She should have committed him long before that, but it’s very difficult. Supposedly, part of the divorce agreement was that his father would participate in any decisions involving his care, and I don’t know if that ever happened, either.
You actually can’t get somebody committed (particularly in CT, which is one of only six states that doesn’t even have involuntary outpatient treatment) even if you want to, so that part of the story is false. However, I think she was trying to get a conservatorship so that she could handle his finances, because his father was establishing a trust fund for him and his mother was trying to get him into an engineering program in a school in another city or possibly state. According to her family, she planned to go and live near him so that she could look after him and handle his affairs.
If that’s the case, she was certainly in denial, but that’s not uncommon with the parents of mentally ill children, especially if there has been a divorce in the family (probably contributed to by disputes over how to handle their son).
A news radio report at 2PM today mentioned that she had traveled to several different states looking to move close by to a health care facility for her son. Maybe the engineering school was a tale she made up for casual acquaintances.
The entire story will takes weeks to come out.
I doubt that at the age of 20 and having been out of school for several years that she was trying to enroll him into an engineering program out of state.
Odds are that it was an out of state psychiatric institution that she was trying to get him into with the promise that she would go with him.
But he’s now 20 — an adult — with no criminal record. How do you do that without his cooperation and consent??? If this is the direction she was going then there should be a paper trail.
And why file for Conservatorship of someone with no assets to conserve. If the father was setting up a Trust then he would name the Trustee not the state.
Maybe the divorce was over how to care for the child. Or that the father wanted him committed and the mother did not at the time.