The crime happened in plain view, with no attempt to cover up the evidence or the body.
The crime scene was neither a dimly lit alley nor a remote field.
It was Tucson’s Sonora Behavioral Health psychiatric hospital.
The victim, 44-year-old Bluesky D. Thomas, came to the facility to be helped, not beaten to death that October day in 2025—his injuries including spinal fractures, a liver laceration, missing teeth and severe neck trauma.
“All they think is profit. Profit, profit, profit.”
Eight months later, on June 15, employee Bryce Nolan Coleman turned himself in on a manslaughter charge. Coleman’s crime was caught on video, with Coleman repeatedly forcing Thomas back into his room and becoming increasingly aggressive. Emergency equipment was later brought in after Thomas became unresponsive. He died at a hospital the following day.
The manner of death, as determined by the autopsy report, was “blunt force injuries.”
But the report doesn’t tell the full story. For at least a decade, Sonora Behavioral Health has faced scrutiny over patient deaths, lawsuits and failures in basic safety measures at a facility that presents itself as a place of care.
Those basics include sheets that cannot serve as ropes, door hinges that cannot support hanging, furniture inspected for exposed staples that patients could remove for self-harm, emergency equipment that can actually be reached and staff qualified to care for vulnerable people.
Sonora has been cited for these and scores of other omissions. Among the most damning: hiring untrained or irresponsible staff, including a nurse without a valid Arizona license, a behavioral health technician who assaulted a child patient, a driver with no medical training acting as a health technician and another nurse accused of drinking on the job.
2016: Chayse Vance, age 17, took her own life after what her family’s court filing described as the hospital’s “negligent, careless and reckless acts and omissions.”
2017: Tara Moon’s nurse was supposed to check on her every five minutes, but took a 20-minute coffee break instead, during which Tara took her own life.
2020: Sonora’s CEO resigned after numerous serious citations that the Arizona Department of Health Services said endangered patients’ lives. One incident involved an emergency cart stocked with life-saving medications and medical equipment for immediate, critical care being locked away in a closet cluttered with toys, games, hula hoops, a microwave and a football—rendering it inaccessible.
Meanwhile, more employees have stepped up to blow the whistle.
“The hospital has become a joke,” one employee said.
“All they think is profit. Profit, profit, profit,” said another.
A third employee answered “Yes” to the question, “Should this hospital be shut down?”
As for the latest preventable death, the hospital released the obligatory statement: “Sonora Behavioral Health maintains a strict zero-tolerance policy for any conduct that compromises patient well-being or the integrity of care.”
Then came the afterthought: “We extend our deepest sympathies to the patient’s family.”
But sympathy is not accountability.
Psychiatry claims the authority to confine, drug and control people in the name of care. At Sonora Behavioral Health, that authority ended with a man dead from blunt force injuries.
Bluesky D. Thomas entered the facility alive, on his own two feet, seeking help.
He was carried out feet first, a homicide.
Another casualty of the psychiatric industry of death.
