THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 5 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ SU A
be normal? Why I can’t have a life
without all these meds?’ And him,
too; that’s the way he was — like
his problems had him down to
where he didn’t care what hap-
pened.”
Gazing at her lap in the dim
light from her kitchen, she says
quietly: “He was a beautiful man,
a beautiful man with a mental
illness. And his mental illness got
the best of him.”
Last summer, when Jordan’s
marijuana habit grew “really
heavy,” Morris says, she won-
dered about his drug tests. In
some cases, delta-9-THC, the
mind-altering chemical in canna-
bis, can be detected in the bodily
waste of a frequent user even
after 60 days of abstinence. Ye t
there was Jordan, week after
week, getting high on his balcony,
Morris says. Although she never
asked him about it, she says, “the
way he was smoking, I didn’t
figure he had to take them urines
anymore.”
On the balcony directly above,
where Hoodbhoy nurtured her
garden in the warm weather and
her husband liked to sit and read,
the reefer aroma became too
much for Bhutto. One day in June
2018, he asked his wife, “What do
you think I should do?” Hoodb-
hoy, who has a weak sense of
smell, suggested he try to ignore
it.
The couple knew little about
Jordan, just that he was an odd-
looking sentinel peering out from
his balcony at the small parking
lot. They’d smile and nod hello,
and he’d nod and smile back.
“Javed said he reminded him of
the mentally effected people he
attended to in his facility,” H oodb-
hoy says. “We thought, well, he’s
probably being put here by some
kind of social worker or institu-
tion and they’re taking care of
him.”
In the fall, after they closed
their balcony door for the season,
the odor of marijuana came up
through the floor inside, further
annoying Bhutto. Downstairs,
meanwhile, Jordan recorded vid-
eo rap-rants posted to his You-
Tube account in November, fea-
turing bitter, frenetic, semi-co-
herent laments about his 17 years
of hospital confinement.
In one, after taking a drag of
what appears to be a joint, he
squints. “They cause psychotic
disorder/they said I smoke too
much.” Waving a hand, he gives a
shout-out, “Hey, ’OPD,” apparent-
ly meaning Behavioral Health’s
forensic outpatient department,
known in the court system by its
initials. In another, there’s a
close-up of rolling papers and an
apparent joint on his balcony
table, followed by a panning shot
of the parking lot, soon to be a
homicide scene. “Don’t get too
close/they call me dynamite/and
nothin’ can save you.”
Finally, on the evening of
Jan. 17, Bhutto emailed Joe Hol-
ston, Jordan’s landlord, com-
plaining about the pungent aro-
ma permeating his and his wife’s
condo. “Our clothes, bedsheets.... Other people visiting this
building has also observed that it
smells as if someone is smoking
‘weeds’ here.”
“I will look into this issue,”
Holston replied the next morn-
ing. “Sorry for any inconve-
nience.”
He says he warned Jordan that
the neighbors right above him
were griping about his pot smok-
ing, and Jordan agreed to stop.
“He didn’t s eem to think it was an
unreasonable request,” Holston
recalls. Hoodbhoy says the odor
went away for a while, but in
February, a few weeks before the
shooting, it came back strong.
And Jordan’s demeanor toward
her and Bhutto turned cold.
They’d nod hello, she says, and
he’d stare.
The morning it happened,
March 1, she was at work.
From a security camera:
Bhutto, done with his over-
night shift, pulls into the lot in his
To yota at 10:56 a.m. and parks in
spot No. 7, directly below his and
Jordan’s b alconies. On the second
floor, a man identified by police
as Jordan leaves the balcony and
walks downstairs to the lot. He is
smoking something.
Bhutto opens the trunk and
bends in, gathering his groceries.
The attacker strides toward him,
a hand in a pocket of his coat.
Whatever he’s smoking, he flicks
it away.
“I won’t watch,” Hoodbhoy
says of the video. “I can’t.”
A week later, she flew to Paki-
stan to bury her husband in
Shikarpur, his hometown, next to
the grave of Fauzia Bhutto, dead
almost 30 years. The crowd that
gathered at Karachi’s airport for
the coffin’s arrival — relatives and
friends, former colleagues, old
philosophy students and com-
rades from the women’s protest
movement — overwhelmed
Hoodbhoy, who led a caravan of
mourners inland for the inter-
ment.
A slain sister, a slain brother,
side-by-side now in the provincial
dust. For Fauzia, there was no
justice. For Javed, she can only
hope.
[email protected]
es that Jordan needed a place to
live. The two had known each
other since boyhood, and Hol-
ston, now 42, had occasionally
visited Jordan in the hospital. He
says Jordan “always seemed okay
to me in there. You know, not
crazy.”
