Former Oklahoma Mental Health Department employee charged

Heath H. Hayes, who had been with the department for more than a decade, was charged Aug. 5 in Oklahoma County with depositing a cashier’s check for $17,386.20 from the Healthy Minds Healthy Lives Foundation into a Bluevine online banking service account Hayes controlled.

An Oklahoma City police investigator’s affidavit, however, says Hayes also deposited a $125,000 cashier’s check into his account and made a $3,000 cash withdrawal.

The affidavit also states that $37,500 in checks from donors intended for the foundation were missing and that all but one were subsequently found to have been deposited in Hayes’ Bluevine account.

The account was listed under the same name as the foundation.

Healthy Minds Healthy Lives is a nonprofit maintained by the Oklahoma Department of Mental Health to receive grants and contributions from non-governmental entities. Hayes, a deputy commissioner of the department at the time of the transactions, was a foundation trustee who was authorized to accept contributions.

Hayes is no longer with the department. According to the investigator’s affidavit, Hayes “resigned en lieu of being fired” when confronted earlier this year and “paid back everything but a few dollars.”

The Department of Mental Health moved quickly to reassure the public after Hayes was charged. Although Health Minds Healthy Lives’ tax returns indicate that it was essentially dormant from 2020-22, in 2023 it apparently became the conduit through which some of Oklahoma City’s most important philanthropies contributed $7.6 million to the $150 million state psychiatric hospital being built on that city’s west side.

Among the missing checks listed in the police report were $20,000 from the Oklahoma City Community Foundation, which manages the finances of many major nonprofits, and $10,000 from the “Arnall family.”

Sue Ann Arnall is one of the state’s most active philanthropists, and her family foundation gave $5 million through the Oklahoma City Community Foundation to Healthy Minds Healthy Lives for the hospital project.

The Inasmuch Foundation, another large Oklahoma City-based grantmaker, gave $1 million to Health Minds Healthy Lives for the the hospital.

Healthy Minds Healthy Lives is not connected to the Tulsa-based Healthy Minds Policy Initiative.