How Much Can We Do For Brian?
The little dark-haired boy slips from his North Spokane house during the night and runs straight to the storm drains that beckon him.
Oblivious to traffic on busy Ash, his skinny frame bends to examine the openings in the street with fixated wonder.
Sometimes he lifts off the heavy steel grates and pitches whatever he can grab into the holes. Or maybe he will carry the thick plates home or switch them from one drain to another.
Brian Koch, 11, is deceptively strong. And unpredictable.
One moment he is sweet and passive. Then, in a lightning flash of destruction, he will drive his fist or foot into the closest face or knee.
Dennis the Menace is a choirboy.
Brian flips tables, throws chairs, breaks windows and rips floorboards off the porch. The walls at his home are mottled with dozens of crude plaster patches that fill holes caused during Brian’s concussions of temper.
“This is a private hell,” laments the boy’s mom, Lenore, with weary exasperation. “Nothing is safe from the kid. He’s progressively deteriorating. So are we.”
No fiction writer could invent a Brian, who suffers from an incredible mixed bag of problems. He has been diagnosed, according to Lenore, with autism, seizures, pervasive developmental disorder, oppositional defiance disorder, obsessive compulsion and moderate mental retardation.
His storm drain fascination is truly bizarre. Brian makes drains out of everything: plastic lids, cardboard boxes, coffee cans…. The Koch yard is a pitted field of drains the boy dug into the soft dirt.
Before drains, Brian was obsessed with the number eight. It was all he could think or talk about. Before eights the fixation was ears. “We never get a break,” adds Lenore, “even when we’re sleeping.”
Lenore for years was belligerently determined to keep Brian home. But as he grows stronger and harder to control, she believes her son should be institutionalized before he “gets himself killed or kills somebody else.”
What to do with this unusual child stumps the many experts who have worked on Brian’s case. A hospital psychiatrist labeled Brian one of the top 10 difficult kids to treat.
Joanne Brady, principal of the Libby Center Brian attends three hours every weekday, says she has never dealt with a tougher case.
Brian caused a panic at the school last week when he vanished from the classroom. Teachers found him after a search - standing high atop a neighborhood roof.
The boy was recently placed in a shelter for special children. An hour later, a sheriff’s deputy called Lenore to tell her to come pick him up. The boy, she says, “basically did the ‘Jumanji’ ape scene in the kitchen.”
“This kid needs somebody who’s gonna be with him 24 hours a day,” agrees Gene Hunter, a Division of Children and Family Services caseworker. “You’ve heard about million-dollar kids. This is a million-dollar kid.”
That’s the bottom line. Can society afford the enormous tab to give a Brian the intense one-on-one, therapeutic care he needs for the rest of his life? Or should he be medicated, tucked away and basically forgotten?
Hospital psychiatrists believe it’s best for Brian to be placed in a residential facility. But with the social service cutbacks, it’s nearly impossible to find any place willing to guarantee Brian a spot longer than 30 days.
Brian definitely shouldn’t remain home. The level of tension he brings to his low-income family is palpable. Brian is a danger to himself, his younger brother and everyone else in the house.
“There are moments when I’ll walk through the door and I won’t even get ‘Hi’ out of my mouth before he assaults me,” says Phil Koch, Brian’s uncle.
Brian is mercifully calm during my visit. He mostly rocks while pounding his head on the back of a chair, chants an Apache mountain spirit song he memorized off a tape and eats a bag of apples.
Suddenly, Brian stands. “I’m hearing bad voices in my head,” he announces.
“What are the voices telling you?” asks Lenore.
The boy stares blankly. Several seconds pass. “Go down to the street,” Brian finally says in a monotone. “To the drains.”
, DataTimes