Leasing his condo to Jordan
was a safe deal for Holston be-
cause the Department of Behav-
ioral Health gives city housing
vouchers to insanity acquittees
on convalescent leave. Jordan’s
share of the $1,200 monthly rent
amounted to 30 percent of his
Social Security disability benefit,
while the D.C. government took
care of the rest.
At Behavioral Health, the fo-
rensic outpatient department
was responsible for making sure
Jordan obeyed his release terms,
which mandated frequent thera-
py sessions and check-ins with a
counselor, who was supposed to
visit him in the condo at least
once a week. His meds, switched
from oral to longer-acting injec-
tions, were to be administered by
mental-health workers on a spec-
ified schedule.
Jordan was required to appear
regularly at the outpatient de-
partment’s Northeast Washing-
ton offices, not only to get his
injections but also to have his
urine tested at l east once a month
for traces of intoxicants.
City View’s other residents
were left in the dark about his
history. “There is no legal report-
ing requirement to notify neigh-
bors that an NGRI is living within
the community,” a spokeswoman
for Behavioral Health says. Hol-
ston, who resigned as president
of the City View owners associa-
tion after the killing, says he also
kept quiet about Jordan, telling
no one in the building that his
tenant was fresh out of St. Eliza-
beths, having shot a friend in the
head in the throes of a psychotic
delusion.
No law required Holston to
warn people. Asked why he didn’t
alert them, anyway, he says, “I
don’t know.”‘They call me dynamite’
In Jordan’s time at City View, a
span of 39 months, Behavioral
Health staffers had nothing nega-
tive to say about him in three
brief reports on file in Superior
Court.
After his release, Jordan got
married. He attended Narcotics
Anonymous conventions in
Ocean City, in 2017 and 2018, and
in August 2018, he and his wife
celebrated their wedding anni-
versary in Williamsburg, Va. In
notifying the court and U.S. attor-
ney’s office that Jordan planned
to take the trips, different mental-
health workers used identical
language in the three reports.
“He visits the Forensic Outpa-
tient Department (FOPD) every
month for psychiatric manage-
ment and monitoring of compli-
ance,” was all they said about his
conduct.
At the condo building, Joyce
Morris, a tenant who befriended
Jordan, says Jordan’s wife some-
times angrily moved out, leaving
him by himself for long periods.
“Smoking marijuana, it was like
his everyday relaxing thing, chill-
ing on his balcony,” Morris re-
calls. “That was his zone, you
know? His peace zone. Hanging
on his balcony, s moking his weed.
He’d be there for hours and
hours.”
Morris, 53, lives on the first
floor, which is partly below
ground. The second floor, where
Jordan lived, is near street level.
She’d sit on the building’s front
stoop, with Jordan just to her left,
perched on his balcony, a nd “we’d
talk about our issues,” she says.
“Me, I’m bipolar with a little bit of
schiz, and I’d be like: ‘Why I can’tSoviet-bloc master’s degree and
Pakistani professorship weren’t
sufficient for U.S. higher educa-
tion.
He toiled in low-wage jobs for
months before discovering a new
vocation, working in group
homes with developmentally dis-
abled adults. “He had such a way
with people, such compassion,”
his widow says. “Even the mental-
ly effected people really took to
him. I mean, he adored them.”
In 2003, Hoodbhoy joined
Voice of America in Washington
as an Urdu-language radio host.
(She now writes for VOA’s Ex-
tremism Watch Desk.) She and
Bhutto bought a one-bedroom
unit at City View Condos, a brick
blockhouse in the tumbledown
Barry Farm area of Southeast D.C.
Hoodbhoy planted peppers and
cilantro in balcony pots, and
Bhutto stuffed the place with his
vast collection of philosophy
texts. In 2012, they raised their
right hands in a federal building
and were sworn in as U.S. citi-
zens.
A Northern Virginia nonprofit,
CRi, which says its mission is to
help people with developmental
disabilities improve their lives,
hired Bhutto in 2015 as a care-
giver in an Alexandria group
home — and he would work there
happily until the morning he was
killed. “He was so adept at know-
ing what everyone’s needs were,”
a former colleague says, referring
to the support Bhutto gave to the
home’s four residents. “He’d
study them, study their cues, and
understand them as unique hu-
man beings.”
In his adoptive country, he
went by the first name “Jawaid,”
which is pronounced in English
the way “Javed” sounds in Urdu.
Hoodbhoy recalls hearing him in
the condo bedroom holding forth
in their native language on Skype
and Facebook Live. Scores of stu-
dents at his old university would
gather for video talks by the
long-departed professor, who lec-
tured for the joy of it.
She’d p eek in, see him hunched
at a computer under shelves filled
with books, smiling, gesturing,
querying, expounding.
“Content, at peace,” i s how she
remembers him.‘Not crazy’
Newly approved for convales-
cent leave, Hilman Jordan moved
into a rental unit at City View
Condos, a mile from St. Eliza-
beths, on Dec. 3, 2015, taking up
residence directly below Bhutto
and Hoodbhoy in the three-story
building.
