Joshua Fulfer, left, several years ago with his brother, Johnny Fulfer.

Melissa Fulfer knows the young man living in her basement, knows him as intimately as only a mother can know her child, and yet she wonders, in the moments when despair crowds in, whether her son will ever again favor her with the carefree grin she once took for granted.

He is familiar, this young man.

But also, in ways which puzzle and frighten Melissa, he is a stranger.

This, she says, is “the new normal.”

But her rueful smile, devoid of humor, suggests that no word could be more inapt, to describe the last two and a half years, than normal.

During that span her son, Joshua Mark Kelly Fulfer, has spent several months in the Baker County Jail on assault, criminal mischief and other charges, then was a patient for 15 months in the Oregon State Hospital in Salem after being diagnosed with a mental disorder.

In early March 2023, Melissa and her husband, Darren, drove to Salem to bring their son back to their home in Baker City.

He is taking multiple medications to treat his condition, which doctors have identified as schizophrenia.

Joshua was on house arrest for six months after returning to Baker City in March. He wore a monitor on his ankle and, until the six-month period ended in September, he was not allowed to leave home.

On Sept. 12, Judge Matt Shirtcliff in Baker County Circuit Court ruled that Joshua is mentally incapable of assisting with his defense on the criminal charges stemming from a July 22, 2021, incident in Baker City, and that he is unlikely to be able to do so “in the foreseeable future.”

Shirtcliff, who based his decision in part on a psychological evaluation done in late August 2023, dismissed the criminal charges.

Joshua will continue to live with his parents.

And although Melissa is grateful that her son, who turned 20 on May 15, is alive, and neither in jail nor in the state hospital, she is anxious about the future.

“It’s almost like having this whole new individual that you don’t know, living in your house,” she said in a recent interview from her office in Baker City, where she works as a licensed massage therapist.

“I feel like I’m making a rapport with him all over again,” she said. “It’s a chance to re-parent, even though he’s 20 years old. I’m scared for the future, but I’m grateful for the chance.”

Frightening changes in personality

Melissa will never forget when Joshua first mentioned the “red jumpsuits in Wyoming.”

It was just before Christmas 2020.

The Fulfers, who moved to Baker City from Seattle nine years ago, were having family portraits taken for holiday.

Joshua, who had what Melissa described as a normal childhood, also claimed he was going to move to Wyoming to become a rap star.

And he started laughing to himself, something he had never done.

Although Melissa said Joshua didn’t adjust well to online classes during the pandemic — he was a junior at Baker High School in the spring of 2020 — he was otherwise a typical teenager who liked to play basketball and socialize with friends.

But after the incident in December 2020, the situation in the Fulfer home deteriorated.

In March of 2021, when Joshua was 17, he was arrested after fighting with his parents at their home. He was sent to a juvenile detention facility in The Dalles but then returned to Baker City. He turned 18 on May 15.

After graduating from high school in June 2021, Joshua moved to Utah where he lived with Melissa’s parents and got a job at Kentucky Fried Chicken.

He didn’t show up for his first day of work.

Not long after, Melissa got a phone call from a woman at a gas station in Laramie, Wyoming.

Joshua was there, the woman told Melissa. He was crying and confused, not sure how he had ended up in Wyoming, even though he had driven there, Melissa said.

Joshua returned to Baker City.

Melissa said she called a physician assistant who had treated Joshua. She believed her son needed a referral for a mental health evaluation.

But Melissa said she couldn’t force Joshua, who at age 18 was legally an adult, to undergo an evaluation.

Joshua told her he heard voices — “20 demons in his brain,” she said.

She said the physician assistant prescribed two drugs for bipolar disorder, which Joshua took “sporadically.”

On July 7, 2021, he was arrested for stealing a 20-pack of Coors beer from the Maverik convenience store in Baker City. Joshua was also cited for interfering with a peace officer, for allegedly refusing to stop when a police officer told him to do so.

Joshua was released from jail the next day and ordered to appear in Baker County Circuit Court on July 22.

But on the day he was supposed to be in court on the theft charge, Joshua got into a fight with another man. He was also charged with assaulting a police officer — Melissa said Joshua tried to run past an officer during the incident.

Melissa said her son was offered a plea deal in which he would serve 30 days in jail and sentenced to probation for one year.

But she said he didn’t understand the offer.

She said he seemed convinced that he would be in jail for five years based on a maximum sentence on one of the charges.

Melissa said she believes Joshua’s failure to recognize why he should take the plea deal is evidence of his mental disorder.

She also wonders whether, if he had taken the medications prescribed for bipolar disorder, that he might have understood his legal situation.

On Nov. 22, 2021, Shirtcliff ruled that Joshua wasn’t fit to assist with his defense on the criminal charges. The judge ordered that Joshua be sent to the Oregon State Hospital in Salem, where he was driven in early December 2021.

