Why did a mental health crisis end in death for a 63-year-old Seattle man?

The press release simply stated that a 63-year-old man was found unresponsive in his cell minutes after being booked. But reporters Sydney Brownstone and Greg Kim of The Seattle Times went beyond the press release — they dug into this story and uncovered a lot more about who Michael Rowland was and how he died.

Earlier this year, Brownstone noticed an unusually high number of deaths in the King County Jail.

"In the span of the first four months of the year, we had five deaths," says Brownstone, who is an investigative reporter at the Times, "which is really, really unusual."

In 2021 there were only three deaths in the jail for the whole year. When Brownstone began looking into the deaths, she found that the jail was not complying with a state law to make information about those deaths public. Brownstone started writing about this, and the jail quietly released a new report showing their version of what happened to Rowland, who died in April 19, 2022.

Rowland was a former custodian at UW Medicine, where he met his wife. He liked to go dancing at clubs in Renton and SeaTac.

Eventually, Rowland and his wife moved to Atlanta, where his mental health started to take a turn.

"His family tried to get him to go seek psychiatric help, but he didn't think that there was anything wrong," Brownstone says. "He moved back to Seattle; he became homeless. He became convinced that he had a personal relationship with God. He developed a degenerative back disease while he was bouncing between shelters and the street."

In the early morning of April 19, Rowland came into contact with law enforcement in a downtown Seattle hotel. It began a series of events that ended with Rowland's death.

The story illuminates how political pressure from the Mayor's Office and the area's reliance on understaffed jails to provide mental health care failed a person in crisis.

"The biggest takeaway is that we as a society have not fully funded our mental health system," Brownstone says, "but even as we do create alternatives, and recognize the limits of policing in confronting mental illness on the streets, it all depends on or willingness to use those systems."