Speaker 1: This episode contains scenes from arrests and harassment of people
Speaker 1: with autism.
Speaker 2: While factual, some listeners may find the audio disturbing.
Speaker 3: Please take care when listening.
Speaker 4: Donald Triplet's golf swing begins with his thumbs standing a
Speaker 4: little too far away from the ball, with his legs
Speaker 4: spread wide like the letter A. Donald licks the pad
Speaker 4: of each thumb, first the left and then the right,
Speaker 4: before he wraps his fingers in a full grip. Then
Speaker 4: he lifts the club over his head as though he's
Speaker 4: hanging a banner. He holds that pose for a moment,
Speaker 4: and then he heaves the club head in an arc
Speaker 4: back to earth until it lands between his feet and stops.
Speaker 4: Then he haanks it back above his head again and pauses,
Speaker 4: and with one final stroke he commits to contact.
Speaker 1: The ball is gone and Donald, bouncing at the knees,
Speaker 1: peers down the fairway admiring his shot.
Speaker 5: Don has a really unique waggle and swaying, and if
Speaker 5: you've ever watched him go through the motions of that,
Speaker 5: it's difficult to tuck your eyes away.
Speaker 1: That's Sid Salter. He's the former publisher of the Scott
Speaker 1: County Times. He's known Donald for years.
Speaker 5: After all of that's over, he hits it right down
Speaker 5: the middle of the fairway. Don is remarkably good golfer,
Speaker 5: given the fact that he goes through all these gyrotions
Speaker 5: before he makes contact with the ball.
Speaker 4: For decades, it was a given that there was only
Speaker 4: one place you were going to find Donald in the afternoon,
Speaker 4: Forrest Country Club.
Speaker 1: The first time we accompanied Don to the golf course
Speaker 1: a few years back, he wore baggy khaki shorts and
Speaker 1: a Queen Nit shirt with a bucket hat in pink
Speaker 1: camouflage pulled down tight over his ears.
Speaker 4: Forrest Country Club is not a pretentious place, for one thing.
Speaker 4: Membership is actually pretty affordable, and the brick clubhouse fronts
Speaker 4: on a well cared for but mostly flat course that's
Speaker 4: been carved out of the Mississippi Woods. Given day, the
Speaker 4: roster of players you meet out in the fairways includes
Speaker 4: lawyers and mechanics, bankers and truckers, salesmen and farmers, and
Speaker 4: of course Donald, here's it again.
Speaker 5: And you know, golf courses, particularly rural South golf courses,
Speaker 5: a lot of the colloquialism in the South is jinking.
Speaker 5: You know, you're giving somebody a hard time criticizing their shot,
Speaker 5: picking at him about not making a put. Don not
Speaker 5: only participates in that in his way, but he sort
Speaker 5: of good naturedly accepts it and kind of gives as
Speaker 5: good as he takes.
Speaker 4: So you have golfed with him?
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, quite Frankly, I didn't play with Donald Lote
Speaker 5: because I got tired of getting the beat. I couldn't
Speaker 5: stand the heat.
Speaker 1: From iHeart podcasts. This is Autism's first child. I'm John
Speaker 1: Don and I'm Karen Zucker.
Speaker 4: Episode five, Donald on the Move.
Speaker 1: Golf plays a huge role in the story of Donald's life.
Speaker 4: Donald started playing back in nineteen fifty six, when he
Speaker 4: was twenty three years old, just out of college. He
Speaker 4: had steady employment at the bank at that time, and
Speaker 4: he had a roof over his head, living with his parents,
Speaker 4: still in his childhood bedroom.
Speaker 1: He quickly fell in love with the game. It's not
Speaker 1: hard to see why the game plays to so much
Speaker 1: of the things that make him comfortable, you know.
Speaker 4: Think about it. Golf has a certain kind of sameness
Speaker 4: built right into it. Basically, as a player, you're doing
Speaker 4: the same thing over and over and over again.
Speaker 1: Swinging a club at the ball, and the ball just
Speaker 1: sits there, it doesn't move until you move it.
Speaker 4: And there's no clock getting pressure to get it done.
Speaker 4: You can play the game entirely at your own pace.
Speaker 1: It's consistent and you are in control of every movement.
Speaker 4: Plus there are numbers involved. Fifth green, eighteenth green, three handicap,
Speaker 4: one under par, one over par, hole in one.
Speaker 1: It's a game of routine and ritual. Every hole starts
Speaker 1: with a t shot, Every round ends in the same place.
Speaker 4: Sid told us that Donald could take or leave the
Speaker 4: whole social part of the game. In fact, most of
Speaker 4: the time Donald golfed alone. Sid thinks that for Donald
Speaker 4: it's a sport he was most interested in playing within himself.
Speaker 1: Now that sounds abstract, but I know what Sid means.
Speaker 1: When Donald plays golf, he is seeking something. It's an
Speaker 1: activity that brings him fulfillment and meaning.
