Mother Donna Smith was joined yesterday by another concerned mother calling for a secure care unit at St. Brendan's.

Ms Smith's son, Earl Rashun Smith died earlier this week of a heart attack after falling into a diabetic coma while in an abandoned office in the old wing of the hospital.

Mr. Smith also suffered from schizophrenia, a mental condition which prevented him from caring for his diabetes properly.

“Even in your right mind trying to deal with diabetes is difficult,” his mother said.

The second mother joining the call did not want her or her son's identity revealed for fear people would “stand off” even more from her son.

Her son suffers from HIV, she said, and has to take more than 15 pills a day. However, caring for his disease is complicated by the fact that he has also had several strokes, which have left him brain-damaged.

“Where do I go now? Am I going to be the next one, my son, dead on the street?” the mother asked.

With her son already in his 40s, the mother said she herself was growing elderly and could not give him the care he needed - even though she has been a caregiver for more than 17 years. If he suffered from one or the other of his afflictions she could manage, she said - but the combination of both was impossible.

“I'm hurting for Ms Smith,” she said. “I drive around in my car with stuff for my son to change his clothes - when I can find him. He wanders off just like Earl (Smith) did. I knew Earl.

“Just today I had to go looking for him again,” she said. She finally found her son lying on a street in Hamilton. A woman she knew told her she had to order several boys to leave him alone. “He gets abused out there,” she said.

“We need a place - a home setting where you're locked in.”

And, according to these mothers, both Earl Smith and the woman's son had been in and out of St. Brendan's repeatedly. Both had been told by doctors and psychiatrists that they needed 24-hour in-patient treatment, and both had subsequently been released, over and over again.

In fact, Mr. Smith had slipped into a diabetic coma more than once before, said his mother.

“We almost lost him a year ago,” she said, after he had been found outside in a coma. “He was so cold, the doctor said he never felt anyone so cold.”

Mr. Smith was a regular visitor at the hospital. Yet once he felt better, she explained, he would just walk out.

“They knew he wasn't managing it,” she said.

“But they told me they did not have a facility to offer him. And I understand that, that's why I'm not blaming anyone. But we need a facility to take care of people with special needs.”

Staff get frustrated, the mothers explained. “(When I found him today) he said, ‘Momma they're not going to want me there',” the anonymous mother said. “And there's others out there like them. It's the same as people being repeat offenders.

“I took him down there (to St. Brendan's today), but I don't know if they're going to keep him.”

A comment from the hospitals on regulations for patient release is expected sometime today.

There is a lockdown facility at St. Brendan's, where Ms Smith said her son had spent some time. However that facility is for patients with the potential for violence, who often have criminal pasts, she said, and neither the atmosphere nor the company were helping her son.

And the other mother said her son had actually spent time at the prison, where other prisoners took pity on him and helped him. “But the officer said, ‘This is not the place for him,'” she said.

“Westgate should have a psychiatric section (for those people with a propensity towards violence),” said Ms Smith. “All (people like Earl) need is a room they can call their own, with their own bed, a table, somewhere to hang their work on the wall. It allows you to identify something as being your own - from there you can grow to short-term goals. This is mine, this is home, I do have a life, I have people that come by and see me, I can go out (with supervision).”

Such short-term goals might include a move to shared accommodations such as those run by one of the Island's mental health organisations. A spokesman for the organisation explained it owns two houses where 19 people are currently living with look-in support from St. Brendan's.

He did not want the organisation to be named, however, saying: “We have kept a low profile because there is a tradition of ‘Gee, this is great but I don't want it in my backyard'.” So far, however, the organisation has encountered no problems, he added.