Paper: Houston Chronicle

Date: SUN 09/26/1999

Section: A Page: 1 Edition: 4 STAR

Tense encounters, tragic consequences / Advocates for mentally ill say police training can defuse potentially deadly standoffs

By MIKE TOLSON

Staff

At the end of the longest dog-day afternoon of his life, 29-year-old Matthew Morgan walked the length of his driveway and into the sights of a dozen men whose patience had long since melted in the August heat.

The police had not come to kill him, not specifically, but the guns bristling behind the semicircle of squad cars indicated they were not inclined to take chances.

They did not know Morgan as his neighbors did, a helpful young man with a sad personal history. They saw a madman with an ax who for some reason, or no reason, was using it to bang on the bumper of his truck.

In the common ground sometimes occupied by the police and the mentally ill, however, perception is very much reality. It did not matter that Morgan probably had no intention of harming anyone. Police perceived him as a threat to public safety, even if the public in this case was them. With that established, the law freed them to use deadly force.

As in similar encounters played out with ever-greater frequency around the country, the decision would come down to a judgment call. And that judgment ultimately would hinge less on logic than fear. Morgan had created the situation. The police were there to deal with it, not as social workers or psychiatric experts, but as cops. If he scared them, they'd shoot.

For a while, the confrontation remained low-key. Then the SWAT team was called in.

"That's when I got a sinking feeling," said Jane Greer, a neighbor who watched the episode unfold from her front window. "Everything changed. The mood turned nasty in a hurry. I knew something bad was going to happen."

At a little past 6 p.m. on Aug. 15, 1995, Greer's fears came true. A single rifle shot echoed down the 8400 block of Braesview Street, a leafy and unremarkable patch of southwest Houston that knows little of urban violence. Morgan lay dying.

By sheer weight of numbers, police in any city can say that most encounters with the mentally ill resolve peacefully. But there is a growing list of exceptions. This year alone in Houston, police have killed three people with mental problems, including two who had called 911 for medical help but met with police instead.

These bloody conclusions have led advocates for the mentally ill to call for a new and specially trained type of police officer, one who understands how to approach them and de-escalate tense situations.

"I had called police for help," said Diane Morgan, the young man's mother. "I wanted to admit him to a hospital on a mental health warrant. When they got here, they never asked us what to do to calm him down."

God knows Morgan needed calming. He'd been agitated all day, and the periodic arrival of more men in bulletproof vests was not helping. Greer told police they should let him be, or let her talk to him, and he'd put the ax down. They said neither was a possibility.

Precisely what he was aiming to do as he made his way down the driveway is anybody's guess. He still held the ax, though not menacingly. He did not bellow threats or dare anyone to shoot or move erratically. He simply walked.

Perhaps Morgan sensed a growing willingness among the police to do what they had repeatedly promised his parents they would not. He may have decided that just by taking a few short steps, nothing more, all the pain and weariness that he felt suddenly would vanish.

For hours the cops had encircled the home that he shared with his parents. They entreated Morgan, cajoled him, as he wandered in and out of the garage, sometimes stopping to throw tools and other items onto the driveway. His parents were taken several houses away. Their presence would only make things worse, the officers said.

James and Diane Morgan had called police wanting nothing more than to have their son taken for help. He had broken a window in a fit of anger, and they wanted him to know such conduct would not be tolerated. Now, with a SWAT team assembled on the front lawn, that seemed trivial.

Later, during the post-mortems that dogged their sleepless nights, it seemed reasonable to think that over the course of the afternoon Morgan really had grown sick of the sweaty, pointless standoff, sick of the metaphor it now offered for his life.

He had never been normal, even as a boy. Slower than others and emotionally unpredictable, he was unable to attend regular schools or hold down significant jobs. Friends and family knew how dispirited he was being a grown-up who could not quite manage on his own, whether it meant attracting a girlfriend or keeping up the payments on his pickup.

Sometimes the frustration boiled over and he punched things. His parents encouraged him to take his medication, but he often refused, saying it made him feel strange. Its absence, of course, left him vulnerable to black moods and debilitating depression.

So suicide - police assisted - was a possible impulse at the end of a taxing day. But it was only a possibility. Morgan may have simply wanted to say something to the officers. Maybe he was going to give up. No one knows.

Police told his parents they were just protecting themselves. James Morgan said one of them remarked that it had been a long time since they had had to shoot one. Then the SWAT team packed up and left. Matthew Morgan died en route to the hospital.

The reports that made the news that night passed along the usual details of a troubled man who made trouble for authorities and, sadly, paid for it. But none of them mentioned something else that Morgan represented: a gulf of misunderstanding that dooms police and the noncriminal mentally ill to endless replays of this deadly dance.

