Imagine Media LLC

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The Crisis Cops

When Louise Pyers talks about the weeks leading up to March 23, 1997, she slips into worry, even anger. It’s understandable, given that the conversation is about her teenage son’s attempt to goad a police officer into killing him.

“He started his rampage at three o’clock in the morning,” she begins, recounting the events from the second-story deck behind her modest Wallingford home. She and her husband had been asleep inside, she says, lowering her eyes. She remembers having crawled into bed believing her 19-year-old was in New Jersey, snoring at the frat house after a night of studying toward an engineering degree.

She knew that Michael, as we’ll call him to protect his identity, was having a rough stretch. The summer after his freshman year, he suffered a devastating breakup with his first great love. He looked sad, stopped speaking, lost weight—all the things a young guy in his situation might be expected to do. But as the days became months of misery, Pyers grew concerned. Toward the end of the summer, on the day she found Michael rolled into a ball on the family’s couch, she suggested he might need help. She knows the signs, given her master’s degree in counseling.

Michael admitted he wanted to commit suicide. Pyers believed him, even before she found out he’d recently tried to hang himself in the woods near the family’s home.

“We went to the emergency room,” she recalls, inching forward in her chair on the deck. “He had a little suitcase. Some idiot came by and said, ‘Oh, you’re here for the wack ward, I see.’”

She shifts in her seat, as if jostling for a fight. “My son got up to leave. My heart was in my throat. I told the nurse, ‘You’ve got to speed this up.’”

Doctors admitted Michael for seven days and began treating him with the antidepressant Zoloft, which, combined with his history of being on the Dean’s List and his desire to get better, gave everyone enough confidence to send him back to New Jersey for his sophomore year. He did well for about six months, until just before a semi-formal dance in March, an event he had enjoyed the previous year with the girl who’d later broken his heart.

Michael started drinking alcohol, which inhibits Zoloft’s effectiveness. Two days before the dance, he mixed it with all the ibuprofen and cough syrup he could find in the frat house. He went to sleep, expecting not to wake up, but ended up vomiting the next day.

The night of the dance, March 22, he decided to attend, but picked a fight with his date in the car afterward. He wanted to be certain she broke up with him before he executed his plan.

Since he was a failure at ending his own life, he’d decided to have people trained to kill do it for him.

His rampage, as Pyers calls it, started with Michael driving at high speeds across New Jersey and New York. A champagne bottle at his side, he tried to instigate a chase by ripping past several state troopers, to no avail. Desperate, he drove where he knew there was a police station—near the family’s Wallingford home. The car was still registered to the Pyerses’ telephone number.

“We got the call at 4:30,” his mother recalls, her intelligent brown eyes focused on her neatly painted pink fingernails. “He was driving doughnuts around the police station, leaving skid marks with his lights off. We knew, because of the depression, something was wrong.”

Just minutes after police called her, Pyers called them back and said she thought Michael may be attempting suicide. She wanted the police to know he was a good boy, a boy who was suffering.

The message never made it through all the squads Michael left in his wake—from Wallingford to Meriden, 80 to 90 miles per hour to Berlin, then to Newington and Wethersfield, a parade of police following him. When Michael sped across the border into Hartford, the line stopped, out of jurisdiction. Matthew noticed there were no more lights in his rear-view mirror, so he turned around and went back into Wethersfield.

Pyers says he next tried to ram a Newington officer’s car by speeding toward it, the officer helpless in his path. Michael changed his mind midway, leaving 60 feet of skid marks, $1,200 damage and some very leery officers.

According to Pyers and police documents, the next 31 seconds happened as follows.

Michael stepped out of his car, champagne bottle in hand, and approached two Wethersfield officers. He raised the bottle over his head and shouted that if the officer didn’t shoot, he was going to kill him. Michael banged the bottle on the hood of the cruiser, establishing a rhythm and chanting with every beat: “Shoot me. Shoot me. Shoot me.”