Speaker 4: You know, some of the people on the autism spectrum
Speaker 4: whom we've met in our reporting talk about finding that
Speaker 4: one thing that pursuit that winds up being all important
Speaker 4: because it brings comfort and meaning to life and even
Speaker 4: a relationship to the world around them.
Speaker 1: And for some people it's about finding a way to
Speaker 1: connect to the people around them.
Speaker 4: Amy Gravino, whom you met in an early episode, is
Speaker 4: one of those people who was able to realize she
Speaker 4: had that thing that allowed her to just be her.
Speaker 6: I was this misshapen ball of dough that hadn't had
Speaker 6: yet to be baked, if you will, and so I
Speaker 6: couldn't offer an opinion on myself that didn't come from
Speaker 6: someone else the one outlet I had, I would say,
Speaker 6: because I did have an outlet, I did have a
Speaker 6: way that I was able to kind of tap into
Speaker 6: whoever that Amy Garvino wasn't there. And that was the writing.
Speaker 6: And I began writing when I was ten years old,
Speaker 6: and it was poetry. Initially it was like a valve
Speaker 6: opening up and giving me a way to kind of
Speaker 6: just let go of all the things that I was feeling.
Speaker 6: But it was one thing that I was good at, apparently,
Speaker 6: you know. My parents would send my poems into the
Speaker 6: local paper, and it was something that finally I could
Speaker 6: actually be good at.
Speaker 1: And our brilliant friend John Robison's account of using his
Speaker 1: intense interest to navigate the world is especially resident.
Speaker 4: You really cannot pigeonhole John Robison. So he's designed electronic
Speaker 4: games for Milton Bradley, and he's also designed guitars for
Speaker 4: rock stars. He runs a high end car restoration business.
Speaker 4: He's also an author and a speaker and a neurodiversity scholar,
Speaker 4: and for a long time he was an activist who
Speaker 4: did research and produced reports for big government agencies.
Speaker 2: Well, for all of my life, before I knew about autism,
Speaker 2: I was keenly aware of my social deficiencies. I knew
Speaker 2: that I didn't have friends, and people didn't want to
Speaker 2: invite me places or do things with me.
Speaker 1: John was diagnosed with autism at forty years old.
Speaker 3: I just thought that I was like a second rate person, and.
Speaker 2: I still I guess it still bothers me when I
Speaker 2: can't get things right. But I have been really lucky
Speaker 2: in my life because first, when I was in my
Speaker 2: early twenties, I was able to engineer musical things that
Speaker 2: would sing for the world, and people appreciated those things,
Speaker 2: and at least the people in the music community would
Speaker 2: talk to me about the things that I could speak
Speaker 2: to and the things I could do. And I took
Speaker 2: up from fixing cars and people would come to talk
Speaker 2: to me about the cars. I took up photography and
Speaker 2: people would talk about the images, and then I began
Speaker 2: writing about autism, and people talk to me about that.
Speaker 3: But in every case, the work.
Speaker 2: That I created spoke for me, and for me, that's
Speaker 2: how I have overcome the disability of not being able
Speaker 2: to figure out what to say. I don't figure it
Speaker 2: out other people things to me.
Speaker 4: John grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts. Both of his parents
Speaker 4: were college professors. The university setting was essential to John
Speaker 4: being able to find his way. Eventually, John Skills got
Speaker 4: him noticed by some big time musicians.
Speaker 2: Well, one of the big things in Amherst every year
Speaker 2: was a spring concert in the stadium at the University
Speaker 2: of Massachusetts, and they would bring in bands, and.
Speaker 3: So I went down.
Speaker 2: There because I was by that time working with local
Speaker 2: bands helping out. I saw these guys backstage that had
Speaker 2: like amplifiers pulled out of the racks.
Speaker 3: They were struggling with them, and of course.
Speaker 2: By then I started to feel like I was confident
Speaker 2: about knowing about musicians equipment. And I walked over and
Speaker 2: I asked what they were doing, and the guy says,
Speaker 2: you know, he's.
Speaker 3: Try to get the amplifiers working.
Speaker 2: And do I know anything about Fay's Linears said yeah,
Speaker 2: you know, I didn't really know much.
Speaker 3: About them, but I was confident and.
Speaker 2: He invited me up and I was able to do
Speaker 2: something that he thought was clever and useful. And he says,
Speaker 2: he says, if you can fix these things, I got
Speaker 2: a whole room full of them down at our place
Speaker 2: in New York. You come down there and work on him.
Speaker 2: And it turned out that he was from a sound
Speaker 2: company called Britannia Rowe, who was what Pink Floyd had
Speaker 2: set up to put their equipment out on the road
Speaker 2: when Pink Floyd wasn't touring. I went down and started
Speaker 2: fixing their gear, and then I started modifying it and
Speaker 2: building more gear, and I became their American engineer. And
Speaker 2: one day we had folks from Kiss come into the
Speaker 2: studio wanting to rent a monitor system, and while they
Speaker 2: were in there, I saw a he freely a guitar player,
Speaker 2: digging at a less Paul guitar with a chisel, and
Speaker 2: I went to see what was the matter with him,
Speaker 2: and he told me that he wanted to make the
Speaker 2: guitar blow, smoke and fire, and I wanted to just
Speaker 2: get it out of his hands because I thought he's
Speaker 2: destroying it. And I said, well, I could do that professionally.
