Tamara Patzer didn\u2019t mean to call the police on her son.<\/p>\n
On April 11, she realized he was having a delusional episode while visiting him at his home in Port Charlotte. She called a mental health service provider, hoping to find him support.<\/p>\n
Instead, he was arrested on an out-of-county warrant, and is now being held in the Sarasota County Jail \u2014 where, as of Tuesday, he has yet to be given any of the prescribed medications that could help with his mental condition, he told a reporter during a video call from inside the jail.<\/p>\n
It was far from the first time Richard Freshwater\u2019s mental health struggles landed him in handcuffs.<\/p>\n
Online court records show Freshwater, 36, has been involved in more than two dozen criminal cases and civil infractions in Sarasota and Charlotte counties, including felonies, misdemeanors and smaller infractions. According to Patzer, almost all stemmed from his mental health issues that she has spent years trying unsuccessfully to get properly treated.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m focusing on Charlotte County\u2019s failure to get him mental health help, and Sarasota County\u2019s failure to help me get him mental health help,\u201d Patzer said in a phone interview. \u201cIt\u2019s not just one failure.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite a new state law focused on mental health that passed last year, cases like Freshwater\u2019s are still common in Florida. Those who work in criminal justice on a daily basis say the system is clogged with people like him who have unaddressed mental health needs, causing an increased caseload that criminalizes mental illness more than it protects public safety.<\/p>\n
The problems can snowball under programs meant to keep defendants with mental illness out of jail.<\/p>\n
When authorities respond under the Baker Act \u2014 a Florida law that allows someone who may be a danger to be involuntarily detained and evaluated for mental health treatment \u2014 it often leads to more arrests on serious charges like resisting an officer.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe system is overwhelmed with mental health cases,\u201d 12th Judicial Circuit Public Defender Larry Eger said. \u201cYou protect public safety by extending assistance to people like this.\u201d<\/p>\n
Patzer has been trying for years to get her son the mental health treatment that he needs.<\/p>\n
Freshwater was diagnosed last year with bipolar disorder, but Patzer said he\u2019d been having mental health struggles long before being diagnosed. He often enters delusional episodes in which he believes things that aren\u2019t true, like that he\u2019s suddenly come into a large sum of money, that his loved ones are trying to steal from him, or that the people around him have died and been replaced with artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n
These delusions have landed him in and out of the justice system in Charlotte and Sarasota counties for more than two decades, often with charges that start as mental health scenarios and then continue to build on each other.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s kind of hard to believe that I\u2019m just now being diagnosed with bipolar, since I\u2019ve been in and out,\u201d Freshwater said in the virtual interview. \u201cI\u2019ve been self-medicating with marijuana and other substances since like 13, 12, maybe even a little bit younger than that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Last year, Sarasota County authorities charged Freshwater with possessing a firearm as a felon and possessing a firearm with an active domestic violence injunction. He said he was under the delusion he had a new identity after getting a new driver\u2019s license, so he didn\u2019t understand that previous convictions still prevented him from owning a weapon.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor some reason, in my head, I was like, \u2018Oh, they gave me a new driver\u2019s license number, and I\u2019ve got a fresh start,\u2019\u201d Freshwater said. \u201cI got my life back, I\u2019m an American citizen, and the first thing in my mind was, \u2018Oh, I\u2019m American, I have the right to bear arms.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
He was arrested on the firearm charge on March 20, 2025, when Sarasota sheriff\u2019s deputies went to pick him up from his father\u2019s house on a Baker Act injunction and found that he had a gun.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was having a mental health crisis, and I was having suicidal thoughts,\u201d Freshwater said. \u201cSo they came, and they arrested me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Baker Act often results in additional charges<\/p>\n
What happened to Freshwater reflects a broader pattern attorneys say they see frequently in Florida \u2014 mental health crises that eventually become criminal cases.<\/p>\n
Although the Baker Act is designed as a mental health intervention, encounters can escalate into criminal charges when law enforcement responds to people in crisis who are frightened, confused or resistant.<\/p>\n
Josef Mitkevicius, a Pensacola-based private defense lawyer, said it\u2019s common for people in crisis to become afraid of the officers who respond to Baker Act situations, and that fear can sometimes lead to felony charges, including battery on an officer.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey don\u2019t back off on those charges because the family member was just calling for help,\u201d Mitkevicius said. \u201cThat\u2019s probably a daily occurrence.\u201d<\/p>\n
Across the Suncoast, 29,125 people were involuntarily examined under the Baker Act between July 1, 2024 and June 30, 2025, according to data published online by the Florida Department of Children and Families.<\/p>\n
Now, a year after his Baker Act injunction and arrest, Freshwater\u2019s firearm possession charges are still in the process of being adjudicated, meaning he hasn\u2019t yet been found innocent or guilty, but he has returned to the jail on a warrant for violating the terms of his bonded release.<\/p>\n
The warrant was issued at the beginning of April 2026, when two additional criminal charges were filed against him in Charlotte County.<\/p>\n
Those charges stem from what his mother said was a delusional incident at a Port Charlotte marijuana dispensary. Court documents say that on April 2, Freshwater stole three THC cartridge vapes, or batteries, \u2014 worth $35 each \u2014 after telling the salesperson he thought they were a gift. He brought the batteries out to his car, but later returned them. They couldn\u2019t be resold after leaving the store, however, because of the medical restrictions on cannabis in Florida.<\/p>\n
The dispensary owner called law enforcement and asked to press charges.<\/p>\n
Two days later, Charlotte County sheriff\u2019s deputies arrested Freshwater on a charge of petty theft, a second-degree misdemeanor. Authorities also charged him with resisting an officer without violence. When deputies came to arrest him, he backed away onto his bed and stiffened his arms to avoid being handcuffed, according to an arrest report.<\/p>\n
