A PREVENTABLE DEATH?

Re the Dec. 28 article Youth dies by hanging in jail cell: Even if
convicted as an adult on both charges, cocaine possession and resisting
arrest would not have earned 17-year-old Gary Petit-Frere the death penalty.

What kind of psychiatric evaluation concluded that a teenager suddenly
locked in jail and facing a mandatory-minimum felony isn't a suicide risk?

Cocaine use by a 17-year-old is a red flag for psychiatric illness, and the
boy should have been taken directly for psychiatric evaluation -- if it
existed. Nationwide, since the dismantling of public psychiatric hospitals
in the 1980s, jails and prisons are now our public institutions that
``care'' for the mentally ill.

On the way to his suicide, how many police officers told Petit-Frere that
he was going away for some serious time as they coerced him to betray other
drug suspects (and assist their own careers)?

Is the Legislature that designed this system mad with savagery against the
young? How was the community served by a boy who hanged himself in his cell
four days before Christmas?

ROBERT MERKIN
Northampton, Mass.