Corneal Westbrooks lowers the collar on his white T-shirt and exposes a tattoo. It reads: “Genesis 4:9.”
That’s the Bible passage in which Cain asks God, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
Westbrooks says one of his missions in life was to watch out for his younger brother Jawaun, who’s had bipolar depression and schizophrenia since his teens.
Corneal and his mother were safe harbors for Jawaun, providing food and a roof over his head. But they weren’t able to find consistent treatment for Jawaun, who’d wander the streets when he stopped taking his medicine and sometimes act out violently.
The result, brother and mother say, was that Illinois’ mental health system failed Jawaun, failed them, failed society.
In 2014, Jawaun Westbrooks, now 39, bludgeoned two women with a hammer as they walked near the lakefront. In a rambling statement, he told detectives the women “had goat cheese on their heads.”
Then, after he got out of a state mental facility for that attack, he fatally stabbed a woman working at a Chase bank branch in River North in 2021.
‘Powerless to intervene’
In that case, Westbrooks is serving a 37-year prison sentence for killing Jessica Vilaythong, the Chase employee.
Her killing was one of six downtown attacks Chicago Sun-Times reporters investigated to try to understand how a small group of violent people with severe mental illness has churned through the criminal justice and mental health systems in Chicago without getting lasting help — until someone was killed or wounded.
The system fails not only people who wind up in jail for violence but everyone with serious mental illness, most of whom are far more likely to become a victim than to commit a crime, experts say.
“The anguish of family members who see what’s happening and are powerless to intervene or feel powerless cannot be overstated,” says Dr. Stephen Dinwiddie, chief of forensic psychiatry at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and former medical director at Elgin Mental Health Center, a state psychiatric hospital. “You have a mix of public misunderstanding and prejudice against severe mental illness, lack of treatment access and a treatment system that has pieces that don’t work well together.”
Hours after the stabbing at the bank, the police caught Westbrooks in the Walgreens at State and Madison streets. With a Disney Princess T-shirt wrapped around his head and a 5-inch hunting knife in a sheath on his ankle, an “agitated” Westbrooks, speaking “gibberish,” told the cops he needed the knife for his protection.
He later told his family he believed people were following him that morning, which is why he entered the bank.
His family was left to wonder whether his violent trajectory could have been stopped.
“If he’s legally insane, let’s get him medication,” Corneal Westbrooks says. “Let’s find him a support group. Let’s find whatever resources are available to him. But there were no resources. At least, we’re not aware of them.”
A ‘big hugger’
As a child, Jawaun Westbrooks was “a cute, sweet kid” in his kindergarten class at Ogden Elementary School on the Gold Coast.
“Always on time, always immaculate and just a big hugger,” says former school volunteer and family friend Kim Shepherd. “He would start the hugs, and all the other kids would join in.”
He grew to be a handsome teenager, charming the girls at school and becoming a dynamic presence on the basketball court, his brother says.
But in his late teens, the popular, unflappable middle child started showing signs of trouble, his family says. He became convinced people were stalking him. He talked to a mirror. He wanted to move to South Dakota, where relatives live, saying he was being followed and needed to leave.
He also started drinking and smoking weed, probably to self-medicate, according to his family, and dropped out of high school.
His worried parents took him to Stroger Hospital. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar depression, incurable but treatable diseases, and was prescribed medication. Schizophrenia, which often arises during the late teens or early 20s in young men, causes delusions and hallucinations, making people feel they’re being watched or persecuted.
For long stretches, Jawaun was stable with medication. While Corneal went to college, law school and grad school, Jawaun earned his high school diploma and got a job at a Treasure Island grocery store in Streeterville, a short walk from the apartment where he lived with his mother.
But he’d start feeling normal on his medicine and would quit. Then, he’d slide back into illness.
Corneal says the family would take him to a hospital when it got bad, and, after a brief stay, Jawaun would be released.
The family would be told Jawaun was an adult and could make his own decisions about outpatient treatment. But one of the features of schizophrenia is that the person lacks awareness about the severity of their illness.
“This is a serious diagnosis,” Corneal says. “In that instance, someone like his mom, his dad, an older brother, a loving and caring family member should be able to step in and make medical decisions that are in the best interest of this individual.”
“Sometimes, he would go and get the medicine, but pretty much he wouldn’t stay with it,” says Theresa Jones, his mother. “That’s why I feel like, if he was made to take that, like court-ordered, I think things would [have been] better.”
Susan Doig, president and chief executive officer of Trilogy Inc., a nonprofit mental health services provider in Chicago, says many family members feel lost when they take an acutely mentally ill person to a hospital and then see that loved one discharged in three to five days without much direction.
“They get marginally better, better enough to stop saying they’re going to kill someone or kill themselves, but they’re not really better, and the whole thing happens over and over again,” Doig says. “Families get so frustrated.”
Jawaun Westbrooks shuttled between hospitals and jail, getting treated only after he got in trouble.
In 2009, he punched a Chicago cop in the eye and spat in his face. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed for psychiatric treatment in 2011.
A year later, back on the street, he asked a woman for her iPhone and slapped her when she ignored him, causing her to hit her head on a sidewalk. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two years in prison.
By March 2014, now out of prison, he was arrested for trespassing in the halls of an apartment building on the Gold Coast. A mental health evaluation was ordered, but the case was dismissed the next month.
The hammer attack
Then came the hammer attack in July 2014. Two 55-year-old women were on the lakefront path near Navy Pier. Westbrooks, then 28, passed them without saying anything, then turned around and started bashing their heads with a hammer, witnesses told police.
The women survived, but one of them had to get more than 25 stitches in her head.
Now-retired Sun-Times columnist Mary Mitchell wrote about it in 2014. Corneal Westbrooks, who was living in New Orleans then, told Mitchell the family had been trying to get help for Jawaun, who had disappeared and later was found walking naked along Lake Shore Drive.