Freshwater was released on bond on April 5, but a warrant was issued for his arrest in Sarasota County shortly after, because the new arrest voided his previous bond agreement on the firearm charges.<\/p>\n
A few days later, Patzer realized her son was having a delusion. That\u2019s when she called IRIS \u2014 the Integrated Response for Intervention and Support \u2014 a Charlotte County team meant \u201cto help redirect individuals with mental illness from the judicial system and other high-cost health care systems to lower cost health care interventions,\u201d according to the Charlotte County website.<\/p>\n
\u201cI explained exactly what the delusion was, what was going on, what the medical emergency was, and that he needed mental health help, and that he needed to be taken to Charlotte Behavioral because he was off his bipolar medication,\u201d Patzer said.<\/p>\n
But instead, Freshwater was arrested \u2014 again.<\/p>\n
An arrest report that Charlotte County deputies filed after serving the warrant doesn\u2019t mention the mental health concerns reported by Patzer, only listing the warrant as a reason for going to Freshwater\u2019s house.<\/p>\n
Tristan Murphy Act provides options, but gaps remain<\/p>\n
After this most recent arrest, Patzer has dedicated herself again to researching legal options for her son.<\/p>\n
She was excited to hear about a new law that passed last year in Florida called the Tristin Murphy Act, meant to create more pathways for people with mental health issues to be diverted out of the criminal justice system, even possibly having their cases dismissed.<\/p>\n
The act is named after Tristin Murphy, a man who died by suicide in 2021 while serving three years in a Florida prison. Murphy, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia, was arrested on a littering charge after rolling his pickup truck into a retention pond next to the Charlotte County Jail. He was the subject of a CBS News Miami documentary in 2023.<\/p>\n
Murphy\u2019s story resonated with Patzer because he reminded her of her own son. Murphy was 37 when he died, just a year older than Freshwater is now, and was also arrested in Charlotte County.<\/p>\n
Hearing about the law initially gave her hope \u2014 until she actually read through it.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe only person in the entire law who is ever required to do anything \u2014 or faces any consequence \u2014 is the mentally ill person,\u201d Patzer said in an email to Suncoast Searchlight. \u201cLaw enforcement, the state, the sheriff\u2019s departments: never held accountable. That is not reform. That is a paper tiger.\u201d<\/p>\n
The law offers grant opportunities that counties can use to create specialized mental health training for emergency responders, or to create mental health diversion programs for people with lower-level charges.<\/p>\n
The law doesn\u2019t require that any of these processes be created. All it does is offer them as an option.<\/p>\n
It does require that defendants found incompetent to face their charges \u2014 but who receive competency training and are later sentenced to probation \u2014 complete a mental health evaluation and then follow the recommendations, in order to maintain their probationary status.<\/p>\n
Competency training \u2014 designed to make sure a person understands the details of their case and how to act in a courtroom \u2014 is the closest thing most defendants with mental illness get to treatment while going through the court system, Mitkevicius said.<\/p>\n
Mitkevicius, who often deals with mental health cases as a defense attorney, said that while the idea behind the Tristan Murphy Act is good, he\u2019s not optimistic that any of the new processes will be used at all.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Legislature, with all their good intention, passed this law that provides an opportunity for judges and prosecutors around the state to have some tools that they can use to deal with this issue, but they don\u2019t understand that the system that we\u2019re operating in functions on dehumanizing,\u201d Mitkevicius said. \u201cThe players in the system, particularly the judges and prosecutors, are in a perpetual state of dehumanizing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Diversion programs, like the one outlined in the Tristin Murphy Act, are not a new concept. They are often used for low-level crimes to keep people who aren\u2019t likely to reoffend from clogging up court systems.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe more people that can be funnelled through something like that, the better,\u201d Mitkevicius said. \u201cWith the volume of the nonsense that\u2019s going through the system, the more we can send through any type of diversionary program, for me, is great.\u201d<\/p>\n
Especially for mental health cases, Mitkevicius said the best option is to get the person out of the justice system as soon as possible.<\/p>\n
\u201cI get family members who just want to get help, and they want to do it through probation or something, and I tell them \u2018Get them help somewhere else,\u2019\u201d Mitkevicius said. \u201cThis is not the place to fix yourself \u2026 If you\u2019re ill, we just need to get you out of here as soon as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite his struggles, Freshwater has built a life for himself with the help of his family. He has a hard time holding down a steady job, but he has worked in landscaping and offers handyman services to earn some cash. He bought his first home in 2021, something Patzer said was a major milestone for him.<\/p>\n
He has a 4-year-old daughter \u2014 turning 5 at the end of May \u2014 who lives with Patzer.<\/p>\n
Freshwater visits every weekend without fail, when he is out of custody, according to his mother. He prioritizes being a parent and has completed more than 100 hours of parenting classes while incarcerated.<\/p>\n
Freshwater always wanted to be an airplane mechanic, and a couple years ago, he started attending classes at Charlotte Technical College, but he was dropped from the program after missing several days because of a bipolar episode.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy son \u2026 is a real human being with ideas about what he wants to do with his life,\u201d Patzer told Suncoast Searchlight in an email. \u201cInstead of addressing the root cause \u2014 mental illness \u2014 the system punishes him for what happens when you try to exist in the real world with untreated delusions and paranoia.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tamara Patzer didn\u2019t mean to call the police on her son. On April 11, she realized he was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":253783,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[209,211,210],"class_list":["post-256768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral-headlines","tag-cape-coral-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=256768"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256768\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/253783"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=256768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=256768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=256768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}