Pam's story: Dad foils suicide pact (Part 2)

Part 2 of a 6-day series

Kevin Kazmaier and his son returned from church around noon to find a note taped to the master bedroom door. “We are taking a nap” the younger boy, Zack, had scrawled on paper.

Kevin figured his wife, Pam, and Zack could use a good snooze. It helped when they were going through a rough patch, and the past few weeks had been like one long squall.

A 6-part series

Sunday: Together in death

Today: By the book

Tuesday: Troubled pasts

Wednesday: “I am not their servant”

Thursday: New hair, new underwear

Friday: “You don’t throw people away”

Pam Kazmaier had struggled with bipolar disorder most of her life, though she wasn’t diagnosed until her 30s. Their 12-year-old had been suicidal since preschool and, when puberty kicked in that summer, his bipolar mania had become almost unmanageable and often dangerous.

He was deteriorating before their eyes. Despite four medication changes and multiple calls, e-mails and visits to his psychiatrist that month, nothing was working.

It had been a rough week, with Zack threatening suicide as well as harm to others. So the weary Mesa police lieutenant settled into some comfortable clothes and took a nap himself while 14-year-old Mike went out back to work on his dirt bike.

The sky was darkening when Kevin started shuffling around the kitchen. He whipped up a batch of homemade cookies.

Then it finally sank in: Since when has Zack ever napped this long? Kevin and Mike had been home from church for more than six hours, and there hadn’t been a peep from the bedroom.

He tried the bedroom door, but found it locked. He knocked, then knocked again, louder.

He called to Pam and Zack to wake up and open the door. Still nothing.

“Just break down the door!” Mike yelled to his dad. They were growing frantic.

A solid, barrel-chested man, Kevin kicked in the door, cracking the frame as he popped off the slide bolt. An oak dresser blocked the doorway. He shoved it over and ran to the bed, where Pam and Zack lay side by side, unconscious, flanking a picture of Jesus.

Pam was still, white foam dribbling from her mouth onto the pillow. Kevin took her by the shoulders and shook her, shouting at her, but she remained limp. He yelled at Zack to wake up. The boy, lying on his stomach, raised his head, looked at his father and fell back onto the quilt.

The 911 call came in as a medical emergency at 6:28 p.m. on Sept. 28, 2003, but police considered it a crime almost from the beginning.

In the bedroom, police found two empty pill bottles, two empty drinking glasses and, on the bed, a loaf of bread, bread crumbs and two small white pills.

Kevin told police and paramedics the types of medication Zack and Pam were prescribed. It quickly became clear what they had taken. The question was, how much?

Kevin urged the paramedics to focus on his wife. He could tell Pam had swallowed more than Zack.

Zack vomited en route to Banner Desert Medical Center. He told paramedics his age and said he had taken “a bottle of his pills.” He asked for his mother.

Pam was out cold. She had taken a handful of the mood stabilizer Tegretol — “as much as I could swallow,” she recalled later. She drifted in and out of consciousness the next few days.

The first thing she remembers is waking up and realizing she was tied to the hospital bed.

But even before Pam Kazmaier reached the hospital, her husband’s co-workers began building a criminal case.

They were looking at child abuse, maybe even attempted manslaughter. Not a mentally ill mother who couldn’t protect her child.

The police department didn’t want to be seen as going easy on one of their own, even with Pam and Zack’s long documented mental health history. This would be done by the book.

Mesa police searched the Kazmaier home without a warrant, sifting through books and documents and medicine cabinets. They later testified they did so for Pam and Zack’s health, that their lives depended on it.

But the search took place nearly two hours after Pam and Zack arrived at the hospital — long after paramedics and hospital workers knew what they had swallowed.

What they found, ostensibly to help Pam and Zack, may have sealed the child abuse case against the 49-year-old mentally ill mother. At the very least, it was powerful evidence to present to a grand jury.

But the grand jury would hear only part of the story.

Jurors wouldn’t learn about the extent of Zack’s psychosis and suicidal behavior, or the fact his longtime psychiatrist was battling her own drug addiction and would eventually lose her medical license.

They wouldn’t be told that Pam, a former nurse, had immersed herself in Zack’s medical care and special-education plan to the point where her own mental illness was relegated almost to an afterthought.

They never knew that Zack was heavily medicated during the police interview the morning after the suicide attempts and was sobbing, inconsolable at times. That he was learning disabled and told several different versions of what happened that night. They were told Zack was put on a ventilator, but not that doctors would later say he didn’t need it and was never in any real danger from the medication he had taken.

And they would never hear the rest of the story — about the hard work and love that kept a family together and saw the remarkable recovery of two seriously mentally ill people.

One of the first officers on the scene grabbed a piece of paper sticking out of a Book of Mormon next to Pam and Kevin’s bed.

“Do not take us to the hospital. Let us go. We can’t live in your world,” Pam had written.

“Too much not fitting in — anywhere. We’re outta here.

“But we do love you. You’ve tried hard to love us. Pam/Zack.”

By 8 o’clock, Kevin was praying at Zack’s bedside, joined by members of the family’s Mormon ward.

Toxicology results would come back positive for the same pills Zack took every day. He had swallowed his “night meds” — just four pills.

About 7 o’clock the next morning, Kevin was at Zack’s bedside when the boy opened his eyes and looked up at his father.

“How did you get the door opened?” Zack asked.

Kevin started to cry.

“I had to get the door open, Zack.”

Zack started pulling at his IV and his catheter, trying to yank them out. The nurse sedated him again. It was a scene that would be repeated during his first days in the hospital. He didn’t want to be there. He wanted to be dead.

“Are we in heaven?” Zack, groggy from the last dose, asked Kevin.

As his son nodded off, Kevin left the room and the pediatric ICU and went upstairs to visit Pam.

When he returned, Zack asked how his mother was doing.

“Is she mad?”

“No, she’s not mad,” Kevin replied. “Are you mad?”

Zack nodded his head. “I don’t want to be here.”

“I know you don’t want to be here,” Kevin said, tears rolling down his cheeks. “But we want you here.”

ABOUT PAM’S STORY:

Information contained in these stories comes from court records and hearings, hospital and medical records, police reports, school records and interviews with the family and others involved in Pam Kazmaier’s case and her life.

About bipolar disorder

Bipolar disorder (also called manic depression, bipolar affective disorder) is characterized by periods of excitability (mania) alternating with periods of depression. The mood swings between mania and depression can be very abrupt.

It occurs equally among men and women, and there is some family connection. Bipolar disorder results from disturbances in areas of the brain that regulate mood. There is a high risk of suicide with bipolar disorder and a tendency to abuse alcohol or drugs, which can worsen symptoms.

Symptoms: During the manic phase, a person may be overly impulsive and energetic. Symptoms include racing thoughts, hyperactivity, lack of self-control, inflated self-esteem, reckless behavior (spending sprees, binge eating and drinking, sexual promiscuity), little need for sleep or short temper.

The depressed phase may bring feelings of anxiety, low self-esteem and suicidal thoughts. Symptoms include persistent sadness, listlessness, sleep and eating disturbances, loss of self-esteem, feelings of hopelessness, worthlessness and guilt, withdrawal from friends and activities or persistent thoughts of death.

Source: National Institute of Mental Health