As Lindsay Clancy awaits subsequent steps in her triple-murder case after a deadlocked jury led to a mistrial Friday, she does so from a decrepit psychiatric hospital with a historical past of violence.
Tewksbury Hospital — the state-run Massachusetts facility that Clancy has referred to as residence since she allegedly strangled her younger youngsters three years in the past — offers with so many out-of-control sufferers and guests that at one level, its safety staff was granted the controversial proper to make use of batons and handcuffs on sufferers.
In April of this yr, a customer was arrested for attacking a pregnant staffer who tried to intervene when he punched a window and threatened to kill employees — one among at the very least three incidents the place staff had been assaulted on the job that month alone, the Boston Globe reported.
by way of REUTERS
In one other incident, one affected person reportedly lunged at one other with a pointy object.
“The very fact of the matter stays, it’s nonetheless an unsafe setting,” Jean Calvert-McClure, Division of Psychological Well being chapter president for the employees union SEIU509, informed the Globe.
Police and the hospital’s Public Security Division responded to greater than 500 requires assaults in 2025, in accordance with the outlet.
The violence was so extreme that the hospital final yr allowed its safety to make use of pepper gel, handcuffs, and batons on sufferers — however the plan was short-lived.
The hospital was banned in April from utilizing any defensive tactical gear in scientific areas. As an alternative, staffers have been instructed to name police within the case of emergency.
Staff informed the Globe the hospital is flooded with unmedicated, untreated and typically harmful sufferers from the felony justice system.
The 370-bed hospital gives “complete therapy, care, and luxury to adults with medical and/or psychological sicknesses,” in accordance with Mass.gov.
Tewksbury has a historical past of unsanitary situations as effectively.
A Might report by the Globe detailed how a number of of the buildings on the 172-year-old hospital’s grounds are plagued with mattress bugs and different pests, whereas different constructions have failing roofs.
Manganese contamination rendered the water on the hospital undrinkable for years and compelled the inhabitants to depend on water bottle deliveries, the Globe reported in 2024.
The Massachusetts Division of Public Well being, which runs the hospital, didn’t return The Submit’s requests for remark.
Clancy, 36, has been residing on the Tewksbury Hospital since 2023 — a life one healthcare knowledgeable painted as dreary.
“Largely, she described, she stays in mattress or on her personal,” Dr. Avram Mack, who previously labored at Nemours Youngsters’s Well being in Delaware, informed the courtroom when he took the stand at her trial on Aug. 21.
“I don’t assume she described interacting with sufferers very a lot. There have been a few methods during which she did work together with employees, at the very least. There was a therapist that she described working with.”
She returned to Tewksbury Hospital after her lawyer Kevin Reddington’s last-ditch attraction to stave off a mistrial was denied by the state’s Supreme Judicial Court docket.
The jury was unable to succeed in a unanimous choice — as a result of one male holdout juror — about whether or not Clancy was criminally answerable for strangling her three youngsters, Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months, within the basement of their Duxbury residence on Jan. 24, 2023.
Clancy, who claims she was within the throes of postpartum psychosis and overprescribed a cocktail of psychiatric meds, then lower her wrists and throat and threw herself from the second story of the house, leaving her partially paralyzed.