Since Morgan's death four years ago, hundreds of similarly afflicted men and women have been killed in confrontations with police in scores of cities around the country. Some were suicidal and deliberately provoked police into doing the job for them. But the majority were far less rational. Paranoid or belligerent, depressed or perhaps delusional, they were killed because officers saw no other way of dealing with them.

Like any large city, Houston has seen its share of these incidents. Of the 39 people killed by HPD officers since 1995, at least six, including Morgan, were known to be mentally ill. Several other cases strongly suggest it. The latest occurred five weeks ago when an unarmed woman suffering from chronic severe depression was shot on the street.

These fatal encounters speak loudly to a lack of police preparedness for interacting with mentally ill citizens. Only a small number of cities have developed special approaches for handling this vexing population, and those few reluctantly in the wake of unpopular shootings. HPD instituted a new training program only after a controversial case in January.

The deaths also tell us something about the value society places on an entire class of sick people, mental health advocates contend. Considered defective in a way that would not be applied, say, to cancer victims, the mentally ill fight a stigma that renders them creatures to be alternately feared and pitied instead of people to be helped. This makes it hard, activists say, to get the sort of money for community services that would make their lives better and safer.

"Regrettably, the mental illness community and the law enforcement community are rapidly becoming victims of an underfunded mental health-care delivery system," said Mary Dees, an advocate and spokesman for the Texas Mental Health Association. "Both are paying the price - persons with mental illness with their lives, and law enforcement with their reputation."

Because of the wide latitude given police on the use of deadly force, grand juries or district attorneys who review shootings of the mentally ill almost always rule them justified. Family members of the victims seldom agree, of course. Morgan's parents are typical of relatives who never had a bad thought about law enforcement before and now find themselves suing the city and the police for excessive use of force.

"They kept saying they were not going to hurt him," Diane Morgan said. "It is a terrible, terrible heartache. The one thing we want is that nobody ever has to go through this again."

It is a laudable goal - and a quixotic one. All but a relative handful of the nation's 10 million mentally ill now live outside of institutions. Some are severely sick. Many have minimal support and supervision. For those who refuse medication and skip clinic appointments, there are few legal consequences in most states. Laws compelling outpatient treatment are seldom enforced, and involuntary commitments keep the ill in hospitals only until they are stabilized. Inexorably, encounters with police will rise as the mentally ill population does.

Patrol officers understandably do not embrace their new and unwanted role as de facto mental health workers. Neither does the training typically given them. Methods useful in controlling a situation with a criminal suspect often result in tragedy with a mentally ill person in crisis.

"In the last five years, I've seen more and more of these" killings, said E. Fuller Torrey, a psychiatrist and expert in schizophrenia who has written extensively about the mental health system. "It never surprises me when there is a fatal outcome. Police often have no information on these persons. The officer is going in blind in most cases, going in with little or no training in dealing with the mentally ill, and he's going in scared."

Occasionally these killings stir community indignation, especially if racial or ethnic groups find opportunity in them. More often, they pass with little comment. Mental health advocates, concerned about maintaining good relations with police, are not inclined to take to the streets. One has to wonder whether any other identifiable group is victimized so regularly and so anonymously.

"These people are throwaway people," said a bitter Al Seymour, whose schizophrenic daughter, Sheryl, was killed by Houston police in January after she had called 911 for help. "Let's face it. These people are easy to kill."

. . .

The numbers are elusive. Nobody has any clear idea of how many mentally ill people die each year in police confrontations. There is no box for crazy that data keepers check off and turn in to the Justice Department. Even if there were, in many cases the mental status of the victim never comes to light.

Last May, for example, an HPD officer shot and killed 31-year-old David Lee Johnson in southeast Houston. Johnson, an ex-convict with a long record of petty crimes, had been bothering customers at a chicken restaurant, and when officers arrived he began fumbling in a duffel bag he carried. Eventually he pulled out a gun and was shot.

The killing of what seemed to be a run-of-the-mill street tough was barely noticed and certainly not questioned. It came to no one's attention that Johnson had recently been discharged from the parole department's mentally ill caseload.

If statistics are hard to find, the human damage is not. An anecdotal review by the Houston Chronicle of police shootings around the country during the last five years turned up a long string of tragedies involving those known to be mentally ill.

Some of the victims belong to the so-called suicide-by-cop category, where an officer is provoked into a violent reaction by a suicidal person. They are hard to prevent, especially if the officer is unaware of the person's mental condition. But in many other cases, police were called for assistance in an emergency by neighbors, family members or sometimes the mentally ill themselves, and they ended up killing the person they were supposed to help.

Sheryl Seymour, for example, was shot by Houston police in January after calling for paramedics to take her to a psychiatric hospital; she had suffered from schizophrenia for years and could feel a bad episode coming on. By the time they arrived, she was fully psychotic and met them at the door with a kitchen knife. Police who had accompanied the ambulance shot her when she advanced toward them.