The unit’s landlord, Joe Hol-
ston, a friend of Jordan’s, says he
heard from mutual acquaintanc-lover, Hoodbhoy was the first
journalist to publicly identify the
man: Rahim Baksh Jamali, a
wealthy legislator and an influen-
tial member of the ruling Paki-
stan People’s Party. She also
tracked down Jamali’s driver,
who told her what he had told the
police: that he was present when
Jamali, middle-aged and mar-
ried, shot his mistress in her
bedroom, and that he helped
Jamali get rid of her body.
The intern, Fauzia Bhutto, 26,
turned up dead on remote scru-
bland. As t he case became a cause
celebre, with women’s groups
clamoring for Jamali to be pun-
ished, the victim’s brother Javed
Bhutto was a beacon of calm and
resolve. The philosophy profes-
sor, the eldest surviving male in
his family, was duty-bound to
seek redress. And he meant to do
it his way — not violently or by
tribal custom, but through Paki-
stan’s judiciary, which he be-
lieved should function blindly for
both sexes and without favor to
the politically connected.
Bhutto “knew full well that the
administration would not act un-
less pressured,” Hoodbhoy wrote.
For weeks in 1990, as he gently,
doggedly implored legal authori-
ties to do their jobs, Hoodbhoy
studied him with a reporter’s eye
— this “unselfconscious” fellow
“driven by a sense of purpose” —
and she watched admiringly as
the women’s protest movement
coalesced around him. “The vic-
tim’s brother mobilized society to
follow the rule of law,” she told
readers.
Jamali, who was arrested and
jailed for two years before getting
out on bail, lost his seat in a
provincial assembly. But his trial
dragged on for more than a dec-
ade until the driver recanted his
story and Jamali, now deceased,
was acquitted by a judge.
As f or Hoodbhoy and Bhutto —
“a study in contrasts,” t he pushy
newshound and the reflective
scholar — they formed a bond
that ran far deeper than their
common interest in civic integri-
ty. On Aug. 28, 1992, they mar-
ried.
“He was my everything,” she
says now.A new country, a new life
After a tumultuous decade of
democracy, Pakistan’s return to
military rule in 1999 prompted
the couple to emigrate.
They moved into a tiny apart-
ment in Massachusetts — just the
two of them; they never would
have children — and Hoodbhoy
began a teaching fellowship at
Amherst College in 2001. Bhutto
thought he’d find a place in aca-
demia, too, but it turned out hisintensity until he has the sensa-
tion of an electrical jolt emanat-
ing from his abdomen,” a report
said, but the hallucination afflict-
ed him mainly in the stressful
confines of St. Elizabeths, not
when he was out and about. In
July 2015, the hospital joined
Anthony in asking the court to let
Jordan live in the community.
As a n outpatient, he “should be
monitored closely” for intoxi-
cants, the hospital said, because
“destabilizers such as marijuana”
could cause a disastrous relapse.
Otherwise, he “was found to be
within the moderate range for
risk of violent recidivism.” After
the U.S. attorney’s office agreed to
a consent order listing 19 condi-
tions, including regular urine
tests, Judge Satterfield approved
Jordan’s convalescent leave.
All that remained was for the
42-year-old patient to find hospi-
tal-approved housing in the
Washington area, with help from
social workers.
They would not have to look
far.A sister’s murder
Javed Bhutto, born in 1955, was
the eldest child in a Pakistani
family of modest means. “For a
while after college, his father sent
him to medical school,” his wid-
ow, Nafisa Hoodbhoy, says. “But
he didn’t like medicine. He pre-
ferred philosophy.”
Bhutto left his dusty home-
town, 300 miles inland from the
Arabian Sea, and traveled to Bul-
garia, where he earned a graduate
degree at S ophia University in the
waning years of communist rule.
In the late 1980s, back in Paki-
stan, he joined the philosophy
faculty at the University of Sindh,
eventually becoming chairman.
He m et h is future wife in tragic
circumstances.
Hoodbhoy, a year younger than
Bhutto, was raised in the sprawl-
ing port city of Karachi, where
she attended English-language
schools. After moving abroad in
1978, she got a master’s degree in
U.S. history at Northeastern Uni-
versity and worked as a reporter
for London’s Guardian newspa-
per. Then, in 1984, she returned
to her male-dominated Muslim
homeland to become a pioneer-
ing female journalist.
As the only female reporter on
the staff of Dawn, Pakistan’s big-
gest English-language daily, her
goal was to “affect change” for
women in the Islamic world,
many of them brimming with
career aspirations, as she was, yet
stifled and routinely victimized.
So it was that in 1990, after a
young medical intern vanished
from her Karachi apartment and
suspicion fell on her clandestinecountering the patient,” before he
gave up on the idea.
