Mentally ill man who killed father and lived in cage starves to death

[NewWorldRecord]

Mentally ill man who killed father and lived in cage starves to death after mother abandons him

PUBLISHED : Tuesday, 09 December, 2014, 7:39pm
UPDATED : Wednesday, 10 December, 2014, 2:59am

Mandy Zuo [email protected]

Doctors view the cage Wang Dafeng had been kept in.

A mentally ill man who killed his father and lived in a cage starved to death after being abandoned by his family, investigators believe.

Wang Dafeng, 42, was found dead last month at a village in Jiangsu’s Pizhou county more than 20 days after his mother – his sole caretaker – left him, the Beijing News reported.

Villagers discovered his corpse at his home on November 17, in bed and surrounded by peanut shells. He had run out of food and had also suffered several wounds.

“No one took care of such a person. Wouldn’t you say it’s strange for him to die?” one unnamed villager asked the Beijing News.

Wang, who had suffered from mania since he was 24, had returned home after being detained by police following a fight with two villagers in August last year. Officers had not realised he was mentally ill, but his abnormal behaviour at court prompted authorities to send him to a hospital.

He was released in October and returned home, but was rejected by his mother, who then abandoned him.

Wang spent the next 20 days wandering around his home, the village and even visited the police bureau before his corpse was discovered.

Wang’s mother, Zhang Bencai, and his sister have not agreed to an autopsy.

Jiangsu provincial police are negotiating with the family over compensation.

Wang, who once worked at a glass factory in Shandong’s Rizhao city, began suffering mania and became aggressive after he was hit by a brick at work 18 years ago, the newspaper reported.

After the accident he returned to his hometown, where he suffered recurring bouts of the illness and was taken into hospital on various occasions.

During this period he attacked various neighbours and family members – behaviour that eventually prompted the family to keep him in a home-made iron cage.

Zhang, his mother, said the cage didn’t help. On one occasion, when his father entered the cage to care for him, Wang responded by attacking and killing him.

His mother, with the help of local police, then made an even stronger cage to contain him.

Wang’s condition greatly improved after undergoing a brain operation at a Beijing hospital in 2010.

“Wang Dafeng suffered from mania. He needed to continuously take medicine and have regular check-ups at hospital,” an unnamed doctor from the Third Hospital of Beijing Armed Police Corps, which conducted the operation, told Beijing News.

But when police detained him in August last year his sickness returned, said Zhang.

Police then transferred him to hospital and he returned home in late October.

Zhang tried to persuade him to leave, but when he refused she abandoned him. When she returned, she discovered he had died.

Professor Liu Xiehe, a leading mainland psychiatrist at Sichuan University’s West China School of Medicine, said local civil affairs and public security authorities should be held accountable for the death.

“Local civil affairs department should help families that are not economically able to take care of their mentally disabled members. The public security bureau should send those patients prone to harm others to the mental health centres sponsored by the police authority,” he told the South China Morning Post.

“But in this case both departments [appear to have neglected] their duties. And I guess that even had they wanted to help Wang, they wouldn’t have known what to do because they have no such experience.”

Liu said such a tragedy was not rare in China’s rural areas, where mentally ill people are often locked up in iron cages by relatives.

The country did not have enough rehabilitation facilities for mentally ill people, he said. The facilities that did exist tended to be in cities, he added.

According to China’s Mental Health Law, a county’s government is responsible for supervising grass-root hospitals to provide drugs and rehabilitation for mentally ill patients. Village committees are required to help families.

“These rules have not at all been implemented,” Liu said.

A string of cases have been exposed over the past few years.

In Ruichang of Jiangxi a 42-year-old man had been caged by his mother for 11 years after becoming manic and killing a 13-year-old boy, the Information Times reported.

In Heyuan, Guangdong, a man had been kept in a cage for six years by his mother who was in her 60s and suffering from stomach cancer. The man is thought to have developed a mental disorder after being mobbed and hit on his head by an iron stick, reported the Guangzhou Daily.