One doesn't have to look far or long to find other examples:

In New York last month, Gidone Busch, 31, was shot after striking police with a hammer. Officers were responding to complaints that Busch, known in the community as emotionally disturbed, was threatening children and brandishing a hammer while singing loudly. When police arrived, they found him in the basement of his house wearing a prayer shawl. The officers retreated onto the street and Busch followed them, carrying the hammer. During a scuffle, one officer fell to the ground. Busch struck him several times with the hammer. When he refused to drop it, he was shot seven times. His mother said that he had recently refused to seek help for depression.

In Des Moines, Iowa, on June 30, Russell Stein, 37, was shot eight times as he allegedly attacked a police officer with a knife. Stein's mother, who wanted help in getting the knife away from him, called police. The confrontation escalated quickly, and when an officer fell Stein kept moving toward him. After chemical spray and a stun gun failed to stop him, Stein was shot seven times. It is believed Stein was being treated for schizophrenia and that he had stopped taking his medication. He had become more withdrawn and quiet, and on the day of his death he was walking around with a knife.

And in Reno, Nev., on March 25, Kaylyn Cotton-Dobie, 34, was fatally shot after she attacked two officers with a knife in the parking lot of the apartment complex where she lived. Cotton-Dobie was bothering another tenant when police were called. She stabbed the officers who arrived, though the wounds were superficial. Police had been called in September 1998 when she threatened to kill herself and her daughter. The 10-year-old girl was given to social workers and her mother was referred to a mental hospital, but no follow-up was made.

Richard Danford saw many such reports when he was a patient advocate for the mentally ill in San Diego County. Finally, in 1995, he got so fed up that he sent a letter to the local newspaper titled "Stop Killing My Clients." He complained that many of the deaths were avoidable - if the mentally ill could be seen as something other than mad dogs that have to be put down when they go out of control.

"I was not trying to blame anybody," Danford said. "Nobody is technically at fault here, individually. But there's another way to intervene in this situation that does not involve a death."

The response Danford received from police officers was vociferous. They insisted their colleagues had done nothing wrong, even when one of the victims was armed only with a garden trowel. All of the shootings were found justifiable, the officers reminded him, and all of the officers involved had followed standard procedure.

"The problem is that there was only one police policy for dealing with physically aggressive people," he said. "In their view, this was the unfortunate, inevitable outcome of dealing with these sorts of people."

. . .

From time immemorial, police have had to confront the irrational. Stress, drugs, alcohol or criminal conduct can prompt erratic conduct among sane people. Figuring out how to deal with it was part of the job.

But seldom did police have to confront the bizarre, and for good reason. Most of the seriously mentally ill were locked up in state hospitals.

Over the last two decades in the United States, that percentage has grown as the hospitals have shrunk. The asylums that grew out of a humanitarian reform movement in the 18th century were done in by a combination of events, starting with the development of groundbreaking medications such as the anti-psychotic Thorazine that allowed the ill to function better.

About the same time, muckraking journalists began to expose the "snake pit" conditions in some poorly run facilities. Later came successful legal challenges to forced hospitalization. Eventually, bureaucrats and politicians realized that continuing the trend could save them significant money.

One wave of de-institutionalization followed another. From 1955 to 1995, the number of long-term patients kept in public mental health hospitals declined by 82 percent. Texas, for example, went from 16,400 patients to 2,900 over that period. Arkansas dropped from 5,000 to 180.

"This was a good thing," said Betsy Schwartz, director of the Greater Houston Mental Health Association. "The problem is, the same amount of money did not follow them as they left the hospitals. The state discharged them, but there was not enough money to provide the services they needed to cope well in the communities."

Over the past 16 years, spending by state mental health agencies has declined - measuring in constant dollars - in all three main statistical categories. Predictably, the biggest drop was for in-patient expenses, where there was an actual dollar drop, but a falloff was seen in total and per-capita spending, too.

As the great hospital shrinkage went on, another problem emerged.

"We have gone further and further into the deep pool of mentally ill to take away more beds," said Torrey, who wrote of their dilemma in his recent book Out of the Shadows. "As we have gone down in the pile, we have discharged sicker people, people who are much more at risk for causing problems than the people we used to release."

Some cities that were flooded with the institutions' former patients began to feel like they were under siege. There were not enough good places for them to live, so many ended up in shabby boarding homes, others on the streets or in public parks. There was not enough money to pay for workers to make sure they stayed on their medication and could manage their lives.

Torrey calls de-institutionalization the "largest failed social experiment in 20th century America." Though historians might dispute his assertion - prohibition being an obvious challenger - there is virtually no dissent within the mental health community that the "liberation" of the mentally ill has been flawed from the beginning. Were it otherwise, the astronomic increase in contact with police would not have happened.

