A St. Croix man released in March after nearly seven years of involuntary commitment in a mental health hospital allegedly nearly killed his nephew by knifing his face and abdomen, police said Thursday.
The 24-year-old victim told police he woke about 3:30 a.m. Wednesday to use the bathroom in his Stoney Ground home. Finding it already occupied, he headed back to bed where his uncle, Khalid A. Richardson, 34, stood in the darkness with a knife. The victim shouted for an explanation and Richardson responded by slicing his nephew’s face and stabbing him in the left abdomen, police said.
The victim’s father rushed in and put Richardson in a chokehold. Seeing “blood all over the floor,” the father released Richardson and rushed his son to Juan F. Luis Hospital for emergency surgery, investigators told the Virgin Islands Superior Court.
The father told police his brother was “mentally impaired and is prone to being violent,” according to court records.
Police searched the house for Richardson, finding blood and a broken knife. They found Richardson around 8:30 a.m., a short walk away. He allegedly had a backpack containing more than two ounces of marijuana.
Charged with attempted murder, he was held on $100,000 bail.
The attack came four months and five days after Superior Court Judge Harold Willocks ordered Richardson released from involuntary commitment and returned to the territory from a South Carolina hospital. He’d been detained against his will since April 2017 on third-degree assault charges.
Lacking an adequate mental health facility, Richardson was held at Golden Grove prison for three months after his 2017 arrest. On July 7 of that year, he was found not competent to stand trial and also to have been suffering from a mental illness at the time of his crime, according to court records.
Doctors at the South Carolina mental health facility kept Richardson segregated, saying he suffered from delusions of grandiosity and paranoia that led to several physical assaults on staff and other patients. In regular reports to the court, doctors at the hospital noted Richardson bristled at authority and often thought people were speaking ill of him. He did not believe he needed antipsychotic medications but took them as ordered, doctors told the court.
Richardson’s aunt and sister told the court they feared he would stop taking the medication if released and that he became threatening when not taking it.
“In the past when Khalid resided with his aunt and his sister, they conveyed that he refused to take his medications and became aggressive towards them. Both his sister and aunt are unable to assist in taking in Khalid or assisting with his care once released,” a Virgin Islands Health Department case manager told Judge Willocks Aug. 31, 2022.
On March 7, 2024, however, Assistant Attorney General Chad Mitchell told the court of a plan to house Richardson with his aunt, with frequent monitoring by the Health Department. On March 19, Willocks signed the order bringing Richardson back to St. Croix by April 5, the same day prosecutors officially dropped charges.
As predicted, Richardson did not live with his aunt long.
“Mr. Richardson originally resided with his aunt, but she could not live with him anymore because of his behavior,” police told the court Thursday.
By June, he’d moved in with his brother and nephew.
The stabbing reverberated on St. Thomas, where many were still processing two killings in March that authorities partly attributed to severe mental illness: the fatal stabbing of Hakim Salem, 69 — allegedly at the hands of his son, Mohammed Salem, 34 — and drowning of Ja’Qeada Isaac, 9 — allegedly by her mother, Anyah Smith, 32.
Salem underwent a psychiatric evaluation and a judge ruled in June that he was competent to stand trial for murder.
Where Smith was housed while prosecutors and the Public Defender’s Office exchanged court filings was unclear in court records.
Also in March, eight days after Salem’s death and three days before Isaac’s, Willichia Hughes, 37, allegedly repeatedly tased her minor daughter. Hughes, who allegedly told police she may suffer from bipolar disorder, was charged with child abuse, assault, parental neglect, and other charges. She’d been charged with disturbing the peace in 2016 and contempt of court in 2015.
Hughes was released in April after undergoing a psychiatric evaluation.
How to safely accommodate people not fit to stand trial because of severe mental illness has long troubled the Virgin Islands.
In 1994, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a class action lawsuit against the territory’s government, alleging widespread rights abuses in prisons. The charges ranged from poor sanitary conditions to abuse of mentally ill inmates. Although a consent decree was eventually agreed on with the federal government, it was regularly ignored in the first decade of the 21st Century. By 2007, the ACLU asked judges to fine the USVI government for non-compliance.
A decade later, both sides acknowledged that progress had been made, but problems remained. An urgent need for adequate treatment for mentally ill detainees and inmates continued, the Source reported in 2017.
