University Police committed a homeless university alumnus to a local hospital’s psychiatric ward last week after he was discovered living in the basement of an on-campus building and admitted to having suicidal thoughts.
John Quah, 30, who graduated from the university in 2009 with a doctorate in mathematics, was banned from the university and admitted to Washington Adventist Hospital Tuesday, university police spokesman Sgt. Ken Leonard said.
Police responded to the Computer and Space Sciences building after receiving a complaint that there was a “suspicious person,” Leonard said. According to Quah, who was interviewed Thursday while still in the hospital, police questioned him during his breakfast around 6:40 a.m. Tuesday and asked if he has ever had thoughts of suicide.
Quah answered, “Yes,” — a statement he said he later regretted.
“If you answer in the affirmative then they’re obligated to take you to the hospital,” Quah said in a telephone interview last week. “But, if you answer in the negative, you’re being dishonest because living in this society of all this gruesome death, you can’t not have thoughts of suicide.”
Based on his answers, Leonard said officers determined Quah was a danger to himself or to others. He was handcuffed — but not arrested — and taken to the hospital. Upon evaluation from a doctor Tuesday night, Quah was committed to the hospital for at least two days. As of last night, he was no longer a patient. Hospital officials would not disclose when he had been released. He could not be reached again for comment last night.
On Thursday, Quah said he felt the measures taken by police were extreme.
“I shouldn’t be condemned for my honesty with the police,” he said. “I thought that I was functioning and stable. By not owning a home, I was doing my part to use the ecosystem and to capitalize on the underutilization of resources.”
Quah said he had been moving between the CSS building, the mathematics building and off-campus woods since mid-January, when he was fired from his full-time job and gave up his apartment to live off the land.
He traveled from building to building with access he was granted on his university I.D. swipe while working as a teaching assistant and a graduate assistant. Quah said he used unlocked offices and lounges to sleep in and hotplates and microwaves to heat the food he purchased with money from two part-time jobs as a math tutor and circulation department employee of the Hyattsville Public Library.
But university police said the campus buildings were not meant for those purposes.
“It’s unfortunate that Mr. Quah believes he was treated unfairly, as he was not arrested but merely banned from returning to campus,” Leonard said. “He had no legal standing to be inside of UM buildings. He had taken advantage of the public access to our campus and therefore he trespassed.”
Although Quah said he has been involuntarily hospitalized twice for mental health issues, associate mathematics professor Dionisios Margetis — who worked with Quah on his Ph.D. from 2007 to 2009 — said his student never showed signs of such health problems.
“He never seemed not normal,” Margetis said. “He was sometimes tired and would want some breaks, but I would not call that abnormal. I couldn’t have predicted this. I had no idea.”
Quah said Thursday he expected to be released from the hospital late last week and was planning to live in a friend’s Takoma Park apartment.
“It can feel kind of humiliating feeding off the bottom, but if that position wasn’t there, then the ecosystem wouldn’t drive. That’s my perspective,” he said Thursday. “It may be warped, but so is everyone’s perspective. It’s the perception of ‘normal.’ There is a variety of ‘normal.'”
egan at umdbk dot com