In New York, for example, 911 calls concerning "emotionally disturbed persons" jumped from 20,000 in 1980 to 46,000 in 1988. In Los Angeles, the police department's Mental Evaluation Unit handled roughly 12,000 calls in 1987 but 54,000 in 1993. The Houston Police Department does not keep statistics on calls related to mental illness.

"The fact that police are so involved with the mentally ill is a direct reflection that communities have not taken the steps necessary to make de-institutionalization work," said Ron Honberg, legal director for the National Association for the Mentally Ill. "In fact, it has proved to be a disaster in many communities."

Police agencies did nothing to create this problem. Where some activists fault them is in not adapting to the problem they were handed. In San Diego, Richard Danford remembers the cold response he and others received when they first suggested to police that there might be another way of handling the mentally ill.

"There was a real closed-mindedness," he said. "You have to find a way to get past the traditional mind-set of law enforcement. That is the first major stumbling block. You have to get them to go look at other places where it is happening, to see there is another way, that they don't have to kill people."

The place where every police department looks first is Memphis.

. . .

It was a warm but not unpleasant June evening along the Mississippi River. Officer Tony Kingery was enjoying a calm Friday shift when he was called to a downtown Memphis hospital for a minor problem. Security officers there were detaining a young man who had been told earlier in the day that he could not be treated there because of insurance problems. For some reason he had returned.

The easiest thing would have been to arrest the man for trespassing. But Kingery had been sent to the scene because the man's mental state seemed questionable. Just To be safe, the dispatcher wanted an officer from the Crisis Intervention Team there.

The suspect was in his mid-20s, polite and dressed cleanly in shorts and a tucked-in T-shirt. His story was confusing, and he was stubborn in trying to tell it. He needed help from a hospital. He said he suffered from schizophrenia and could feel himself getting worse. He went home to get his Medicaid card, but it was not clear why he had returned to the hospital that had ordered him elsewhere.

"Please don't arrest me," he repeated several times. "I need my medication. I'm not feeling good."

In another time or place, the man would have been hauled to jail for a routine trespass booking. But Kingery patiently tried to piece together a brief psychiatric profile. After 15 minutes, he decided to take him to the nearby crisis stabilization unit, whose employees were familiar with the man and agreed to take him. Had the young man gone to jail and continued several more days without medication, the next confrontation might have been more problematic.

"When we implemented the program, our department sent out a message to the community: Our department looks at the mentally ill as a special population with special needs," said Lt. Sam Cochran, who heads the CIT program and has become an apostle for its approach. "We work very hard to keep people out of county jail and route them into the mental health system."

The Memphis program was created from scratch in 1986 following a controversial police shooting. Political leaders insisted on a new method of dealing with the mentally ill, but when officials sought models elsewhere they could not find any. Working with the local mental health community, they fashioned one in which specially trained officers would work with doctors at a newly created crisis stabilization unit.

The idea is simple. About a fourth of the city's patrol officers, all volunteers, receive at least a week's worth of special training in mental illness. They learn the different diseases, the medications that are prescribed for them, and how the symptoms typically appear. They meet mentally ill people - officers must refer to them as "consumers" - and their families.

When at all possible, a CIT officer is dispatched to calls where the mental or emotional state of a citizen is at issue. That officer assumes control of the scene even if he or she is outranked by other officers present.

"That's the only way to assure accountability and responsibility," Cochran said.

Many officers are not cut out for the work, he admits. They don't have the interest in it or the right attitude. But those who do can make a difference.

"I shudder to think what it would be like without our CIT program," Cochran said. "The officer injury rate went down sixfold. The number of mentally ill people injured went down. We have officers who go by and check on people. We never had that before."

Police training is only half of the community's commitment, however. There must be somewhere for officers to take the 350 or so ill people who are placed in custody every month, and a regular mental hospital with all its attendant bureaucracy would not be efficient. So local mental health officials established an emergency clinic, which aims to have the officer back on the street within 15 minutes and the ill person stabilized and into an appropriate setting within six hours.

"Our goal is to take them out of the criminal justice system," said clinic director Randy DuPont. "Once they get into that system, they tend to stay in it." DuPont is sold on the CIT concept. He said he began to see a change in the behavior of the police officers.

"It used to be, never call the police - they'll hurt your patient," DuPont said. "Now it's, always call CIT. I feel like we have 150 outreach workers."

For all the good news that comes from Memphis and even San Diego - it finally created its own Psychiatric Emergency Response Team - the bad news remains more prevalent. Police and city officials are not easily convinced that they should go to the effort and expense of special officers, teams or training regimens.

Advocates say their objections are shortsighted.

"As long as the police have to deal with the troubling realization that they are front-line mental health officers, it makes sense on a moral or humane ground, and for their own safety and well-being, to institute some system like the Memphis program," said Ron Honberg of NAMI.