Melissa, who hadn’t seen Joshua since Sept. 23, wouldn’t see him again for almost eight months, due in part to visitor restrictions related to the pandemic.

A shocking reunion

That first meeting in more than half a year happened during Mother’s Day weekend in May 2022.

Melissa was shocked when she saw Joshua.

The skinny young man she knew, weighing just 130 pounds or so, was nearly 200 pounds.

His skin had the pallor of a person who doesn’t often get out in the sunlight.

Most of his hair had fallen out — a side effect of one of the many medications the hospital staff had tried to stabilize Joshua’s condition, Melissa said.

“It really was frightening,” she said.

Although she had spoken frequently with hospital staff about Joshua, and spoken occasionally with her son by phone, sitting beside him was an altogether different experience.

Joshua told her he was “so tired,” that he “can’t think,” that he felt he was “on fire.”

Melissa said her son, who during phone conversations had told her he had played basketball and computer games, and taken classes in cooking and music, wouldn’t or couldn’t, during their face-to-face meeting, answer the question that plagued her.

How was he doing?

What was actually happening while she waited 350 miles away?

A few months later, in August 2022, Melissa visited Joshua again, this time for her birthday.

He seemed much the same as in May.

Melissa remained anxious about her son’s future.

But then, when she arrived at the state hospital around Thanksgiving 2022, Joshua was different.

Better.

“He was more talkative, a little more engaging,” she said.

Doctors, it seemed, had found a more effective combination of medication.

Melissa was optimistic, and not only because Joshua’s condition had improved.

By then, she knew that Joshua almost certainly was coming home.

In August 2022, a federal judge ruled, in a lawsuit filed by Disability Rights Oregon and Metropolitan Public Defenders, that the state hospital could no longer hold certain patients for up to three years.

Judge Michael W. Mosman’s decision affected so-called “aid-and-assist” patients — those who, like Joshua, have been deemed unable to assist in their own defense.

The judge ruled that patients accused of a felony, as Joshua was in 2021, must be released from the hospital within six months of being admitted.

When Mosman issued his ruling, Joshua had been a patient for more than nine months.

Coming home

Melissa and Darren petitioned for their son’s release based on Mosman’s ruling.

It was granted, and in early March 2023 they drove to Salem to pick up Joshua.

For the first time in 15 months, he was coming home.

Pondering the question of how it has been to have Joshua back in his room, Melissa pauses, silent for much longer than before answering any other question.

Perhaps 20 seconds pass as she sits, eyes closed.

She knew things would be different.

Counselors, she said, urged her to prepare for “a new normal,” a “different Joshua.”

“They told me to lower my expectations,” Melissa said.

The terms, though, were mere words.

The reality, Melissa understood, was that those painful, frantic months in 2021, when Joshua was in the Baker County Jail and the future was beyond her ability to comprehend, were indeed a distinct demarcation between who her son had been, and who he would be thereafter.

Yet those well-intentioned warnings could not completely, or even largely, ease the transition as Joshua returned to Baker City.

Instead of sharing her household with a gregarious young man who had an active social life — one that didn’t involve his parents — Melissa had to acquaint herself with “this big, bald person who doesn’t talk, who doesn’t leave the house.”

“Now my kid doesn’t want to socialize with anyone, doesn’t want to see family, doesn’t want to talk to us,” she said.

An employee at the state hospital who had worked with Joshua told her that his scarcity of communication, particularly his lack of interest in having long conservations, wasn’t surprising.

One counselor told Melissa this phenomenon, known as “poverty of speech” and “poverty of content,” is common in people diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Yet she wondered — as, indeed, she wonders today — whether this “new normal” was permanent or merely an interval.

“Am I just going to have this person living in my basement for the rest of my life?” Melissa said. “It’s hard for me.”

As it is for Joshua’s older sister, Hannah Fulfer, who is 22.

Hannah, who also lives in Baker City, said she feels that her brother, the gregarious and popular boy she grew up with, is still there, “but deep inside.”

“He’s not the Joshua I grew up with,” Hannah said. “As kids we were really good friends — he was my main friend. He was really good at sports and he had a lot of friends. People were drawn to him. I remember wishing I had as many friends as he did.

“Now we don’t have the same bond. He doesn’t express himself as much.”

Signs of potential progress

There have been gratifying moments since March — brief glimpses at a Joshua who seems familiar.

This June Melissa and Joshua traveled to Portland for a psychiatric evaluation. They stayed in a motel, something Joshua has enjoyed since he was a little boy.

He had his own room.

And unlike in so many other recent situations, including in his own home, once Joshua stepped inside that motel room he acted with a confidence, an assurance, that Melissa found surprising and pleasing.

