My daughter, with Autism and Tourette syndrome, was arrested

Posted Thu 12th Sep 2024 at 10:31
by Claire de la Varre

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She has been dealing with the consequences for years

I was awoken at 2am by my phone ringing. The caller ID said something about water management or utilities. I assumed it was a robocall and didn’t answer. But they left a message, and I listened to that. It was my daughter, who I will refer to as Emma, then 23. She said she was being held in jail in the neighboring county and that I could pick her up at noon tomorrow.

I was completely confused, having spoken to Emma just a few hours earlier when she said she was about to go to bed. I called my ex-husband, Emma’s dad, with whom she was living at the time. He had come home from work after 11pm and had assumed she was in bed, asleep. He called the local police to find out what was happening.

Emma is on the autism spectrum, having been diagnosed at age six with pragmatic language impairment, a condition that was considered to be qualitatively different from Asperger’s Syndrome (no longer a diagnostic term). She was also given a diagnosis of ADHD and Tourette Syndrome around the same time.

While Emma is sociable, chatty, of normal intelligence, and has a wicked sense of humor, she has reduced blood flow in her prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain that helps us self-regulate thoughts, feelings and emotions. This…

These characteristics make Emma vulnerable, somewhat gullible, and at risk of emotional manipulation. She wears her heart on her sleeve and overshares on social media. She is prone to repetitive thinking and intrusive thoughts. From middle school onwards we had occasional visits from the police because Emma had tics along the lines of “I want to stab you” and would impulsively blurt that out to people at school.

A tic is a repetitive vocal utterance or body movement over which the person has little control. Tourette Syndrome (TS) is diagnosed when both vocal and motor tics are present and persist for at least a year. The content of a vocal tic is often the worst thing that the person could possibly think of, is usually taboo, and is often embarrassing to the person with the tic themselves.

Emma attended, for a couple of years, a wonderful high school for children with learning disabilities, and had an African-American school counsellor there. She developed a tic where she said “Miss [name] is a N*****” and would say it under her breath in school. Her teacher got in touch with us to brainstorm what to do about this.

As tics come and go (referred to as waxing and waning) and will be replaced with something else within a fairly short period, I suspected that if this word were no longer considered taboo, she would stop saying it. And that’s exactly what happened.

At home, her dad, her sister, and I agreed to start saying the N-word all the time, in our everyday speech in the house, drawing her attention to it and normalizing it as nothing unusual. As a mixed-race person, who has been called the N-word myself, I was aware of the irony of this. But very quickly, within a couple of weeks, Emma was no longer compelled to say it. And she was sick of hearing it from her family. We all breathed a sigh of relief and the awful word was never mentioned again.

Emma graduated high school and eventually found a job in a supermarket. She met a man at work and they started dating. He was not her first boyfriend — she had dated a boy in high school for over a year — but this relationship became serious quickly. He was several years older than Emma, and had not been in a serious relationship before. He had mental health issues and was on medication. When he forgot to take his meds he would become rigid, controlling, and preoccupied with Christian fundamentalist beliefs. He didn’t like Emma having other male friends.

We had raised Emma in a non-religious household, but he was pressuring her to believe what he believed. He bought Emma a pink BB gun for her birthday despite the fact that I, and Emma’s dad, asked him not to. He bought her a promise ring and put it on her finger. She was thrilled and loved the attention, but we as her parents were concerned. After the initial infatuation, the cracks started to show and eventually the relationship broke down, after about a year.

Emma was upset and angry. She wrote an email to a mutual friend and co-worker, who knew them both. She expressed that she was so angry she wanted to cut his head off with a chain saw. This is a very “Tourette’s” thing to say — the worst thing that Emma could think of but not anything she would ever entertain (or be capable of) doing. The so-called friend decided that this was a serious threat and informed Emma’s ex of the email. He then went to the police and said that his ex-girlfriend was threatening his life.

Somehow this complaint fell through the cracks for a while. Then four months later, despite no history of violence, no incidents of domestic abuse between Emma and her former boyfriend, and no direct threat or action since that letter, Emma was arrested for making threats.

The police called at the house at 10:30pm and took her in handcuffs to the county jail. They put her on suicide watch overnight, then she had to appear the next morning, shackled, before a judge. She appeared with two other young women on domestic violence charges. Each of those women had actually held a gun to their partner’s head and threatened to kill them. Emma had just written an angry email to a friend.

I retained a lawyer. He was also very surprised at the arrest on the grounds of domestic violence and said that Emma’s case, if anything, would fall under cyberstalking. It was particularly inappropriate given her history of TS. She had to go to court five times in the end. For three of those times the ex was also present and Emma was retraumatized by seeing him. The judge mandated six sessions of anger management therapy for Emma, and after she had completed those the case was dismissed. A restraining order was put in place for a year so that neither Emma nor her ex could contact each other.

Emma has struggled with low self-worth, depression, and anxiety since then. Why did I get all the bad genes in the family? she asks. I’m ugly. No man will ever want me. Six years later, she is working with a therapist, and no longer obsessively thinking about her ex, but she is not the same happy-go-lucky and upbeat person that she was before that relationship. She used to sing all the time.

I see glimmers of her old self returning more and more, and the overall trajectory is positive, although this whole experience broke her heart, and the hearts of all of us who love her.

Emma has found peace through travelling as often as she can. She packs up the car and her black and white dog, Olive, and drives. She has driven to Alabama, Miami, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and more, and is fearless about going to new places. She likes to visit museums, try new food, listen to live music, and spend time walking in nature with Olive. Sometimes she goes with her best friend Nick, who has been a rock for her. Despite the occasional lapse into negative nostalgia, she is learning to put that difficult time in her life in the past.

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