Tragedy follows landmark court win

The door to Apartment B, in the building called Courage, was open. The man who had summoned police, Kanuri Qawi, was waiting casually in the doorway, a glass of soda in his hand.

Qawi invited the officer inside and began spinning a wild tale. Intruders, he insisted, had entered his apartment. They had robbed him of $300, then stripped him naked, strapped him to a flatbed truck and paraded him through the streets. As Qawi talked, incense burned, but it could not hide the smell. It was the smell, the officer knew, of decaying flesh.

The officer asked if he could have a look around, then pushed open the door of an empty bedroom. Qawi's roommate, John Laird Milton Sr., was lying on his back, his body stiff, his face blue. His blood was splattered three feet up the wall. Next to the body were his glasses and one white sock. An autopsy would reveal that he had been stabbed seven times, once in the heart. He had been dead about a week.

Interviewed by investigators, Qawi was consumed by what he described as an elaborate conspiracy: how staffers at the apartment complex had called him a homosexual; how they wanted to kick him out because he had been "contaminated" by radiation during the Chernobyl meltdown.

Police quickly realized that Qawi, 46, was suffering from delusions. What they didn't know that day was how long and hard he had fought for the right to have them.

Qawi was a notorious figure in California mental hospitals. His nine-year legal battle had taken him all the way to the state Supreme Court, where he had won the right -- for himself and hundreds of other mental patients -- to refuse to take the psychiatric drugs prescribed by doctors.

His case was a seminal chapter in the campaign to modernize mental health treatment and give patients more control over their bodies. And in key ways, it helped transform California's mental hospitals, with a growing number of patients rejecting their drugs, suffering psychotic breaks and lashing out in violence.