Speaker 2: And he asked what I would do, and I said, well,
Speaker 2: we could, you know, put smoke bombs in it, We
Speaker 2: could put lights in it. We could insulate it so
Speaker 2: it wouldn't burn up. And he had Gibson send me
Speaker 2: a guitar. And from that beginning I designed all of
Speaker 2: the instruments that Ace played that shot fire, shot, rockets,
Speaker 2: lit up and blew up, anything like that.
Speaker 3: I made them. And I also did work on the
Speaker 3: amplifiers themselves.
Speaker 4: John Robinson's own intense interest does work with amplifiers and
Speaker 4: guitars got him hired as part of the crew for
Speaker 4: bands like Kiss. That work got him away from Amherst,
Speaker 4: and it got him out into the world.
Speaker 2: I went all over him, went all over the United States.
Speaker 2: I went to England and went to Germany, but Canada.
Speaker 1: You know, John's story is fantastic, and so is Amy's.
Speaker 1: They are both success stories.
Speaker 4: And it's great to hear them telling their stories in
Speaker 4: their own words.
Speaker 1: But the spectrum, it's so broad and so complex that
Speaker 1: almost half the people diagnosed with autism can't tell their
Speaker 1: own stories because literally they can't speak or communicate their
Speaker 1: life experiences in ways that most of us are capable
Speaker 1: of taking in and understanding.
Speaker 4: It's important to remember that each person on the spectrum
Speaker 4: also has a story and a way to connect and
Speaker 4: something to say.
Speaker 1: Even if it's not completely obvious yet. Sometimes it needs
Speaker 1: the rest of us to go more than halfway to
Speaker 1: really understand.
Speaker 4: Of course, Donald's unique way of connecting to the world
Speaker 4: around him, the golf and the numbers, it was always
Speaker 4: pretty easy to see where he was coming from.
Speaker 1: After the break, Donald learns his own lessons about freedom
Speaker 1: and takes flight literally.
Speaker 4: Donald was twenty seven years old in nineteen sixty when
Speaker 4: he first learned how to drive a car. His mother,
Speaker 4: who had been his teacher all his life, taught him
Speaker 4: how to operate the family's Ford Fairlane, a massive barge
Speaker 4: of a car, and we've imagined how this might have worked. First,
Speaker 4: with the engine still off, Mary would have talked Donald
Speaker 4: through the whole routine, checking the mirrors, where to put
Speaker 4: his hands on the steering wheel, how to speed up,
Speaker 4: how to slow down, and then.
Speaker 1: Because Donald is not at all tall, he would have
Speaker 1: pulled himself forward so that his chin almost touched the
Speaker 1: steering wheel. It's easy to Imagine him tensing up as
Speaker 1: he put the key into the ignition and brought the
Speaker 1: car to life. And imagine how this moment must have
Speaker 1: fell from Mary as Donald turned out of the driveway
Speaker 1: for the first time.
Speaker 4: This man sitting next to her once seemed like someone
Speaker 4: incapable of recognizing danger. But Donald had come so far
Speaker 4: from the boy she once worried about as being possibly
Speaker 4: hopelessly insane, as she actually once thought. And now the
Speaker 4: road was his whenever he wanted. Donald wasn't content to
Speaker 4: stay close to Forrest. As an adult, Donald packed up
Speaker 4: and left town on holiday at least a dozen times
Speaker 4: every year.
Speaker 1: In those days, it was pretty common for small town
Speaker 1: newspapers to report when somebody went out of town. Donald
Speaker 1: will go to, say, Dallas for a few days, or
Speaker 1: New Mexico, and it would make the society page of
Speaker 1: the Scott County Times. He became known for his travels.
Speaker 1: Here's his lifelong friend and neighbor, John Russia.
Speaker 3: He traveled a lot ourselves. Nothing like him off us
Speaker 3: to go from.
Speaker 7: I'll tell you for sure, now done, he's ready to
Speaker 7: go an emotional nose.
Speaker 4: As a rule, whenever he could, Donald kept his trips
Speaker 4: to six days exactly because he tried to be back
Speaker 4: in forest for Sunday Bible study.
Speaker 1: He always traveled alone.
Speaker 4: By the time we first met him, when he was
Speaker 4: in his late seventies, Donald had been to at least
Speaker 4: twenty eight American states, including Hawaii.
Speaker 1: Many of them several times.
Speaker 4: And he'd been to more than thirty six foreign countries.
Speaker 1: The list is incredible. Germany, Tunisia, Morocco, Hungary, Dubai, Spain, Portugal, France, Bulgaria, Columbia.
