Editor,

Shocking and deeply disturbing are my first reactions after reading the article about Keaton Farris’s death in the Coupeville jail.

The death was attributed to dehydration, with the lack of adequate nutrition as a compounding factor. If the facts, as they have been presented, withstand further scrutiny, then everyone in the Island County’s justice system shares some responsibility for this tragedy, along with the officials we elected to oversee this system.

The only good news in this mess (if you could call it that), is Island County Sheriff Mark Brown took responsibility for the events. In some areas of the country, readers would never hear about such an event, much less receive a public apology.

In a similar way our state Legislature shares some responsibility for these events. It says a lot about a society in the way it treats its most vulnerable. Locking up the chronically mentally ill because there are no other options is completely unacceptable. However, the fairy tale that continues to be alive and well in some circles of Olympia is that it is OK to continue to cut social, health, and legal programs and resources needed for the most vulnerable — no matter what the consequences.

Under no circumstance do we want to raise taxes to address these most critical needs, even when taxes are at historically low levels. For this “no taxes” group of “decision makers” in Olympia, the sentiment appears to be that the most vulnerable can just “figure it out for themselves” or that the problems will just disappear on their own. In this case, the problem did disappear, but in a way few people would find palatable.

DAVE PEARSON

Clinton