Besides those concerns, the killing of the mentally ill can have a polarizing effect in the cities where they occur, especially among populations whose relations with police have been tenuous.

The recent death of Gidone Busch in New York stirred the wrath of the city's population of Hasidic Jews, who felt one of their own was gunned down needlessly. A local state assemblyman chastised the police officers for a "Dodge City" mentality, forcing Mayor Rudy Giuliani to come to their defense at a special press conference. A grand jury is reviewing the shooting.

In Cincinnati, the 1997 killing of Lorenzo Collins, a black man who armed himself with a brick after escaping from a hospital mental ward, sparked ugly racial discord.

"It was very divisive," said Joe Deters, the former Hamilton County prosecutor who reviewed the shooting and found it legally justifiable. "There were lawyers willing to divide the community to drum up business. It led to death threats to my family and a whole lot of things that were not pleasant."

Deters, now the Ohio state treasurer, does not believe the killing had any racial implications. But he said his report in no way condoned the police action.

"These cases are gut-wrenching because the mentally ill person does not perceive or understand reality the way the police officers do, and that can lead to tragedy," Deters said. "Police methods have to evolve. Look at the way we once dealt with riots and how far we've come."

There is talk about doing something in Cincinnati. So far nothing has come of it.

"I'm less interested in blame than in finding a less harmful way of dealing with these people," said Jerry Huhn, president of the local NAMI chapter. "My greatest hope is that there will be a slow wellspring of commitment to improve. I have yet to see any evidence of that."

Houston's police department finally has shown that inclination. Earlier this year, HPD began an experimental program in which 60 patrol officers in the Central Division underwent CIT training. The captain of that division, Dwayne Ready, is enthusiastic about the concept and thinks there is a good chance Chief Clarence Bradford will extend it throughout the department.

"It arms officers with a tool to de-escalate a situation," Ready said. "Understanding where that person is coming from will allow you to know what kind of questions to ask that may calm things down."

Calm and slow, especially at the beginning of contact, is crucial, Cochran said. And Ready understands why. It's all about overcoming an officer's instinctive reaction of self-protection. The more time an officer has, the more accurately he can assess the threat.

"If there's enough time to establish communication, if there's a window of just a few seconds when he can assess the person's condition, then this training can make all the difference in the world," Ready said

. . . .

Whatever Houston does will be too late for Colleen Kelly, who on Aug. 24 became a victim of the sort of quick reaction to which Ready referred. Kelly was walking along a street near her house when police shot and killed her. They had learned she was suicidal and had heard she was looking to get a gun. Apparently, they saw her as a threat.

She was. To herself.

Police had been dispatched after Kelly's psychiatrist called 911 and asked for an ambulance to be sent to the Spring Branch home where she lived with her mother. She had called him a few minutes earlier and told him she was thinking about going over to a friend's house, getting a gun and killing herself.

Kelly, 38, had suffered from chronic severe depression for most of her life. She had made similar threats before and had even attempted suicide, though not with a gun. Her doctor took her seriously and thought it might be wise to get her quickly to a psychiatric facility.

Police were dispatched, too, in case there was a problem.

Arlene Kelly was surprised to see an officer at the door that morning. She thought her daughter had just stepped outside onto the porch to smoke a cigarette. In any case, she had not been gone long. Asked about a gun, police were told the family did not own one, nor did her mother know anybody from whom Kelly could get one. The police left.

A few minutes later, Kelly was dead.

"She was this tiny thing who weighed just over 90 pounds," said her sister, Tracy Pillsbury. "And she was so loving. She would never hurt anybody, except herself."

According to the police version of events, Kelly was found near the intersection of Emnora and Hollister. As officers tried to speak with her, she approached the car with her raised hand inside a fanny pack. They told her to put the fanny pack down, but she did not. As she got closer to the car, Officer J.H. Shackett fired once, hitting her in the chest. Kelly died en route to the hospital.

As it turned out, there was no weapon in the fanny pack, only a stick. It is unclear whether Kelly was trying to provoke police or whether there was a misunderstanding. Her mother said she suffered from a 50 percent hearing loss. Might she have been approaching the officers to hear them better?

As with Matthew Morgan, the tragedy of Colleen Kelly's death was rivaled only by the sadness of her life. In her younger years, her promise seemed limitless. She was the best student in her class, an avid reader and gifted writer - good at almost anything she did. But she often felt bad. Her depression went undiagnosed for 13 years, and she could not understand the feelings of despair and hopelessness that plagued her.

"I thought it was my fault, a result of my weak character," she wrote in a journal many years later. "When I wasn't in a pit of despair, there was a lingering sadness. Life was nothing to me: a senseless cycle. No meaning, no pleasure. I couldn't see good in anyone or anything."