One of the officers attempted to subdue Michael with pepper spray, but it didn’t work. The other officer drew his Beretta 9mm handgun and ordered, “Drop the bottle!”

Michael kept banging, chanting: “Shoot me! Shoot me! You’re going to have to kill me!” He had moved to within 10 feet of the officer with the Beretta.

The next thing Michael knew, a single hollow-point bullet tore through his midsection, just beneath the left side of his ribcage. Its fragments lodged near his spinal cord. He fell to the pavement, as did the champagne bottle, which shattered.

About 5:30 in the morning, Pyers, still at home in her pajamas, got another call from police. “There’s been an accident,” they told her. “Go to Hartford hospital.”

She left her 16-year-old daughter at home and went to Michael’s side. A nurse, she remembers, treated her like she “was the scummy parent of a scummy kid who got shot by a cop.”

Later that day, Michael told his mother everything. He asked her to tell the officer he was sorry. “I’m still alive,” he told her. “Oh, damn. And things are going to be ten times worse now.”

 

                                                   ***

 

Capt. Ken Edwards is a lifelong resident of New London, where he’s been on the police force for 21 years. He sits behind a wide desk in his modest office a few blocks from the city’s historic waterfront, surrounded by a mural of a three-masted sailing yacht and photographs of his family. His boyish blue eyes and easy smile are an oddly comforting combination. To meet him on the street, out of uniform, you might assume he was a middle-school science teacher.

Perhaps it was his approachable demeanor that led a local mental health agency to him in the fall of 1998, asking him to join its board of directors. He thought it was a good idea, since New London’s officers seemed to be dealing with more and more situations involving people in mental health crises—a good third of their cases, at least.

“About 12 or 14 years ago, when Norwich (State Mental) Hospital closed, we saw an increase,” Edwards says of his six-square-mile city. “It seemed to be rising again.” One horrific example was on November 23, 1998, when a man with a history of depression brutally stabbed a local mental health worker. One of Edwards’ officers had to shoot the man to death in the street.

Around the same time, a New London police lieutenant handed Edwards an article he’d found about Crisis Intervention Teams, groups of officers that had gone through a training program in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1988 after the death of a mentally ill person at the hands of police. The CIT training is designed to help officers defuse confrontations and use time as an ally, especially when dealing with people suffering from mental illnesses.

“We should have something like this,” the lieutenant told Edwards.

“I said, ‘Yes, you’re right.’”

Thanks to a $15,000 Venture Grant from the United Way that his two new friends from the board of directors helped him acquire, Edwards and a training supervisor flew to Memphis, experienced the CIT training and learned how to bring it back home. It’s a weeklong program with sessions that include identifying mental illnesses, understanding the system of community care in America, and role-playing with de-escalation techniques. Everything from schizophrenia to suicide-by-cop is covered, giving officers new insights into cases like those of Louise Pyers’ teenage son.

Nobody refers to things like the “wack ward” or “scumbags shot by cops” during CIT training. Officers are taught to use a vocabulary that includes mental health providers, clients, consumers.

“The same principles that made specialists in domestic violence so good made this work,” Edwards says.

Some of the 14 volunteer officers he chose for the training were hesitant as it got under way in January 2001, but even the most skeptical were moved by the part of the program called “Hearing Voices.” It was put together by people with mental illnesses who spoke into tape recorders, repeating everything the voices in their heads said. Each officer was given a Walkman and told to listen to the tape while doing a few seemingly simple tasks.

One New London officer was told to go outside and write down the license plate numbers of all the cars parked on a nearby street. He had trouble concentrating until the voices stopped. He figured the tape had run out. Finally, he thought. I can finish this. After a few minutes of silence, one of the voices shouted “Hey!” The officer was so startled, he threw his pen and paper into the air.

Another officer told the story of finishing his task, but leaving the headphones on until the tape ended, as he had been instructed to do. The voices were still issuing commands when the officer stepped up to a urinal in the men’s room. When a voice shouted, “Put that thing down!” the shocked officer complied.