Speaker 4: He's taken snapshots of the Pyramids in Egypt, the New
Speaker 4: York City skyline, the Grand Canyon.
Speaker 1: With your travels, what was the best part about govern
Speaker 1: to Church?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 7: I just enjoyed going there, saying, the Turkish Bela dancers
Speaker 7: perform and all that good stuff.
Speaker 8: Of all the trips that you've done, could you tell
Speaker 8: me like a couple of your favorite ones.
Speaker 7: Going to Grace, I'd fly to the to the airport
Speaker 7: in Athens and take either a shuttle to the hotel
Speaker 7: I was staying, or sometimes taking a text from the
Speaker 7: airport to the hotel.
Speaker 4: It's again typical of Donald that when he talks about
Speaker 4: his travels, he brings the conversation kind of around to
Speaker 4: the logistics of his travel rather than to the experiences
Speaker 4: he had and the people he met and the flavor
Speaker 4: of it all.
Speaker 1: What Donald isn't mentioning there is that he meticulously documents
Speaker 1: his trips, taking thousands of snapshots iconic buildings and statues
Speaker 1: and mountaintops, the ones he had seen on TV or
Speaker 1: read about in books when you returned home from his trips.
Speaker 1: He organized all of his photos in albums until his
Speaker 1: bookshelves were filled with memories.
Speaker 4: Then in the nineteen nineties he learned to use a
Speaker 4: computer and Donald went back through all of his albums,
Speaker 4: and now he's assigning numbers to each of his trips
Speaker 4: and he's creating a database and an index that makes
Speaker 4: it a lot easier for him to find specific photos.
Speaker 1: It's something about the categorizing, the organization of it all
Speaker 1: that brings him pleasure.
Speaker 4: Also, that's how he made sense of the world. That's
Speaker 4: how he kind of makes the world his own.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 1: The travel part of his life is something that doesn't
Speaker 1: fit neatly into the idea that Donald doesn't like change,
Speaker 1: because of course every place is going to be different.
Speaker 1: And maybe that shows how people with autism do grow
Speaker 1: and stretch.
Speaker 4: But it's also true that Donald established a kind of
Speaker 4: routine within the experience of traveling with going away for
Speaker 4: just six days all of the time. And in fact,
Speaker 4: many of the countries he went to he visited over
Speaker 4: and over again, so there is kind of a routine there.
Speaker 4: Or maybe he just really liked going to these places.
Speaker 4: Donald was a world explorer, but he always came home
Speaker 4: to Forrest, where he lived in his parents' house his
Speaker 4: entire adult life.
Speaker 1: Forrest provided Donald with a sort of perfect combination of
Speaker 1: circumstances for a man like him. Life in a small
Speaker 1: community afforded predictability, tranquility, and safety. The pace was slow,
Speaker 1: it was quiet. One day was just like the next.
Speaker 4: And Donald, by virtue of his wealth and his parents'
Speaker 4: social standing, found himself in this embracing web of relationships
Speaker 4: that come along with small town life where everyone knows
Speaker 4: more than a little bit about everybody else.
Speaker 1: Forres just accepted Donald.
Speaker 4: As Donald's friend. Sid Salter says, and I'm paraphrasing a
Speaker 4: little here. In a small southern town, if you're poor
Speaker 4: and different, you're just different. But if you've got money
Speaker 4: and you're different, well then you're eccentric.
Speaker 5: The whole discussion begs the question of had Don's family
Speaker 5: not had the bank, if there had not been the
Speaker 5: respect for mister Beeman triplet that the community had, would
Speaker 5: Don's life have turned out the same way? If there
Speaker 5: had not been the network of support, the job at
Speaker 5: the bank, all of those things. Would Don's life have
Speaker 5: turned out? Would he be able to travel the world alone?
Speaker 5: Would he be able to function without oversight or a guardian?
Speaker 5: And I think the answer is maybe, because one of
Speaker 5: the things is a journalist that I observed, And it's
Speaker 5: true in Mississippi, it's true all across the South. I
Speaker 5: think it's probably true all over the country. Woefully inadequate
Speaker 5: funding for mental health. And that's for more pronounced things
Speaker 5: like schizophrenia. But when you talk about something as delicate
Speaker 5: and mysterious as autism, which we still don't understand a
Speaker 5: great deal about as a society, and we certainly don't
Speaker 5: know how to deal with people who have profound autism,
Speaker 5: I think it would have been very difficult if Don
Speaker 5: had not had that.
Speaker 4: After the break, we talk about the cost of autism misunderstood.
Speaker 1: As we piece together Donald Triplett's adult life, we want
Speaker 1: to take a moment to point out that today so
Speaker 1: much of the conversation around autism is focused around young kids,
Speaker 1: and that's progress, but there are so many big and
Speaker 1: difficult challenges facing young adults and grown ups on the spectrum.
Speaker 1: They are so vulnerable in many ways.