He took a shower.

He grabbed the TV remote, sprawled on the bed and started checking channels.

“He seemed in his element,” she said. “Like he knew just what to do.”

Hannah, too, has had moments, since Joshua returned to Baker City in March, when she felt, however briefly, that her brother was once again with her.

One day she hid behind a door then jumped out when Joshua entered the room, trying to scare him, a prank they often pulled while growing up.

When she leaped from behind the door, Joshua seemed on the verge of bursting into laughter, just as he would have done years ago.

And although he didn’t laugh, the episode was nonetheless memorable for Hannah.

“I felt connected to him in that moment,” she said.

Although Joshua has been much more withdrawn since he returned, Melissa said he “hasn’t shown any violent tendencies” since he came home.

“He is nice and polite to everyone,” she said.

Joshua looks after his basic needs. He occasionally helps with household chores, such as washing dishes.

He plays video games occasionally. He watches TV.

Recently he surprised his mother by carving a pumpkin.

Joshua sometimes accompanies Hannah on drives, or to get lunch at McDonald’s.

But although he used to read regularly, he has little interest now in books.

Melissa said he has told her, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

It’s as though he can no longer hold the words long enough in his mind to enjoy a compelling story.

Now that the judge has dismissed the 2021 criminal charges, and with Joshua no longer on house arrest, Melissa thinks about taking trips.

Trips with Joshua or, more troubling, without him.

She wonders whether she could possibly enjoy a vacation if she was worried constantly about how Joshua was getting along by himself.

Although Melissa laments her son’s placidity, his withdrawn personality, she still worries about the unexpected, the unpredictable.

Joshua has been prescribed monthly injections of an antipsychotic drug, Invega. He has had two injections.

The day after the first injection, in September, he called 911 from the Fulfers’ home on the evening of Sept. 22. When police arrived to see if there was an emergency, Joshua became agitated and apparently bumped an officer. He was accused of second-degree disorderly conduct and harassment. No charges have been filed.

Police took Joshua to the Baker County Jail, and a jail official called Dr. Joel Rice, a La Grande psychiatrist who is treating Joshua. Melissa said Rice recommended that the jail staff take Joshua to Saint Alphonsus Medical Center in Baker City, which they did. He stayed overnight but had no other similar episodes.

A test at the hospital showed his blood sugar level was elevated, but he was otherwise healthy, Melissa said.

She later looked at Joshua’s cellphone and was intrigued to see that, prior to calling 911, he had tried to send a couple of text messages to the main phone number for the Baker County Sheriff’s Office. In the messages, which couldn’t be sent because that is a landline and not a cell number, Joshua had written that he felt his “thoughts were being stolen” and he wondered if police could help him.

After his most recent injection of Invega, on Oct. 12, Joshua again called 911 the next day, Melissa said.

She said she has talked with another woman, whose son also has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, about the possibility of helping local police recognize when a person they meet during a call is being treated for a mental disorder.

The idea, Melissa said, is to avoid such encounters from becoming violent unnecessarily, possibly by compiling a list of people who are being treated and who voluntarily submit their names. Police would have access to that list.

Ty Duby, Baker City Police chief, said he thinks the basic idea has merit.

“The more information an officer has, the better,” Duby said.

He said that in some cases, a counselor or someone else trained in dealing with mental disorders might be better equipped to handle the situation than a police officer is.

Duby said Baker City Police officers are trained in techniques for “de-escalating” encounters.

Pondering the future

Although Melissa understands the advice counselors have given her — to change her expectations for Joshua’s future — she said the adjustment is difficult.

She thinks about what Joshua might be doing today — attending college, perhaps, or doing work he finds fulfilling, simply enjoying the social life of an unattached young man.

She remains optimistic.

The Social Security Administration recently granted Joshua’s application for disability. That will help with financial challenges, but it hardly addresses Melissa’s hopes for Joshua’s future.

She wonders whether he would make more progress if he lived not at home but in a group facility where his medications and treatment were monitored but where he could interact more with people his age.

But she knows such opportunities are limited in rural areas such as Baker County.

“I’m hoping,” she said. “I don’t know what the future holds. We’re just trying to live in this community and do our best.”

Editor’s Note Joshua Fulfer declined an interview for this story. His mother, Melissa, said he would consider an interview later.

Joshua Fulfer declined an interview for this story. His mother, Melissa, said he would consider an interview later.

“It’s almost like having this whole new individual that you don’t know, living in your house. I feel like I’m making a rapport with him all over again. It’s a chance to re-parent, even though he’s 20 years old. I’m scared for the future, but I’m grateful for the chance.”

— Melissa Fulfer, whose son, Joshua, is being treated for schizophrenia