become chronic no-win challenges for police.
In the 11 months before his death, Richard was Baker Acted nine times, bouncing between Kendall Regional Hospital and Southern Winds Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Hialeah. He was committed twice in July 2021, twice in October, and twice in December, including Christmas Eve.
Doctors released him with prescriptions and perhaps a prayer.
The admission records echo each other: Extremely aggressive. Suspicious. Erratic. Disheveled. Dirty. Grandiose. Grossly psychotic. High suicide risk. Abusing drugs but in “massive denial.” Hearing voices. Paranoid schizophrenia read one admitting diagnosis, though most say Richard had bipolar disorder.
The reports provide snapshots of what chaotic daily life was like for Hollis and Richard. She was on 24-hour call, scrambling from her job back to the apartment to rescue him from his psychotic and addictive behavior, to calm his rages, to debunk his delusions, like his preoccupation with an imaginary wife and dead son. One time, Richard took a bottle of allergy pills and drank a bottle of cough medicine in a suicide attempt. Police found him walking down the street with his mom “chasing him.”
In two visits that foreshadowed what was to come, doctors said Richard threatened the police dispatched to help him. In September 2021, he was Baker Acted when officers answered a call about “a violent male with a knife.” Hollis announced he “would defend himself against officers.”
A month later, he was back after tearing the house apart. “You are all evil,” Richard said. “If you come inside my apartment, I will shoot all of the officers.” He yelled at hospital staff, “My mom was lying…I’ve got a note from my doctor saying I don’t have any mental problems. I’m gonna sue you all!”
On his last hospital trip on Jan. 25, 2022 – five months before he was shot – police took Richard to Kendall Regional after he was found “high on drugs and barricading his mother in her apartment.”
Two days after admission, he agreed to stay in the psych unit, but was sent home the next day. The discharge summary notes that Richard was to “resume” his psychiatric medications – though hospital records state he is “non-compliant” with taking them.
The pattern is common. After a few days on stabilizing medication, Richard would promise to stick with outpatient treatment. But once discharged, he declined to pick up his prescriptions and returned to his old ways.
The rinse-and-repeat of his case is typical, critics say. Maney, the lawmaker who oversaw Baker Act cases as a judge, calls it “a huge broken system.”
The Legislature has tried reforms, most recently requiring case managers and intensive discharge planning for perennial patients, and boosting treatment funds by $50 million.
But nothing has fixed a fundamental flaw: Floridians with the most severe mental illness are the ones least likely to get lasting help, said Miami-Dade County Associate Administrative Judge Steve Leifman, who heads Miami’s Mental Health Court. Under current state law, “there is very little the courts can do to require people to get treatment.”
No end to the ‘vicious cycle’
That August 2021 night in the Peppermill parking lot, Pino and other officers, despite their irritation, urge Hollis to take drastic action before something bad happens to her – or them.
Hollis blames Richard’s behavior on drugs – “hongos,” hallucinogenic mushrooms. He takes a smorgasbord of drugs – cough medicine, marijuana, PCP, LSD and other psychedelics made from Morning Glory tea or Hawaiian Baby Woodrose seeds. He inhaled a solvent used for thinning paint. He drank Bacardi rum. He often couldn’t sleep for days on end.
“The scenario is very simple and I’ll say it in front of her because I’ve been here before,” Pino says in an aside to another officer. “He uses drugs. She gets pissed. She tells him something. He doesn’t like it because he’s 20. He’ll do whatever the hell he wants. She gets mad. Can’t control him. Calls us. Then gets mad at us for the way we deal with him.”
During a call at B-312 two weeks earlier, Hollis had tried to dissuade Pino from committing Richard.
“Do you wanna go, too?” he asked her then.
“I want him [to] calm down,” she replied, as if Pino and his colleagues could fill in as father figures.
“I don’t care. You wanna go, too?” Pino said, his words sharpened with sarcasm. “Did I stutter?”
After talking patiently one-on-one to Richard for 15 minutes, Pino decided to Baker Act him.
“You make me go through hell,” Richard said. “I don’t want to be there another night.”
“You wanna go there or you want to go to jail?” Pino asked.
“I don’t deserve this,” Richard said.
“You were prescribed medication. You’re not taking it. You’re aggressive towards your mother,” Pino said.
“What do you mean? I’m in complete control,” Richard said.
“I can feel you are not in complete control,” Pino said in a gentle voice. “Unfortunately, you’re sick, bro, and you need help.”
Two weeks after that call, back at Peppermill, Pino sounds far less understanding. He recounts how Hollis had resisted his decision to take Richard to the psych unit. Hollis jumps in to explain her conflicting emotions, “Officer, because [a] mother doesn’t want her child…”.
Pino cuts her off: “Your child. Your child’s an adult and you can’t control him. Unfortunately for you.”
“But I never offend you,” Hollis says, flinching at Pino’s words. “Never...”
Pino interrupts again. “No, but you’re wasting our time. This is a waste of our time. Because if you don’t like the way we work, don’t call us.”
Neighbors walk past Hollis’ white motorcycle, laying on its side like a wounded animal. Pino suggests the problem is not Richard but his mother.
“You’re losing your mind in the middle of an apartment complex,” he tells Hollis. “You see a therapist?”
Hollis defends herself, says she’s a good mother, a responsible citizen, despite their disdain for her. “I’m working. I’m supporting my house.”
Hollis’ phone rings. It’s Richard, and Hollis puts the call on speaker so officers can hear her son curse at her.
“You need to get rid of him,” the officer says. “It’s gonna sound terrible, because I know he’s your son.”
A female officer tells Hollis she should change her locks and get a restraining order against Richard. Hollis describes how Richard climbs up to their balcony like a ninja by grasping onto the building’s wiring and satellite dishes.
The officers encourage her to stop enabling Richard. “You go in there and tell them you need a restraining order. You’re scared for your life,” one says.
“Listen, you have to get out. You have to get into saving yourself now. And you have to let him take the consequences and that’s the only way he’s gonna get better. That’s the only way he’s gonna let you stay healthy, stay alive. He’s getting worse and worse, and worse.”
“Worse and worse and worse,” Hollis says with an exhausted sigh. “This is a hell. This is every day, every week.
“This is a hell.”
Pino has walked away. The other two officers suggest she seek a judge’s order to commit Richard.
“I already did this,” Hollis says. “They take him out the next day.”
One cop turns to a man in a blue shirt, an unidentified bystander. She could be reading from a script, so familiar is her lament.
“Mental illness. Big problem in this country,” she tells him. “And unfortunately, they don’t get the help they need. There’s no facility to take them. And you take ‘em to a hospital and, like she says, they just let ‘em out. So, the vicious little cycle like this.
“It’s terrible.”
About this series
Read more about how we reported on this series here.
You can watch the police body camera videos in their entirety here.
Credits
Carol Marbin Miller | Reporter
Camellia Burris | Reporter
Linda Robertson | Reporter
Curtis Morgan | Editor
Susan Merriam | Visual Journalist
Rachel Handley | Visual Journalist
Sohail Al-Jamea | Creative Director
Pierre Taylor | Video Editor
Jose Iglesias | Photo Editor
Alie Skowronski | Photographer
Andres Viglucci | Translator
Carolina Zamora | Audience Engagement
Support
This series was produced with financial support from the Esserman Family Foundation in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners. The Miami Herald maintains full editorial control of this work.