Kelly left high school in the East Texas town of Trinity just before graduating, a fit of pique or boredom that cost her valedictorian honors and some college scholarship money that went with it. She had the talent for many potential careers, but not the health to pursue them. College seemed out of the question in spite of her intellect.

A love for animals led her to work at the Houston Zoo and the Houston Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. She enjoyed traveling, taking trips to China and Costa Rica, where friends recall her climbing a tree in a swamp during a snake hunt to retrieve a particular specimen.

At her funeral, Kelly was remembered as warm, fearless and passionate; a great aunt and empathetic friend. One who eulogized her called her "simply remarkable." Another marveled at her insights. She likely would have been shocked at the things said.

"She didn't feel like she had been a success at anything," said Karl Peterson, a close friend. "She had no idea of how many people she touched."

In 1996, frustrated by what she perceived as a lack of accomplishment, Kelly made a belated stab at college at the University of Houston. One of her favorite courses was psychology, for which she was required to keep a journal.

"I take pleasure in many things," she wrote on Nov. 20, 1996, her last journal entry. "I'm learning to trust myself and other people. Understanding some of the processes affecting me helps, as does having a network of support. I'm finally able to pursue goals. Altogether, I'm happy to be alive in this world."

Her happiness did not last. She had to leave school after two semesters when her condition worsened. One more thing to weigh on her sense of failure.

"She wanted to take care of herself and be OK, and she could not reconcile with the fact that she could not and was not," said Pillsbury, her sister. "She felt like she was supposed to be the strong one, yet she couldn't be."

The last two years were hard as Kelly struggled with her depression. She was in and out of psychiatric facilities. Recently she was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, which marries elements of the psychosis found in schizophrenia with an affective disorder such as depression.

"She always improved in the hospitals, but it never lasted," her mother said.

One afternoon in June, Arlene Kelly came home to find her daughter in a rage, cursing at plants she had just put in pots. Arlene Kelly called 911, then canceled the call minutes later, thinking better of it.

Something told her that might just make matters worse. Now, angry and grieving, she hopes other relatives of mentally ill people feel the same reluctance.

"You just don't call the police," she said. "It's a death sentence."

. . .

Fatal encounters

Oceanside, Calif., March 30, 1993

Melodee Belew, 38, was killed in her home while flashing a steak knife and ranting about Jesus and the devil coming to take her soul. She went into her bathroom and fought to keep the police out. They broke the door down and fired pepper spray and an electronic dart. She fought back with a 4-inch steak knife, and they shot her.

. . .

Grand Prairie, Oct. 7, 1997

Joseph Calloway, 52, was killed as he allegedly raised a 3 1/2-inch knife toward a police officer, who had tried to subdue him with pepper foam spray and with his baton. Calloway was killed by a second officer, Blake Hubbard, who subsequently was tried for murder in connection with the incident. He was acquitted, but fired by the Grand Prairie Police Department.

. . .

Anchorage, Alaska, Oct. 12, 1995

Bobbie Lee Carlisle, 45, was shot and wounded by police after she held them at bay for nine hours outside her apartment. Neighbors said she heard voices and was very paranoid; her apartment manager had tried to get help for the obviously mentally ill woman for months without success. A psychiatric hospital suggested calling a counseling center; people there said call police. Police had been called to Carlisle's home five times, but no incident had been serious enough to arrest her and her behavior was not so extreme that an involuntary commitment seemed warranted.

. . .

Los Angeles, Dec. 18, 1994

Aaron Cease, 30, was killed when he threatened police officers with the jagged end of a broken metal crutch. Police were alerted by callers to a man in the street swinging a crutch at cars and pedestrians. When they arrived, Cease, who suffered from depression, ignored commands to drop the crutch and advanced toward officers. The sheriff's deputies fired 12 shots at Cease. A witness who had called police said there was no way the man was a serious threat to the lives of the officers.

. . .

Austin, Feb. 2, 1999

Johnny Cornell, 30, was shot when he raised a knife toward police officers who had been called to a neighborhood grocery store where a vehicle was on fire. When police arrived, Cornell was walking away from a Lincoln, where he had started a fire in the back seat. A clerk at the store told the officer not to shoot Cornell because he had a mental condition. Indignant family members said Cornell also was deaf.

. . .

Spokane, Wash., Dec. 1, 1995

Blaine Dalrymple, 38, was shot six times at his mother's house after she had called 911 for assistance in getting him to leave. Officers tried to talk him out of the bathroom, and sprayed pepper spray under the door when they heard him breaking glass. He finally came out of the room with a knife and a long shard of broken glass and was immediately shot. Dalrymple had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. He had stopped showing up for his medications in September 1994, and staff at the local community mental health center "lost track of him."

. . .

