Patient's death under investigation

The Charlton man, 23-year-old Joshua Messier, stopped breathing as officers restrained him after he allegedly hit one of them, according to officials with the state Department of Correction and the Plymouth district attorney's office.

Messier, who was diagnosed five years ago with schizophrenia and paranoia, was brought by ambulance to Signature Healthcare's Brockton Hospital, where he was pronounced dead about an hour after the reported scuffle.

State and local officials said the matter is under investigation. An autopsy was performed Tuesday to determine the cause of death, but the results are still pending, said Bridget Norton Middleton, a spokeswoman for the district attorney's office.

Diane Wiffin, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Correction, said yesterday that her agency is also investigating and would examine the use of force.

"There is no indication that there was any excessive force at this time," Wiffin said.

Messier's family and Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, an inmate advocacy group, raised concerns of brutality after learning that Messier reportedly screamed for help, saying he could not breathe, as officers tried to subdue the young man, who wanted to become a computer technician.

Leslie Walker, executive director of the advocacy group, said, "Enough information has come to our attention that has made us concerned that an independent investigation into the possible use of excessive force needs to be pursued in this matter."

For Messier's family, the death raised deeper concerns with the ability of state mental hospitals to manage patients before they cross criminal lines. The family question whether more could have been done to help a mental health patient who showed no sign of violence before his schizophrenia began five years ago.

"If Joshua ever hurt himself, or hurt me, it wouldn't be him . . . It would be the schizophrenia," his mother, Lisa Messier, said in an interview. "There is a reason: He was psychotic, and no one would help him. No one was willing to help him."

It was not the first time Joshua Messier had scuffled with his hospital caretakers. Last year, he was charged with three counts of assault and battery after hitting two workers at Worcester State Hospital and a police officer who attempted to arrest him. He was sentenced to a year of probation with the condition that he continue his psychiatric treatment.

Then in March, after three stays within a month at the Harrington Memorial Hospital psychiatric ward in Southbridge, he was charged with hitting three staff members in one violent weekend and was sent to Bridgewater.

Messier's family feared Bridgewater, because it is a corrections facility, and tried earlier to send him to a mental health facility such as McLean Hospital in Belmont, in an attempt to determine the origins of his disease.

"I just wanted to get him help," his mother said. "Everything's been against him for so long."

But he was never transferred.

On April 1, a Dudley District Court judge sent Messier to Bridgewater for an evaluation to determine whether he was criminally responsible for hitting the Harrington staff. On April 17, the day the evaluation expired, the hospital filed a court order to have him committed for six months.

"Joshua Messier . . . is mentally ill, and is not a proper subject for commitment to any facility of the Department of Mental Health, and that failure to retain him in strict security would create a likelihood of serious harm to himself or others," the petition said.

Two weeks later, as the petition was still pending, Messier died, less than two hours after his mother had visited him in the hospital. She saw the ambulance drive away.

Kristina Barry, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Mental Health, said yesterday, without speaking about Messier's case directly because of privacy concerns, that her agency would forward any criminal action such as an assault on staff to law enforcement agencies and that a judge would decide the most appropriate facility for a patient.

Wiffin said that state law requires that inmates in need of strict security because of the potential for endangering themselves or others be sent to Bridgewater, which has its own mental health staff.

The family has no history of schizophrenia, but instead believes the disease surfaced after Joshua suffered head injuries in a golf cart accident six years ago, following his senior year at Shepherd High Regional High School. He then went on to the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth, but was forced to drop out in his second semester after having hallucinations and hearing voices.

His family said that in the five years since he was diagnosed, the preppy boy with dirty blond hair and green eyes who wore khaki pants and Adidas sneakers, who brought two girls to his senior prom, had started to smash things over his head because he thought God had told him he should do so.

He once looked at his mother in fear, thinking she was the devil, the family said, and soon the violence against hospital staff began.

After each time, he would say that he did not remember it, that it wasn't him.

"He couldn't handle it, that's what he told me," said his sister, Danielle Messier.

Milton Valencia can be reached at mvalencia@globe.com.