Her name was Shaka and we were in the fifth grade when I decided to kick her square in the stomach. Even though I had a huge crush on her, Shaka’s pain did not matter to me. It didn’t matter to our laughing peers either. Shaka’s pain was irrelevant as I asserted my prepubescent norms of courting. Television shows like The Wonder Years and The Cosby Show jokingly conveyed to me that it was normal for boys to hit and degrade girls to get their attention.

At the time of Michelle Cusseaux’s death, she was 50, lived in Phoenix, Arizona, and suffered from bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and depression. On August 14, 2014, Cusseaux grew agitated when a cab didn’t show up to take her to the hospital; just a week earlier, she’d filed a grievance on previous transportation failures. Cusseaux called a Southwest Network health facility, and Office Manager Jamey Helms found her comments to be threatening. Due to House Bill 2105, passed in April of that year, neither Helms nor anyone else affiliated with Southwest Network—which claims to be “one of the largest community behavioral health providers in the U.S.”—have to check in on patients personally. Instead, Helms called the police to make what is formally known as a mental health petition. (Police are frequently first-responders in calls like this, which in ideal situations end in a psychiatric care facility; the actual trip itself is referred to as a mental-health pickup.)