“The gun was concealed on the
hospital grounds for several
weeks” in 2005 “while Mr. Jordan
awaited an opportunity to con-
front the peer,” St. Elizabeths said
in a court filing nearly a decade
after the violation. Jordan told a
counselor about the gun and his
potentially deadly fixation in Oc-
tober 2005, a report said. Without
informing the court or U.S. attor-
ney’s office, the hospital termi-
nated his furloughs and locked
him in a maximum-security ward
indefinitely.
Which, again, wouldn’t be for-
ever.
Marc Dalton, chief clinical offi-
cer for the Department of Behav-
ioral Health, says he and his staff
are barred by law from comment-
ing on specific cases. Asked about
their confidence level in assess-
ing patients such as Jordan for
release, Dalton, a forensic psychi-
atrist, notes that recidivism
among insanity acquittees is
“very low.”
Still, he shakes his head.
“Even with the best treatment,”
he says, “there are never certain-
ties.”
‘Community re-entry’
After his admitted gun-smug-
gling in 2005, Jordan spent five
years in maximum security and
made halting progress in therapy,
according to hospital reports.
Still plagued by “paranoid de-
lusions,” he complained of “feel-
ing snakes crawling on his chest
and hearing hissing noises.” He
“initiated” three fights with two
patients, one of whom needed
17 stitches to close a mouth
wound. In 2007, after he shoved a
fellow insanity acquittee to the
floor, fracturing the man’s collar-
bone, he “was observed to have
more paranoid and delusional
thoughts” and “worsened audito-
ry hallucinations.”
In 2009, he told a counselor
“that he intended to continue
abusing marijuana when he was
granted privileges,” a prosecutor
said in a court filing.
His medications were adjust-
ed, and his behavior slowly im-
proved. He was transferred out of
maximum security in 2010 and
allowed to stroll the grassy acre-
age of St. Elizabeths. But that
summer, after he again “disclosed
homicidal ideation... regarding
the patient he had planned to kill
in 2005,” his grounds privileges
were curtailed.
By 2012, though, upbeat re-
ports were mentioning his “active
and insightful participation” in
counseling. He was taking Hal-
dol, Abilify, Klonopin and Ge-
odon, and a psychologist noted
“the lowest baseline level of para-
noia and anxiety” in Jordan that
she had seen in four years. In a
letter to a Superior Court judge,
the hospital said he was ready for
“a well-planned, gradual process
of community re-entry.”
Thus the incremental steps of
conditional release began anew.
His attorney at the time, J.
Patrick Anthony, asked the court
to let Jordan leave the hospital for
unescorted weekend day visits
with his family and for weekday
therapy sessions at a community
mental-health center. Prosecutor
Colleen Kennedy, having just
learned of his 2005 violations,
“strongly” objected in writing,
saying Jordan’s “ own actions have
clearly shown” that he “is not a
good candidate for release.”
Kennedy wrote that she was
“perplexed” by the proposed fur-
loughs. However, she faced the
fact that she would probably lose
a court fight to keep Jordan
confined, given the low legal
threshold for an acquittee to gain
release — the 51/49 percent “pre-
ponderance of the evidence”
standard. So she and Anthony
negotiated a consent order allow-
ing for unsupervised trips to the
community center but, initially,
no family visits. In June 2013,
Judge Lee F. Satterfield signed
the order.
Anthony, Kennedy and other
lawyers involved with Jordan
over the years either won’t com-
ment on him or didn’t respond to
interview requests. A Superior
Court spokeswoman says judges
are barred by judicial rules from
publicly commenting on defen-
dants.
Sometimes, usually in notori-
ous cases, the U.S. attorney’s of-
fice battles relentlessly to prevent
releases, and judges seem more
likely to err on the side of caution.
After his insanity acquittal in
1982, for example, it took 34 years
for would-be presidential assas-
sin John W. H inckley Jr. to get out
of St. Elizabeths on convalescent
leave, to live with his mother. But
for acquittees who aren’t infa-
mous, such as Jordan, the process
often moves much quicker.
In 2013 and 2014, his furloughs
were repeatedly expanded
through consent orders until he
was staying overnight with his
family every Friday to Sunday.
Jordan’s treatment team en-
thusiastically supported his new
freedoms. He was still hearing “a
hissing sound which grows in
PLEA FROM A
KATHERINE FREY/THE WASHINGTON POST
Nafisa Hoodbhoy talks about her late husband, Javed Bhutto, who was slain in March. She wonders why the D.C. Department of
Behavioral Health wasn’t required to warn residents that their neighbor was a St. Elizabeths outpatient who had killed before.FAMILY PHOTO
Hoodbhoy and Bhutto in Karachi, Pakistan, in 19 93. Bhutto was a caregiver in a group home.