Portland son, 27, ‘strangles his mom to death during psychotic episode after accusing her of poisoning the water and air around him to try to murder him’

According to his family, a 27-year-old murdered his mother by strangulation during a psychotic episode brought on by an attack of paranoia.

Austin Hillier Graham was booked into the Multnomah County Jail in November, nearly three weeks after police responded to a report of his mother’s death.

They would come across the body of Teresa Graham, whose husband said he witnessed their son’s worsening illness at the family’s Portland home.

Hunter Graham on Monday recalled how the couple sought help and first noticed Austin’s mental changes after a failed stint at university that saw him back home in 2018.

After this, his decline accelerated, Hunter recalled — a descent that culminated in the unspeakable crime on Oct. 20. Within weeks, Austin had confessed to killing his mother, and he is now being held in a psychiatric hospital in Oregon.

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Hunter said this on Tuesday KKG: ‘You shouldn’t have to commit murder to get mental health care, but that’s what our son Austin did to my beautiful wife.

While on the local news station, he added, “It was very difficult to tell whether his struggles were the result of a pre-existing mental illness or the result of the concussion or a combination of both.”

Hunter went on to explain why he sees his family’s tragedy as evidence of Oregon’s flawed mental health system, which waits until someone commits a crime before prescribing treatment.

He provided insight into her son’s state of mind at the time, saying Austin firmly believed his mother was secretly poisoning his water and the air around him.

Civil court papers filed months before Teresa’s murder coincided with these claims, which recall years of her son’s mental decline starting in 2018.

The documents allege that Austin, who he posed with his mother in a photo for a poster showing a scientific study on the effects of concussions on brain activity, suffered a traumatic brain injury.

The injury was not specified, but the parents were successfully rescued custody of Austin in August, after telling a court that his mental health took a sharp turn in January 2023.

She wrote how he was unable to work and became isolated in his bedroom at the family home, forgetting to eat or bathe.

During this time, Austin also began experiencing hallucinations, the parents said — with Teresa even writing that at one point he thought people were coming for him, causing him to brandish a knife.

That incident did not lead to anything fatal, but the one a few months later did.

Teresa said the family sought professional psychiatric care for her son within that time, but this was thwarted when he ran away and lived on the streets indefinitely.

Within three months, Teresa was dead, even after the couple told Multnomah County Circuit Court officials that Austin was in “imminent and serious danger” and that his mental health was “rapidly decompensating.”

Speak with KKGsaid an emotional Hunter that it was clear that Austin needed help at this time, even though he repeatedly refused care

“Immediately we discovered what you discovered in your (previous) reporting, which is that involuntary commitment is virtually impossible,” he told the lawmaker, which barred the parents from taking more outspoken action.

“He’s 6ft tall, just like me, and even if you have the right to say you need to go to hospital, if he refuses, that’s a significant logistical problem,” Hunter added, revealing that it getting custody still didn’t allow them to do that. take him to a hospital.

Before that, in July, Austin was admitted to the Kaiser Permanente Brookside Center, Hunter revealed – speaking of a voluntary inpatient mental health hospital in nearby Clackamas.

Hunter recalled how the doctors there were in over their heads when it came to Austin, categorizing him as “beyond their capabilities.”

While they were reportedly trying to transfer him elsewhere, Austin suffered a severe psychotic episode, he said — describing how Austin grabbed a nurse’s badge, walked away from the locked ward and disappeared into the woods.

Police eventually found him two days later with blackberry thorns in his feet, after which he refused medication.

Soon, medical professionals determined that Austin did not meet Oregon’s standards for involuntary treatment — and despite being diagnosed with pychosis, Austin was returned to the family home with a behavioral health plan.

However, Hunter on Monday called that plan “unenforceable” as he recalled his wife not wanting to release him.

“My wife, in her wisdom, did not want him released because we knew he would fail, that the behavioral health plan was set up to fail,” he said.

“We were always optimistic that we would get a handle on this and that he would return to the smart, articulate, promising son that he is and was.”

But as the husbands predicted, the behavior plan ultimately backfired, and Austin strangled his mother a few weeks later.

Complaining that he was not home at the time, Hunter tearfully stated, “The failure was that he killed her.”

The police were called, but in a bizarre surveillance, Portland Police Bureau officers ruled they saw no signs of foul play, and therefore did not declare Austin a suspect.

However, detectives would return a few days later to the 5500 block of Southwest Menefee Drive, in Southwest Portland’s Hillsdale neighborhood – presumably after an autopsy.

Two weeks later, Hunter was in another hospital with his son, where he called 911 and confessed to police.

An affidavit of probable cause claims the confessed killer told the 911 operator, “I think I just killed my mother” and “she died and I watched her die.”

After police arrived to arrest him, he scribbled: “I killed my mother.” [and] I strangled her with my bare hands” on the back of a document listing his Miranda rights.

Austin, meanwhile, has been charged with murder and is now being held at Oregon State Hospital, where he is also being treated.

A local judge ruled him mentally unfit to stand trial, and his father, a lawyer, remained adamant Monday that the state was at least somewhat responsible for his wife’s murder.

“Treatment would have prevented this, in my opinion, without a doubt,” Hunter said Monday, before breaking down in tears.

‘No one should feel this way. The public, the legislature, health care workers, police, everyone needs to know how bad it can get, so everyone is committed to solving the problem.”