Knoxville, Tenn., Oct. 17, 1997

Juan L. Daniels, 25, was shot to death in the basement of his home after police responded to a disturbance call. He and a woman had gotten into an argument, and Daniels called the police. Soon after they arrived, he ran into his basement and held a knife to his throat, threatening suicide. A subsequent lawsuit alleged that the officers became impatient. Daniels became more and more agitated and supposedly lunged at the officers with the knife. The two officers fired nine shots. Police had been in the home for about an hour and 20 minutes before the shooting.

. . .

Hartford, Conn., April 10, 1996

Demond Harper, 24, was killed during a struggle with an officer inside his girlfriend's apartment. Police said he attacked the officer with a knife, prompting the officer's partner to shoot him. But the victim's sister and girlfriend say he had already put down the knife when the struggle began, and they question whether lethal force was necessary. Harper was diagnosed schizophrenic and had not been taking the prescribed medication. He had been acting strangely. Right before police were called, he was using a large kitchen knife to carve a bar of soap.

. . .

Greensboro, N.C., Sept. 8, 1994

Daryl Howerton, wandering around a street wearing only sunglasses and a hat, carried a knife and talked about killing himself. When police confronted him outside a barber shop, he refused to drop the knife. A Mace dousing had no effect. As he moved toward a bystander, police shot and killed him. Witnesses said Howerton made no threatening moves and that police continued to shoot him as he fell. The shooting of Howerton, who was black, became a significant racial incident.

. . .

Rio Rancho, N.M., Aug. 18, 1998

David Allen James, 37, was shot to death by four police officers responding to a 911 call from his ex-wife who was concerned about his suicidal state. James had a history of mental illness and had previously asked police to shoot him on at least four occasions. James' ex-wife warned the dispatcher that he carried a cross and that he would try to fool the police into thinking he had a gun. Whether the dispatcher ever passed on the warning is uncertain. Police opened fire when he pulled the cross out of his pocket.

. . .

Baltimore, Md., Jan. 12, 1996

Betty Keat, 63, was killed by police officers who broke into her home when she failed to respond to knocks on the door. Keat allegedly threatened one officer with a knife and was then shot by him. She had been diagnosed with depression and schizophrenia. The officers did not have an emergency warrant for an evaluation. However, a neighbor had called 911 saying that Keat had been walking down the street brandishing a sickle and had thrown "Molotov cocktails" on a neighbor's lawn.

. . .

Tampa, Fla., Nov. 9, 1998

David Montgomery, 39, locked himself in his apartment during a schizophrenic episode. When police stormed the door, he stabbed one officer in the cheek with a barbecue fork. Another officer shot him to death. Montgomery, the son of a schizophrenic who committed suicide, periodically stopped taking his medicine because he thought it was poison.

. . .

Ukiah, Calif., July 14, 1998

Marvin Noble, 45, was shot to death after allegedly stabbing a police dog and threatening two officers. The officers were trying to detain Noble, who suffered from schizophrenia, for a psychiatric evaluation after a county mental health worker had become alarmed about his behavior and asked that he be picked up. Noble was sitting in a hamburger joint drinking lemonade when police approached him. He pulled out a knife and said he was not going to go with them. He then ran back toward his apartment. As he reached the building, he was cornered by the dog in a stairwell and stabbed it. An officer then shot Noble.

. . .

Alexandria, Va., July 7, 1996

Daniel Shaw, 34, was shot dead as he was striking a police officer in the face with a brick. Shaw, who had suffered from schizophrenia for about 10 years and had been in and out of mental hospitals, was known to the police for erratic behavior. He was harassing people and uprooting trees and street signs, and when police arrived he threw bricks at them. They tried to subdue him with pepper spray, but failed.

. . .

Monmouth, Maine, Dec. 29, 1998

Jerzy Sidor, 43, was shot by police after charging them with a sword or long knife. They and a mental health worker had gone to his home for a psychiatric evaluation. Sidor, who suffered from schizophrenia and had a history of assaultive behavior, charged from the house and struck one officer, though without injury. Family members had called a mental health clinic three days before the fatal shooting asking for help. They said he had stopped taking his medication, was losing weight and was not sleeping. A crisis worker came to the home and said Sidor did not meet the criteria for hospitalization.

. . .

Gresham, Wash., Aug. 21, 1994

Janet M. Smith, 28, was shot and killed by police in a grocery store while holding a cat and a knife. She had come into the store and said someone was after her. She went to the beverage aisle, got a soda, lit a cigarette and sat down. Managers blocked off the area and called police. Five officers arrived. They asked her to drop the knife, and she threatened to kill the cat. She advanced toward the officers and they sprayed her with pepper spray. Police said she then raised the knife above her head and ran toward them. One officer fired two or three times.

. . .

Violent ends to difficult lives

Shirley Ansley

. . . police were her worst fear

Shirley Ansley suffered from schizophrenia for 30 years, but her sister believes she was in control of herself on the day she died - until she saw police.

