Black, Autistic and home from prison: Matthew Rushin’s case

“I can relate to Levi a lot because I was him when I was his age,” Rushin tells me on a recent evening. “It’s kids like Levi that make me want to be the advocate I am, the activist I am. The worst thing that could possibly happen to someone who is Black and autistic is they get into a situation like mine.”

The 23-year-old, who was diagnosed with Asperger’s and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as a child and later experienced a traumatic brain injury, is now home from prison, living with his parents in Virginia Beach. But that is only because former Virginia governor Ralph Northam (D) granted him a conditional pardon, resulting in his release in March 2021. Before that, Rushin spent more than two years behind bars following a crash that left a man with life-altering injuries. Rushin was taken into custody that night and later sentenced to serve 10 years of a 50-year sentence.

A young black autistic man was sentenced to 50 years for a car crash. Tens of thousands of people are now calling for his freedom.

While in prison, Rushin was only partially aware of the calls for his release that were coming from his family as well as autistic and racial justice advocates and strangers across the nation who had heard about his case and didn’t believe the criminal justice system had treated him fairly. Together, through emails, phone calls and social media posts, they begged the governor to “Free Matthew Rushin.”

His mother, Lavern Rushin, became his most vocal supporter. She posted public pleas on an Instagram page she created for him. And in an unseen moment, she sent one of his poems to a prison warden and wrote on it: “You have an innocent young man in your prison. I’m going to bring him home.”

The conditional pardon from Northam allowed Rushin to be released early, but it did not grant him complete freedom. It requires him to remain under the supervision of a parole officer for five years and prohibits him from possessing a firearm or driving.

“I can’t drive for the rest of my life, and I honestly wouldn’t want to,” Rushin says. He describes the crash and his time in prison as changing him. Before the crash, he was a college student who watched shows about the criminal justice system but never imagined himself entangled in it. He trusted law enforcement officials. After the crash, he says, he handed over the password to his phone and answered questions without hesitation, only to later realize authorities had already decided his guilt.

“Being locked up showed me the truth of society,” he says. “It gave me a different perspective, a more broad perspective on how society really is and how the people put in place to protect individuals can ultimately fail in that task.”

Body-camera footage obtained by The Washington Post shows one of the first officers at the scene telling others, “He’s f—ing squirrelly, trying to run over here and fake crying. And then he’s talking about, ‘Oh, I just want to kill myself.’ ”

Authorities argued that Rushin intentionally drove into oncoming traffic in an attempt to end his life. He pleaded guilty to two charges of malicious wounding and, for a parking lot collision that occurred before the crash, a hit-and-run charge. Rushin says he didn’t intend to kill himself or hurt anyone that night. His family says he had a seizure and has since placed him on medication to control them.

His family and a psychologist who viewed the body-cam footage describe the officer’s interpretation of Rushin’s behavior as reflecting a lack of understanding of autism. They say Rushin had been asked if he was trying to kill himself and he was repeating that phrase. The repetition of speech is called echolalia and is a common sign of autism. What was seen as “squirrelly” behavior, they say, was his body processing an overwhelming amount of sensory information.

“The police don’t know what it means to be autistic … They don’t understand the differences between how we process language and what our bodies do under stress without our conscious choice,” said psychologist Erin Findley, who is autistic and has viewed the footage. “This is not me saying autistic people get a free pass. If you’re a bad actor, you’re a bad actor. This is me saying if police misunderstand us before they even get on the scene, it’s just going to go worse from there.”

She said one lesson of Rushin’s case is that autistic people should play a role in the training law enforcement officials receive. She also pointed to the importance of recognizing how a person’s different identities, including race, disability and gender, can lead people to place assumptions on them.

Rushin is not the first Black autistic man in the country, or even Virginia, to end up spending years in prison. In 2010, I wrote about Neli Latson, a teenager who was waiting outside his local library for it to open when someone thought he looked suspicious and called the sheriff’s department. A violent encounter with a responding deputy led Latson to spend years in prison. In June, after 11 years and the intervention of two governors, his time under state supervision finally ended.

Neli Latson is — finally — free. It only took 11 years, two governors and a national conversation about race and disability.

“If nothing changes as a result of this particular case, that would be heartbreaking but not a reason to give up,” Findley said of Rushin’s case. “I think this is part of a bigger cultural shift toward understanding and being respectful of different people and challenging our assumptions about what we think about different people.”

The details of Rushin’s case are complicated and painful. More than vehicles were wrecked the night of the crash. Rushin recognizes that. He says he prays every night for the recovery of George Cusick, who was with his wife, Danna Cusick, in the vehicle Rushin hit. In a statement, Danna Cusick described her husband as no longer able to do anything for himself and requiring a feeding tube. “Only someone totally removed from our truth would waste prayers on the impossible,” she wrote. “George will never even closely approach partial recovery. He is destroyed. His family is destroyed. His friends are destroyed.”

If Rushin chose never to talk about that day or his time in prison, that would be understandable. But he is now contributing to important conversations his case started and trying to help people better understand what it means to be autistic and Black. He has developed his own social media following and has spoken publicly when asked.

“I take all 27 months as a lesson,” he says of his time in custody. “I wish all the changes to my life didn’t happen because of me getting locked up. But we’re here now, and doing well and that’s what I care about.”

What he cares about is that there are Black autistic boys who will turn into Black autistic men, and their parents have reason to worry how they will be perceived and treated.

Levi’s mother, Chante Douglas, also sees the similarities between her son and Rushin. She describes what happened to Rushin as one of her worst fears for her son as he gets older.

“As an African American mother who is raising a Black child with a disability that to the world looks invisible, things can go left really quickly,” she said. “If he’s not understanding cues or he doesn’t want to be touched or a noise might trigger him, so many variables can make a situation just as simple as a traffic stop go all the way left and become violent for no reason.”

Douglas has written a series of books that features her son as the superhero, “Echo Boy.” She said she is grateful for the conversations Rushin’s case has amplified because she doesn’t want to hold her son back.

“I want him to live his truth,” she said. “I want him to not be ashamed of having autism. I don’t want him to mask any of the things that make him unique.”