The District’s effort to collect $2.2 million from a mental patient who gouged his eyes out in city care has drawn fire from D.C. Council Chairman Vincent Gray, who said billing the blind man violated a city policy once advocated by Mayor Adrian Fenty.

Gray said the D.C. attorney general’s attempt to dun Frank Harris Jr. for the huge payment for room and board covering decades during which Harris was at St. Elizabeths Hospital was “hard to justify.” Gray pulled that phrase from a letter Fenty signed as a council member in 2002 as he and the rest of the council implored then-Mayor Anthony Williams not to try to recover payments from people in city care when D.C. was being sued for negligence.

The District presented the bill dating back to 1987 to Harris after his guardians filed a negligence lawsuit. Harris, first hospitalized in 1973, blinded himself after being released from restraints while in the care of a single hospital employee in 2003. Harris had been restrained after he threatened to pull out his eyes because they were making him see “awful things.”

Fenty’s administration has not responded to calls for comment. The D.C. attorney general justified the bill by saying it would compensate the city tax payers if a large judgment was rendered against the District in the Harris case. The trial in that lawsuit is set for Oct. 15.

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But Gray questioned that legal strategy which he said contradicts District policy. In a letter sent to the mayor last week, Gray reminded Fenty that in 2002 he and other council members urged Williams to avoid using liens in a case involving mentally retarded wards of the city.

“This, too, would be ‘hard to justify as a matter of public policy, public relations and agency accountability,’ ” wrote Gray, reciting a portion of the council’s letter to Williams. Gray is the second council member to question billing Harris. Council Member Phil Mendelson last week called the city’s invoice for $2,229,644 “crude.”

Mendelson, Harris’ guardians and their attorney Joseph Cammarata will criticize the city’s policy and its carelessness in handling mental patients during a news conference today.

smccabe@dcexaminer.com