Edwards says the exercise leads many officers to recall incidents when mentally ill people have refused to comply with their orders, or have acted in seemingly irrational ways that led police to use force.

“You can tell when they’re doing it that a light bulb goes on about an experience they’ve had,” Edwards says. “Ohhh, that’s why.”

Within weeks of the training, the officers began to see its benefit. “Right away, we brought in a consumer in an assault case,” Edwards recalls. “The person obviously needed medication. It was a serious assault. In the old days, we would’ve put shackles on their legs, handcuffs and a belly belt, and transported them to the hospital. Officers would wait three or four hours for medication to be ordered.

“Now, we got hold of a case manager who administered the medication in the cell block,” Edwards says.

He slams his hand on his desk.

“We never would’ve known to do that!” he exclaims, like a man who just found a hammer after two decades spent installing nails with a screwdriver.

And with that, New London became the 10th police force in the United States to have CIT-trained officers on duty round-the-clock.

Three years later, just before January of this year, it remained the only one in Connecticut with that distinction.

                

                                                   ***

 

Louise Pyers was fluctuating between understanding and abject rage as her son Michael spent five days in the hospital recovering from his shooting, then another five days at Yale Psychiatric Institute in New Haven.

“That rage is so debilitating,” she recalls, shaking her head. “You have to get out of it. The only way is to try to understand what happened.”

From out of the haze of the shooting, she had pulled the phrase “suicide-by-cop” into her working vocabulary. She took to the Web and found a study done by Sgt. Barry Peru in Los Angeles. She called him, and he spent a generous amount of time helping her understand police training, behavioral cues, statistics and procedures.

“After our talk, he said, ‘How’s your son?’” she recalls, her voice dropping softly. “It was the first cop who’d asked me that.”

That’s when she realized that police officers can be good people, but people who work within a set of conduct rules designed to keep them and the community safe. For months, she learned more from Peru by telephone and e-mail. Eventually, she was asked to speak at police training events. After one, an officer who had shot and killed a woman in a similar situation sought Pyers out. He and Michael quickly took to one another in conversation. Each, it seems, felt like he was talking to the person he had shot, or who had shot him.

“That was the turning point for me,” Pyers remembers. “That was a miracle happening. To see the two of them talking to each other, so intently staring into each other’s eyes, telling their stories. They hugged.”

Inspired, Pyers called the Wethersfield Police Department and asked to speak with the officer who had pulled the trigger against Michael. She met him at the stationhouse.

“He looks like a kid,” Pyers says with a chuckle. “I thought, ‘My God, you look like my son.’”

She made sure to ask him how he was doing, as Peru had asked her about Michael. She could tell he was hurting.

“I don’t know if you need my forgiveness,” she told him, “but if you do need it, I forgive you.”

She says he hugged her and whispered, “I needed it.”

At the time, Pyers was working as the director of public relations for the Albert Schweitzer Institute. She summoned every skill and resource she had, then applied it to the notion that better police training about mental illness crises might have helped prevent Michael’s shooting.

“There was more than one victim here,” she says, her fingers outstretched as if to will more emphasis into her message. “My son was a victim of this illness. This officer was a victim. Our families are victims.”

She formed an organization called the Connecticut Alliance to Benefit Law Enforcement with the intention of educating as many people as possible about suicide-by-cop. An article she posted on her newly created site, www.cableweb.org, led dozens of officers, students and family members to her. Several called just to tell their stories to a sympathetic listener.

And one day, she got an e-mail from a man she didn’t know—Capt. Ken Edwards at the New London Police Department. He was researching suicide-by-cop as a component of study for his newly minted CIT team.

“Where have you been?” she remembers reading on her computer screen. “I’ve been looking for an organization that believes in what I’m doing.”

