OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) – A woman is upset no one informed her or any other relatives that her adult son, who is deaf, had been stabbed and hospitalized overnight because police never sent him an American Sign Language interpreter.

It’s hard for Angila West to make sense of how her son, Robert “Bobby” Osborne, ended up in her living room Tuesday afternoon, lying barely responsive on her couch.

“When he is responsive, he is just barely in and out,” West said. “And he’s telling me he’s having real bad headaches.”

Two stab wounds to his back were still oozing blood onto West’s couch when News 4 visited Tuesday afternoon.

“I don’t know, I don’t even know,” West said while fighting tears. “I’m just sitting here watching my son to make sure he won’t die… And I just don’t understand it.”

She wishes she’d known what happened sooner, so she could have been in the hospital with him.

West said Bobby was born deaf, and uses American Sign Language to communicate. She said she would have minimally liked to be in the hospital with her son to act as an ASL interpreter for his nurses.

But she only learned what happened to Bobby after he’d already been released from the hospital and sent home.

She got a call late Tuesday morning from a woman working at Bobby’s apartment building. The woman said Bobby was wandering the hallways and did not seem coherent.

“She said, please come and check on him,” West said. “He’s got blood all over him.”

Around the same time, West saw a News 4 story about a stabbing victim reported at Bobby’s apartment building.  

She put two and two together and raced over to Bobby’s apartment.

She found him in his apartment, barely coherent.

“I thought he was going to die,” West said. “When I seen him in his apartment, I thought he was going to die.”

He was able to tell her bits and pieces of what happened to him overnight through sign language.

“He said that he was on walking home at midnight, and he’d seen a fight outside a store on Robinson and SW 29th Street.”

She says Bobby told her, next thing he knew, one of the people involved in the fight was stabbing him in the back.

“And he said he just ran. He just took off running,” she said. “And I guess he got help somehow because they took him to OU Hospital.”

But he only spent a few hours there.

“The hospital gave him an Uber,” West said while crying. “Instead of calling his family, they brought him home by himself.”

West showed News 4 a blood-soaked hospital gown and blood-soaked hospital pants she says the hospital sent Bobby home wearing.

“And he was…. he was wearing these clothes walking down the hallway.”

She never got a call. Not from police. Not from the hospital.

“And so he was stabbed multiple times and the family was never notified,” West said. “Nobody in the family was notified.”

She later called Oklahoma City Police. She says they told her responding officers weren’t able to ask Bobby for a family contact to call, because they didn’t have a sign language interpreter on duty.

She also called the hospital, to tell them Bobby was still bleeding hours after being released.

“And [the hospital] said, ‘you can call 911 if you want to, but we wouldn’t have turned him loose if it was life threatening,’” West said. “That they wouldn’t have let him go.”

Being left in the dark is not a new experience for West. She told News 4 her son has previously been attacked while living homeless in Shawnee. She never got any calls that time either.

“And I think people need to know what’s going on out here with these handicapped,” West said while fighting back more tears. “I’ve done nothing but fight since I’ve been here, because he’s handicapped…I have screamed at the top of my lungs so many times that—that I’m tired.”

‘Tired’ of being left to make sense of her son’s trauma—after the fact.

“They treat [disabled people] like they’re garbage, but they’re not,” West said. “They have rights too. They have rights. We just can’t… find out how to use them.”

News 4 reached out to the Oklahoma City Police Department to ask why they did not send an interpreter to the scene when they found out bobby was deaf.

“We will always do our best to communicate with anyone who is a victim or otherwise,” a department spokesperson said.