Speaker 4: A lot of people on the spectrum don't have the
Speaker 4: sort of family or community support and awareness that Donald
Speaker 4: Triplet has benefited from. Donald's parents had his back always,
Speaker 4: and his community everybody from his neighbors to his teachers
Speaker 4: to the police department, they all knew that Donald had
Speaker 4: special needs. And John Robison and Amy Garvino, they're both
Speaker 4: excellent communicators. But there are people on the spectrum who
Speaker 4: don't have that kind of support and who cannot speak
Speaker 4: for themselves, people who are more challenged and have difficulty
Speaker 4: in complicated social situations, and that can have consequences, dangerous consequences.
Speaker 4: You know where that comes up a lot, it's where
Speaker 4: autistic people come face to face with the police. When
Speaker 4: a cop doesn't know a lot about autism, that's not
Speaker 4: a good mix.
Speaker 1: There are so many terrifying stories about police officers misunderstanding
Speaker 1: or not having the proper training to effectively interact with
Speaker 1: people on the spectrum. Think about it. A lot of
Speaker 1: autistic people do things that police are trained to see
Speaker 1: as suspicious behavior.
Speaker 4: You know, they might not look people in the eyes,
Speaker 4: or they might need more time than most people to
Speaker 4: answer even simple questions. They might run away when somebody
Speaker 4: speaks loudly or sharply at them, or they might lose
Speaker 4: it if somebody touches them.
Speaker 1: Any one of those has the potential to trigger an
Speaker 1: officer's instinct that they're dealing with a suspicious situation when
Speaker 1: all it is is autism. An innocent autistic person whose
Speaker 1: behaviors the officers translating the wrong way. This is a
Speaker 1: huge deal.
Speaker 4: Drexel University published a study in twenty seventeen that estimated
Speaker 4: one in five teenagers with autism was stopped and questioned
Speaker 4: by the police before the age of twenty one. Five
Speaker 4: percent were actually arrested.
Speaker 1: And researchers at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia found that
Speaker 1: people with disabilities, including those on the spectrum, are five
Speaker 1: times more likely to be incarcerated then people in the
Speaker 1: general population.
Speaker 4: Even a rudimentary Google search tells a devastating story.
Speaker 9: A Salt Lake City police officers shot and seriously wounded an.
Speaker 1: Unarmed thirteen year old autistic boy last night.
Speaker 10: The boy's mother called nine one one.
Speaker 9: Night and her officer with the Vacaville Police Department is
Speaker 9: in hot water after video footage of him punching a
Speaker 9: seventeen year old teenager with autism was posted by the
Speaker 9: boys Fox night. Lawyers from the pomp Beach County Sheriff's
Speaker 9: Office and the parents of an autistic team shot eleven
Speaker 9: times by a deputy have reached a settlement of one
Speaker 9: million dollars.
Speaker 10: Sheriffs deputies in a New Orleans suburbs set on a
Speaker 10: shackled obie severely autistic sixteen year old boy for nine
Speaker 10: minutes and put a choke hold on him for part
Speaker 10: of that time until he died, escording to a federal
Speaker 10: lawsuit filed Thursday against the sheriff and seven deputies in
Speaker 10: the pad last.
Speaker 4: Year and now that police are wearing cameras a lot
Speaker 4: more than they used to, where a starning to see
Speaker 4: and hear how some of these encounters can go off
Speaker 4: the rail so quickly. We saw that happen In Kodiak, Alaska,
Speaker 4: in twenty fifteen, there.
Speaker 1: Were two tourists they were visiting Kodiak, staying at a
Speaker 1: bed and breakfast in a quiet residential neighborhood. They thought
Speaker 1: they saw a man trying to get into their rental car,
Speaker 1: so they dialed nine one one.
Speaker 4: Nope, that was wrong. He was not trying to get
Speaker 4: into their rental car. The man they saw was Nick Plettnikoff,
Speaker 4: who was actually pretty well known around Kodiak and extremely
Speaker 4: well liked. And he's autistic.
Speaker 8: He was born super healthy. Nine out of nine were
Speaker 8: his upgars, and he was ahead of his milestones until
Speaker 8: he wasn't and he developed autism in about eighteen months.
Speaker 4: That's Nick's mom, Judy Plettnikoff.
Speaker 8: And he's worked awfully hard, harder than harder you could
Speaker 8: than you can imagine to achieve what he has. And
Speaker 8: he's productive, and he contributes to the community, and he's taxes.
Speaker 8: He's just an all around five end up standing citizen.
Speaker 4: That's for sure. Nick has a business engraving ID tags
Speaker 4: for dogs. He sorts and transports recycling for a number
Speaker 4: of different clients. He volunteers at the hospital, also at
Speaker 4: Saint Mary's, which is the school that completely embraced him
Speaker 4: when he went there as a kid. Now he volunteers
Speaker 4: there setting up and breaking down the lunch room.
Speaker 1: These were all sorts of small triumphs for Nick. For him,
Speaker 1: learning new things is hard. He takes a while to
Speaker 1: process speech. He needs a lot of support day to day.