 

                                                   ***

 

It’s a sunny fall morning in New London, and Chris Burke is running late. Every Tuesday, the toweringly tall clinical social worker rides along with the shorter, but no less intimidating Sgt. Greg Moreau in one of the New London Police Department’s Ford Explorers, part of the CIT effort. Today’s shift will be cut short because the mobile outreach team Burke oversees is dealing with a call from nearby Groton, where a man in his 70s has barricaded himself in his house with three pistols and two rifles.

Moreau is a 21-year veteran who keeps his sense of humor as closely cropped as his salt-and-pepper hair. His eyes are sharp, intent and constantly scanning, like a guide’s in bald eagle country. Just under the right side of his crisply pressed shirt collar, he wears the small gold pin he earned after completing his CIT training. It’s a replica of the World War II Pathfinder patch, worn by soldiers sent to find and bring home their lost brothers-in-arms.

Despite his decades on the beat, the sergeant certainly doesn’t know all the consumers of mental health services in this city of about 25,000. Group homes are not required to announce their addresses, nor are private citizens. Statistics show that, of all people suffering from mental illnesses, only 10 percent or so are violent. It’s true that some people fall into patterns: going off their medication, getting into trouble that requires police intervention, getting arrested and re-medicated, and starting all over again. Moreau estimates he’s met about 100 to 200 consumers during his shifts in New London, but many people get along well enough that the police never know they’re there.

As afternoon encroaches, Moreau’s cell phone rings. The 70-year-old with the guns is still barricaded at home in Groton, but that situation appears to be under control.

“I have an update,” Burke says a few minutes later as he climbs inside.

“Don’t tell me they let him out,” Moreau replies, rolling his eyes.

The topic is a consumer in New London—a large, rather nasty fellow—whose care team had called Moreau the week before. The man had been off his medication and was becoming belligerent. Moreau, with Burke at his side, had gone to the man’s house and talked him into going for treatment.

Now, a week later, Burke says the hospital is prepared to discharge the man, whose own care team on the outside wants to keep him in treatment longer. They were working to find another hospital willing to take him.

“So now what do you do?” Burke says, exasperated. “You’ve got a team trying to tell one hospital they need to take a guy who another hospital says is ready to go home.”

Burke pauses and looks out the window.

“He’ll be home by 2 or 3 o’clock today,” he says.

“And he’ll be our problem again in three or four days,” Moreau responds. “It gets dumped on the police department.”

That’s one of the things that led Moreau to volunteer for CIT training. Police officers are not social workers, but they are constantly called upon to be problem solvers. On the street, Moreau recognized what Capt. Edwards had been seeing in the daily reports from all his officers—a need to learn new ways to handle the new problems being thrown at them.

“Deinstitutionalization in Norwich (State Mental Hospital) filled Norwich and New London with consumers,” Burke says. “They were forced to figure it out.”

It’s just before 2:30 p.m. when a CIT call comes over the radio. Moreau flips on the sirens, and the Explorer speeds through red lights and stopped traffic to a two-story white house across town. Plastic planters hang from the front porch, and a metal fence surrounds the postage stamp-sized front yard. It’s the kind of block where the houses are close together, where you may not see any neighbors in the nearby windows, but you have the distinct feeling their gaze is upon you.

Moreau enters first, followed by several officers who have converged on the scene. Burke lingers outside until Moreau tells him it’s safe to climb up the porch steps and walk through the front door. A set of the Encyclopedia Britannica is in a bookcase just inside the foyer, along with a couple of porcelain dolls wearing flowing satin gowns.

A woman, 5 feet tall at best with long brown hair pulled back, greets the officers in white slippers with pink-and-blue flowers. She’s been home just a few days after having an operation and is comfortably dressed in a warm white fleece. Her husband, standing at her side, dons a T-shirt and a Yankees cap.

Her 38-year-old son, she explains, is in the basement, down the stairs through the kitchen, just past the mammoth Phillips big-screen television stuffed into a tiny corner of the living room.