"The police were her worst fear, and they always had been," said Lula Stevenson. "She was scared of them."

Ansley, 56, was killed by police in Jacksonville, Fla., after a confusing series of events that began when her boss called and asked her to stop by his office when she got to work to discuss an episode from the previous day. Ansley, a guard with a private security company, had shown up out of uniform and gone on an obscenity-filled tirade. Relatives suspected she had stopped taking her medication.

Ansley arrived at work and began strumming her guitar and singing. Her boss called police to have her taken for a psychiatric evaluation. The officer saw no evidence of a threat and declined. Her boss then asked the officer to issue a trespass warning so that she would not come back on the premises.

When the officer approached Ansley, she drove off in her van. Even though she had committed no crime, a chase ensued. The officer called for backup.

A few minutes into the chase, Ansley turned into a driveway at an office building and quickly found herself boxed in by the patrol cars. Ansley tried to maneuver her van out of the tight spot, but there was not enough room.

The drivers got out of their cars. They said later that she gunned the engine and pointed her van toward them. One officer fired through the driver's side window five times. Ansley died at the scene.

The shooting was ruled justifiable, though the officer was found to have violated department policy by needlessly placing himself in danger. He later resigned.

The killing enraged Ansley's family and brought demands for a civilian review board to review Jacksonville police shootings.

"My sister was not violent," Stevenson said. "The police called her a `number 27' - mentally ill - so they knew what she was before they got there. This officer just wanted to prove he was not a boy."

. . .

Paul Maxwell . . . armed with a baseball bat

Whatever Paul Maxwell could have been, there was precious little evidence of it on the warm July day last year when he removed all of his clothes, grabbed a knapsack and a baseball bat, and began to walk down the street.

Certainly the police of Hempstead, N.Y., had no idea what to make of him. They did not know he had been a brilliant child, an excellent student at Morehouse College, an investment banker, insurance salesman and entrepreneur. Given his state of dress, not to mention his state of mind, it's not likely they cared.

It is believed that Maxwell, 28, was heading to the Nassau County Medical Center to check himself into the psychiatric ward, where he had been hospitalized twice before. Though he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, he usually did all right as long as he stayed on his medication. When he didn't, he became reclusive and unpredictable.

Police surrounded Maxwell after he had walked a few blocks. He smashed the windshield of a squad car and, according to officers, yelled threats at them. They retreated, grabbed an electronic stun gun and fired it at him. The device apparently malfunctioned.

When Maxwell then struck one of the officers with his bat, another officer fired five shots at him, hitting him in the head or torso with each shot.

The shooting was found to be justified by the district attorney. Maxwell's father, Roy, filed suit against the town alleging that excessive force was used.

"Paul was smiling and laughing and waving to his neighbors as he walked down the street - he was not threatening anyone," said attorney Charles Brennan, who represents Roy Maxwell. "He had no history of violence. The proper response was to step back and try to talk him down. They don't have to close in and subdue him."

The officer who killed Maxwell, John Zoll, later received the Law and Order Award from the state attorney general's office for his work during the confrontation. The statewide police group that nominated him said it did so because he saved the life of a fellow officer.

. . .

Margaret Mitchell

. . . a threat to officers?

Margaret Mitchell had a famous name and an anonymous life. She lived on the streets near Hancock Park in Los Angeles. The only time anybody noticed her was when she pushed her shopping cart along trendy La Brea Avenue.

Mitchell, 55, once was normal. She graduated from college and had a long career as a bank employee. Then she started hearing voices. Refusing medical help, she ended up periodically homeless.

On the evening of May 21, Mitchell was pushing her cart when she was stopped by two Los Angeles bicycle patrol officers. They wanted to see whether the cart was stolen.

What happened next is the subject of dispute. The officers said she became hostile and threatened to kill them with a long screwdriver. When she thrust it in the direction of one of the officers, he shot and killed her.

Though police officials claimed that witnesses' statements supported the officers, people interviewed by local newspapers questioned the claim of self defense, saying the small woman - she was 5-foot-1 and weighed about 100 pounds - was no threat to the officers. The closest civilian to the shooting said Mitchell did not lunge toward the officers, the Los Angeles Times reported.

"I think he lost his balance and fired out of fear," said Leo Terrell, an attorney for Mitchell's son, who is suing the police department. Terrell claims that witnesses have told him Mitchell was trying to get away from police when she was shot.

"They admitted they had their weapons drawn when they approached her. Why?"

Advocates for the homeless and African-American activists denounced the shooting and demanded further investigation. The FBI had already said it was looking into the case to see whether Mitchell's civil rights were violated.

Mitchell had had a difficult life. She was widowed when her son was young, and she reared him as a single parent. She began to suffer mental problems after the death of her father a dozen years ago. Gradually, she became isolated and refused suggestions to seek medical help.

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