Commitment To Matteawan
After hearing from psychiatric experts, Judge Samuel S. Liebowitz declared the tubercular Metesky a paranoid schizophrenic, "hopeless and incurable both mentally and physically", and found him legally insane and incompetent to stand trial. On April 18, 1957, Judge Liebowitz committed Metesky to the Matteawan Hospital for the Criminally Insane at Beacon, New York.
Expected to live only a few weeks due to his advanced tuberculosis, Metesky had to be carried into the hospital. After a year and a half of treatment, his health had improved, and a newspaper article written fourteen years later described the 68-year-old Metesky as "vigorous and healthy looking".
While he was at Matteawan, the Journal American hired a leading workers' compensation attorney to appeal his disallowed claim for the 1931 injury, on the grounds that Metesky was mentally incompetent at the time and did not know his rights. The appeal was denied.
Metesky was unresponsive to psychiatric therapy, but was a model inmate and caused no trouble. He was visited regularly by his sisters and occasionally by Dr. Brussel, to whom he would point out that he had deliberately built his bombs not to kill anyone.
Read more about this topic: George Metesky
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