Speaker 1: But he was getting more independent all the time.
Speaker 8: Oh, he's fabulous. We really believed. So he moved into
Speaker 8: an apartment that's attached to our home after high school,
Speaker 8: and we really believed that he would live independently and
Speaker 8: we would eventually leave the house and somebody else this
Speaker 8: house where he lives in the apartment, that we would
Speaker 8: leave this house and somebody else could move in and
Speaker 8: everything'd be just lovely. So he was doing fabulously. He
Speaker 8: could shop for just a small list of items independently
Speaker 8: and checked the mail obviously, and cook himself a light
Speaker 8: meal and more or less get himself ready in the morning.
Speaker 8: Need a little help, but he was doing really quite well.
Speaker 4: And just like a lot of autistic people, Nick likes routines,
Speaker 4: and one of his routines was to head down the
Speaker 4: street every day to collect the mail from the communal postal.
Speaker 1: Point, and another of his things he would check on
Speaker 1: the cars parked along his way. His mom says he
Speaker 1: was making sure all the doors.
Speaker 4: Were locked, and one of the cars he stopped at
Speaker 4: belonged to those two guys from out of town, and
Speaker 4: they thought maybe he was trying to break in, which
Speaker 4: he was not, and they thought also that he had
Speaker 4: been drinking, which he had not been doing.
Speaker 1: And then everything goes off the rails.
Speaker 4: They've called nine one one, and now the police show
Speaker 4: up and they approached Nick, and Nick doesn't have the
Speaker 4: skills to explain himself in that moment. He also doesn't
Speaker 4: make eye contact with the officers, and apparently all of
Speaker 4: this comes off to them as suspicious because they put
Speaker 4: hands on him really quickly, and they spin him around
Speaker 4: so that they can handcuff him.
Speaker 1: And Nick confused by what's happening all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: it's terrified. He starts pleading with the cops. You can
Speaker 1: hear that on the police camera recording.
Speaker 4: Hey can't go, and he's twisting his body as this
Speaker 4: is all happening. And so what the cops see is
Speaker 4: not an autistic guy who is just scared and confused.
Speaker 4: They see someone not cooperating, and then they're down on
Speaker 4: the ground with him and they're flipping Nick on his
Speaker 4: stomach to get control over him, and one of the
Speaker 4: cops is leading into his neck with his forearm, and
Speaker 4: you keep hearing Nick saying something as they're all wrestling
Speaker 4: on the pavement. He's apologizing.
Speaker 1: And what's especially disturbing is that one of the police
Speaker 1: officers knows me. He keeps saying Nick, stop, but we
Speaker 1: lay learned he was really new to the force, and
Speaker 1: he doesn't step in and tell the other officers to stop.
Speaker 1: Nick keeps saying, I want to go home, please, I'm sorry, Oh.
Speaker 3: Nick shop.
Speaker 4: And what happens next is really hard to take.
Speaker 1: They're holding Nick down, He's terrified, not calming down, but
Speaker 1: getting more and more agitated.
Speaker 4: And one of the officers pulls out his pepper spray
Speaker 4: and then he says and then the cop lasts him
Speaker 4: in the face with the pepper spray, right in the eyes.
Speaker 4: One of Nick's neighbors is watching all of this happen
Speaker 4: from his house and he yells out to the cops,
Speaker 4: you know you've just guard this kid for the rest
Speaker 4: of his life. Another passer by runs to let Nick's mother, Judy,
Speaker 4: know what's going on.
Speaker 1: Judy rushes to the scene. She sees police cars and
Speaker 1: an ambulance and Nick surrounded by police. And this is
Speaker 1: before she realizes he's been pepper sprayed. The officer in
Speaker 1: charge speaks to her, and you can hear Judy trying
Speaker 1: to stay cool. It's what some parents of people with
Speaker 1: autism do when they're dealing with authority.
Speaker 4: Figures is he And at that point the mistake realized.
Speaker 4: The officer tells her about the pepper spray.
Speaker 3: Okay, all right, we pepper sprayed him.
Speaker 4: Her outrage is palpable, a mother's outrage, and she insists
Speaker 4: they take the cups off, and they do it.
Speaker 8: And then I Nick was stunned and not able to
Speaker 8: get himself home at that point, so I kind of
Speaker 8: put my arm around him and guide it a home.
Speaker 8: My daughter came. She's a doctor. That was very helpful.
Speaker 8: We cataloged his injuries. He had bruises a size of
Speaker 8: footballs on him. He had a great big kidney punch
Speaker 8: and scrapes and black and I mean he was beaten.
Speaker 1: You know. Nick's most serious injuries were invisible and they're
Speaker 1: still there. Remember he had been doing really well, but
Speaker 1: now his mom says.
