On July 3, 1994, Lisa Weisser was raped by another patient at McFarland Mental
Health Center in Springfield. That fact has never been in dispute: the rapist,
Bryan K. Noel, pleaded guilty to sexual assault.
Weisser, however, believed the rape never would have happened if McFarland had
handled Noel properly. She sued the hospital for negligence, alleging that
staff at the state-operated hospital failed to exercise ordinary care to
protect her from Noel. Earlier this year, in a unanimous opinion from the
Illinois Court of Claims, Weisser won.
But the marathon legal battle left casualties — mainly Weisser, whose struggles with severe depression had led her to McFarland
in the first place. She committed suicide in December 2005, about six months
after testifying before the court of claims. Her husband, Mikel, received her
monetary award just this month.
Weisser received half of the court’s $100,000 cap. After legal fees, his cut was $38,000. Some people may consider
that sum paltry, after a 14-year fight, but Weisser says the lawsuit never was
about money.
It was worth it to see the ruling that the state had been negligent,” he says.
The Weissers, who were married for 23 years, saw Lisa’s rape as an example of a larger patient-violence problem plaguing mental health
facilities in the 1990s. Illinois Times documented other such incidents in a 1995 cover story by Jeff Ignatius, and
updated the Weisser case 10 years later [see “Victim of the State,” Oct. 13, 2005].
Mikel Weisser never imagined the lawsuit would evolve into such a lengthy
process. “It turns out that suing the state of Illinois is kind of a tough thing to do,” he says. Under the court’s rules, a “claimant” first has to exhaust all other avenues, which meant that Lisa Weisser had to
sue Noel in circuit court. She did, and in 2002 won a default judgment of
$600,000. She never received any money from him (neither the state nor Weisser’s attorneys nor IT reporters have been able to locate Noel), but the adjudication of that case
allowed her case against the state to proceed.
In July 1994, Weisser had admitted herself to McFarland after a suicide attempt.
It wasn’t her first stay at the hospital, operated by the Illinois Department of Mental
Health and Developmental Disabilities; she had been on Social Security
Disability due to depression since 1987. This time, she was assigned to a room
in Jefferson Hall, where there are no locks on the doors.
Noel was assigned to a bed placed at the nurses’ station, and according to court records, he told Weisser that he was assigned
there “because I can’t keep it in my pants.” Just five weeks earlier, he had terrorized a woman by following her through
downtown Springfield asking, “Do you want to get raped?” (he pleaded guilty to a sexual assault for that incident), and three months
before that, he had been named as the suspect in another sexual assault at
McFarland. When an Illinois State Police officer investigating the assault
against Weisser questioned staff, they reported that Noel was known to stare at
female patients, stalk them and grab them.
At McFarland, patients deemed a danger to themselves or others could be put in
seclusion or in a “restraint room,” but Noel was instead simply told to not go into other patients’ rooms. He assaulted Weisser — who was napping, fully-clothed, in her own room — on a holiday weekend when the staff was busy with other patients.
The rape had a profound effect on Lisa Weisser. Although she had voluntarily
sought residential treatment for depression several times, she never did again.
After her death, Mikel Weisser remarried in February 2007, and now lives in
Bullhead, Ariz., where he teaches seventh- and eighth-grade social studies and
writes political columns for opednews.com.
Contact Dusty Rhodes at drhodes@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in Dec 18-24, 2008.