“I knew something was going to happen. I didn’t know what,” Corneal Westbrooks told Mitchell after his brother was arrested in the hammer attack. “Whenever my mom would call the police, they would tell her that they couldn’t do anything until he harmed himself or someone else.”
Even after Jawaun was stopped on Lake Shore Drive and the police took him to a hospital, he didn’t stay long.
“They let him go because they couldn’t keep him against his will,” Corneal Westbrooks told Mitchell. “But he needed to be hospitalized. He needs to be hospitalized until he sees the need for his medication and gets on a regimen.”
Then-Cook County Judge Nicholas Ford agreed with Westbrooks’ defense lawyer in the hammer case that Westbrooks was “legally insane at the time of the offense” and sent him to Elgin Mental Health Center.
Under Illinois law, people found not guilty by reason of insanity can be sent to a state mental institution but only for a set period — up to what the maximum prison sentence would have been. Their discharge date, called a “Thiem date,” is set by a judge.
Westbrooks’ Thiem date for the hammer attack was July 8, 2019. His family says he thrived under the close watch and medical monitoring at Elgin.
“Jawaun was completely different on his medicine,” his mother says.
Elgin Mental Health Center wanted Westbrooks to live in a “supervised aftercare center” in Lincoln Park after he was discharged on his Thiem date, records show.
“If he does not go to a supervised placement, he plans to live with his father, who could not provide as much structure or supervision as a residential placement,” according to a memo from the Elgin center to Westbrooks’ lawyers.
But the family says the aftercare center didn’t want him.
Westbrooks ended up at his dad’s place in Garfield Park.
“What I remember, early on, is the doctors telling my mom that we should get others involved” to create a family support system, Corneal Westbrooks says.
But some in their circle felt stigma surrounding mental illness. Even their father needed time to shed his denial at first, Corneal says.
Jawaun did OK for a while, mostly staying on his medication, his family says. But the old problems came back.
The father died in January 2021 after falling off a ladder months earlier. The accident and death triggered something in Jawaun, his brother says.
And Jawaun didn’t like how his psychiatric medication made him feel. He’d leave the condo at the crack of dawn and wander the city all day and night, sometimes walking 15 miles from Pershing Road to North Avenue and back. He’d come home at midnight, waking Corneal and his son, who needed sleep for work and school.
The older brother set rules.
“ ‘Be in the house by 10,’ ” Corneal would say. “I didn’t think I was asking too much.”
He says he felt utterly alone.
“You do feel like you’re left on an island trying to figure something out that no one else has figured out,” he says. “And we tried to figure it out.”
But they couldn’t.
‘Horrific incident’ at bank
Jawaun Westbrooks snapped again.
His last victim, Jessica Vilaythong, greeted customers when they came into the Chase bank branch at 600 N. Dearborn St., where she worked.
On the morning of Sept. 1, 2021, Jawaun walked in and headed for Vilaythong’s desk, where she was meeting with a customer. Vilaythong, 24, stood and asked if she could help him. That’s when Westbrooks pulled out the knife and stabbed her in the neck.
He later told his family he went into the bank because he sensed that people were following him.
As someone called 911 and Vilaythong’s client applied pressure to her neck with his shirt, Westbrooks walked out, knife in hand.
The police arrested him about four hours later.
Vilaythong was rushed into surgery at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where she died two days later.
A 2020 graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Vilaythong had earned a degree in psychology. Her brother-in-law Mike Huang described her on a GoFundMe page set up to pay for her funeral as the youngest in a large Vietnamese family. He said she “was loved by everyone. She talked with enthusiasm about her future.”
Huang and the family declined to talk with the Sun-Times.
But he posed several questions on the GoFundMe page, including:
“How could this happen while at work and in broad daylight? Why was a multiple violent offender let out to walk the streets? How do you reconcile seeing someone off in the morning and realizing they are gone forever by the next day?”
Then, he wrote: “These questions and many more are ones that we will have to look within to find answers for. It will take a lifetime.”
Cook County Circuit Judge John Lyke Jr., agreeing with a prosecutor that Westbrooks should be held without bail, called the attack “a horrific incident where a person’s just at work, minding their own business.”
Court records show Westbrooks underwent two behavior clinical exams between October 2021 and May 2022, though it’s unclear what was determined.
Corneal says his brother had little memory of stabbing Vilaythong and was facing the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison if found guilty.
Prosecutors offered a plea deal of 36 years. Corneal says he tried to reason with his younger brother, offering to get him a lawyer who could push for hospitalization instead of prison. But the brother chose prison.
“Jawaun’s exact words to me were: ‘There’s way too many rules at the hospital. I want to go to jail.’
“Does that sound like a sane person?” Corneal says. “Who would choose going to jail over going to a hospital? No one in their right mind.”
It’s too late for his brother, but Corneal Westbrooks says he now knows where the gaps in the mental health system are. Court-ordered mandatory medication and treatment — and support to keep tabs on him — would have helped Jawaun, he says.
“Something as simple as someone to call when something happens. Because a lot of times when Jawaun went off his meds and my mom did think she needed some type of help, her option was to call 911, right? And she was very afraid of that option because she never knew what would happen when the police showed up.”
Theresa Jones thinks about Jessica Vilaythong’s death and her son’s role in it, and sadness sweeps over her face.
“Spending most of his life going from the mental hospital and going to jail, I don’t know,” she says. “I guess you wish you could wave that magic wand and get him the help that he really needed.
“Even if it would have taken for him to live at a place like Elgin Mental Health, if he had to live there [permanently]. You don’t want that, you know. You want to see them get married one day, maybe have kids.
“But, no, not for Jawaun.”