Speaker 8: He lost his ability to take care of himself. He
Speaker 8: didn't brush his own teeth again for seven months. So
Speaker 8: he just lost a lot of skills. And the trauma,
Speaker 8: the need for him to protect himself and be safe,
Speaker 8: is what took over his That's the sympathetic response, that's
Speaker 8: what took over his brain. I won't soon forget what
Speaker 8: his psychologist told me, if you've got to protect him,
Speaker 8: because these re traumatizations, while they won't kill him, will
Speaker 8: make his life very difficult. And boy, she was right,
Speaker 8: because one time he was so bad, it was so bad,
Speaker 8: he'd completely lost control. He really thought they were coming
Speaker 8: to get him again, and he pulled the doorknobs right
Speaker 8: off the car trying to get out, trying to get
Speaker 8: out of my car, and I could barely get him home,
Speaker 8: and he just went so far backward again.
Speaker 4: So these kinds of misunderstandings and these kinds of mistakes,
Speaker 4: the consequences are real and they're lasting. Also, let's be
Speaker 4: honest that when people of color who have autism get
Speaker 4: into these situations, the danger for them is likely to
Speaker 4: get a lot higher, a lot faster, especially when they're
Speaker 4: outside of their own communities where people know them.
Speaker 1: And there are some deeply ingrained problems to address here,
Speaker 1: But at least we're seeing that many police forces around
Speaker 1: the US are trying to do better with the autism
Speaker 1: piece of it. There are programs now that train police
Speaker 1: to recognize and understand autism better and to modify their
Speaker 1: responses when they encounter autistic people, for starters, understanding that
Speaker 1: their behaviors do not necessarily warrant suspicion, and to work
Speaker 1: better to communicate and de escalate the situation.
Speaker 4: In fact, the Kodiak police did get some training after
Speaker 4: all of this happened, but it's a problem that it's
Speaker 4: often only after something bad happens that the corrective steps
Speaker 4: are being taken. But they are being taken, and we
Speaker 4: saw the teaching that the police are getting about autism,
Speaker 4: and it's actually pretty basic. That's why it's also pretty useful.
Speaker 4: So there is some progress in this area, but there
Speaker 4: is still a long way to go. There are just
Speaker 4: so many stories like this.
Speaker 1: I definitely have that worry about my son Micky. I
Speaker 1: can see him innocently stumbling into some interaction with police
Speaker 1: where they misread him, like say, his inability to explain
Speaker 1: why he's in a particular place at a particular time,
Speaker 1: or something like that and the whole thing going downhill
Speaker 1: really fast. In fact, there was a time when he
Speaker 1: was on an airplane and a baby had been crying
Speaker 1: for hours, and that just hit one of his sensory
Speaker 1: buttons and he became really agitated. And an agitated person
Speaker 1: on a plane sets off all kinds of alarms. But
Speaker 1: in this case, there was a flight attendant who got
Speaker 1: that Mickey had autism, and he helped come down. As
Speaker 1: for Donald, it's another way. He was lucky in a
Speaker 1: place where everyone knew him. He was, as far as
Speaker 1: we know, never subjected to that sort of trauma, another
Speaker 1: gift of the community that surrounded him in Forest.
Speaker 4: In nineteen sixty two, a group of parents in Britain
Speaker 4: founded what would become the National Autistic Society, the first
Speaker 4: autism organization in the world.
Speaker 1: The early nineteen sixties were the beginning of a sea
Speaker 1: change in autism. Parents became activists and began getting organized.
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty four, a small group of mothers of
Speaker 1: disabled children begins to campaign for their children's access to
Speaker 1: public education.
Speaker 4: In nineteen sixty nine, at the annual meeting of the
Speaker 4: National Society for Autistic Children, doctor le O'Connor gives a
Speaker 4: speech in which he states declaratively that blaming parents for
Speaker 4: causing their children's autism is a bogus.
Speaker 1: Idea, which is a huge relief because really, almost from
Speaker 1: the beginning of the diagnosis, clinicians and doctors had heat
Speaker 1: lame on the parents, especially on mothers. It was the
Speaker 1: beginning of the end of the refrigerator mother theory.
Speaker 4: The next decade, the nineteen seventies, is pivotal to the
Speaker 4: rights of people on the autism spectrum. In nineteen seventy one,
Speaker 4: a lawsuit in Pennsylvania demanding access to public education for
Speaker 4: children with developmental disabilities is successful. Other states follow in
Speaker 4: rapid succession. In nineteen seventy five, the Federal Education for
Speaker 4: All Handicapped Children Act as passed, and after TV personality
Speaker 4: Heraldo Rivera exposes horrendous conditions at the Willibrook State School
Speaker 4: and Institution for the Intellectually Disabled in Staten Island, New York.
Speaker 4: The scandal leads to the closing of Willibrook and the
Speaker 4: shuddering of institutions like it.
Speaker 1: As the seventies turn into the eighties, the world learned
Speaker 1: significantly more about autism as a condition. With a strong
Speaker 1: genetic component data is published that supports the argument that
Speaker 1: autism should be described as a spectrum, and in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty one, the English speaking world is introduced to the
Speaker 1: research of Hans Asperger.
Speaker 4: And at the same time, autism began to reach into
Speaker 4: the popular consciousness in ways it hadn't before, as Temple
Speaker 4: Granden publishes her best selling book Emergence Labeled Autistic, which
Speaker 4: was about her experience having autism.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty eight, Dustin Hoffman stars in the Hollywood
Speaker 1: smash It Rainman, which put autism on the map in
Speaker 1: ways it never was before.
Speaker 4: In the nineteen nineties, the timeline moves on. This decade
Speaker 4: saw the creation of the first organization to fund biomedical
Speaker 4: research into autism, the National Alliance for Autism Research, and
Speaker 4: then other organizations pursuing similar research are launched and begin
Speaker 4: winning grants. The nineteen nineties also signals the birth of
Speaker 4: a new kind of struggle for rights and representation. A
Speaker 4: self advocacy movement is born. The foundation for a thriving
Speaker 4: neurodiversity movement is laid.
Speaker 1: In the two decades since our understanding of autism and
Speaker 1: the space creative for people on the spectrum has ex
Speaker 1: expanded exponentially.
Speaker 4: But Karen, you know what I think is so interesting.
Speaker 4: While this change was going on, while the fight for
Speaker 4: the rights of people with autism was being waged, while
Speaker 4: the scientists were studying the disorder, and while activists were
Speaker 4: pushing for recognition and access and opportunity, while this idea
Speaker 4: of neurodiversity blossomed, you know what, Donald Triplet, Donald t
Speaker 4: case number one, the kid all of this started with,
Speaker 4: was doing for all of that time, living his life
Speaker 4: exactly right. The world that was focused on autism had
Speaker 4: no idea about Donald Triplett.
Speaker 1: And he had no idea about.
Speaker 4: Them, absolutely none. It's as though Donald and his parents
Speaker 4: also existed in their own silo in that little town
Speaker 4: called Forest. You can see their insulation from all of
Speaker 4: this change going back to as early as nineteen forty nine,
Speaker 4: when doctor Connor wrote his third article on autism. Doctor
Speaker 4: Connor never mentioned Beaman or Mary Triplett by name, but
Speaker 4: he described them and the other parents of the children
Speaker 4: included in the study in not really flattering terms. He
Speaker 4: I have described some of them as harsh and cold
Speaker 4: and mechanical.
Speaker 1: We believe Mary and Beeman Triplet were completely oblivious to
Speaker 1: this characterization, and so Donald living his life protected by
Speaker 1: the comfy, little bubble of small town life in rural Mississippi.
Speaker 4: Donald had no clue about the whole story of autism
Speaker 4: that was swirling around the world outside of Forrest, like
Speaker 4: the development of groundbreaking therapies or the confusion over the
Speaker 4: theory that autism was somehow tied to vaccinations. He had
Speaker 4: nothing to do with the continuous broadening of the definition
Speaker 4: of what constitutes autism.
Speaker 1: Ten years after Beaman Triplet's death, Mary Triplett died of
Speaker 1: heart failure. Here's Oliver Triplett, Don's brother.
Speaker 11: I think she was a little bit concerned about the
Speaker 11: fact that Don might have some problem managing his affairs
Speaker 11: in the event of her death, which occurred in nineteen
Speaker 11: eighty five, and about a year or so prior to
Speaker 11: her demise to be visiting my mother, and she expressed
Speaker 11: these concerns to me, and I pointed out to her,
Speaker 11: I said, mother, I really don't think you have anything
Speaker 11: to worry about, because Don has demonstrated he's a good
Speaker 11: manager of his money. He traveled all over the world,
Speaker 11: goes places, and does a lot of things that I
Speaker 11: wouldn't dare do and said he does just fine. And
Speaker 11: after the discussion was over, she said, Olivery, you've convinced
Speaker 11: me that Don will do just fine. Said okay, it's great.
Speaker 11: So she was satisfied in her own mind that Don
Speaker 11: would be able to fare well for himself. That's a
Speaker 11: great story, isn't it, Tobe.
Speaker 1: I'm John Don Van, I'm Karen Zucker. Autism's First Child
Speaker 1: is a production of School of Humans and iHeart Podcasts
Speaker 1: and based on our book and documentary film In a
Speaker 1: Frank Key.
Speaker 4: Written by Alex French, senior staff writer at iHeart Originals.
Speaker 4: Story editor is Matt Riddle.
Speaker 1: The podcast is produced by Alexander Ritchie.
Speaker 4: Original score composed and mixed by Alice McCoy, editing an
Speaker 4: Assembly by Caliche Moyer, Scoring, mixing and mastering by Dan Marshall.
Speaker 4: Voiceovers by Julia Christgau and Michael Coscarelli. Executive producers are
Speaker 4: Virginia Prescott, Brandon Barr, Elsie Crowley and Jason English. Special
Speaker 4: thanks to Ray Conley, Ernie Inderdott, and Will Pearson.
Speaker 1: School of Humans