“I thought he was going to break my arms today,” she says, staring up at the armed men surrounding her. “This is why I called the police.”

Moreau, Burke and the others move into the kitchen. Cases upon cases of Cup O’Noodles soup are stacked atop the refrigerator, like stores in a military bunker. Apparently, this was the day’s impetus for violence. The son—who at well over 250 pounds is at least twice his mother’s weight—wanted a flavor she did not have.

As all the officers move toward the basement steps, Moreau and Burke begin to sift mentally through their experiences. Burke recognizes a fish tank in the foyer. He thinks he’s been here before.

 “I know this guy,” he says hesitantly. “He has a good history.”

Moreau nods and looks for more clues in the kitchen. He thinks he’s had to come to this home before, as well. He makes his way to the basement steps.

After a few minutes of conversation, the son emerges upstairs of his own will and lies down on a stretcher. There is no confrontation, though he is drunk to the point of stupor, with ratty-looking cornrows in his hair and a tattoo of a flaming sun bursting across the right side of his neck. He has urinated on himself, but doesn’t seem to notice.

While the police wait outside, Burke goes back into the house to talk with the mother. She is hesitant even to whisper bits of information. Burke urges her gently, asking not whether the son is in treatment, but who his case manager is.

The woman is stunned when Burke recognizes the name, and her demeanor shifts. She suddenly sees Burke as an ally, one whose help she desperately needs.

She walks out of sight for a few seconds, then returns to the living room with a large, torn manila envelope. She eagerly hands it to Burke, who dumps its contents on the dining-room table: several bottles of antidepressant and antipsychotic medications.

“I give him no medicine today,” the woman admits sheepishly, almost remorsefully. “When he drinks, I can give him no medicine.”

Burke assesses the severity of the son’s mental illness based on the prescribed dosages, then writes down the phone number of a colleague at the hospital, then calls the number  himself to explain the incoming case. Burke tells the mother to call the hospital again as soon as he leaves, to tell the hospital workers everything she can about her son’s illness.

“The more you tell them,” Burke instructs, “the more likely they are to keep him.”

The mother nods as if she understands the instructions, but not the reason for them.

“But if they let him go today,” she says, “he will not know what to do. They told me his mind is going to get worse and worse.”

It’s been maybe 10 minutes since officers responded to the call, and another is coming over the radio. It’s time to pile back into the Explorer.

“If things like this happen, you call the police,” Burke tells the woman as he turns to leave. “Just call the police.”

 

 

When Pyers, working alone from her Wallingford home, received Capt. Edwards’s e-mail about what the New London CIT teams were doing, she felt, for the first time, like some good might come of her son’s shooting.

“His enthusiasm turned on all the light bulbs in my head,” she recalls, her face lighting up like a child’s on Christmas Day.

Pyers told Edwards about her visit to POST, the Police Officer Standards and Training Council. She recalls a state trooper flipping through her neatly prepared binder, dropping it on the floor, standing up, stepping on it and walking out. (The head of POST’s in-service division says she remembers Pyers’ name, but not the discussion.)

Edwards told Pyers about the limited response he was getting from other Connecticut police departments as he tried to spread the word about CIT teams. It seems that training to work better with the mentally ill sounds too much like social work to some chiefs in the state.

Resistance to the CIT idea sometimes even extends to consumers’ families and caregivers, who shun anything that equates mental illness and violence. As CIT-trained New London Police Dispatcher Robin Schwarze put it, “The families need our help, but they don’t like the ways we have to deal with things. They don’t want to see their kid in a choke hold, but we have to contain the situation the safest way we can.”

Edwards and Pyers eventually worked together to schedule a meeting with the Connecticut Criminal Law Foundation, a private agency that offers police training throughout the state. They held the first statewide CIT training in Farmington in May 2003. In attendance were 26 officers from 13 departments—not enough from any single department to form a round-the-clock CIT team, as New London has, but enough to take the message back home and spread the word.

“It’s a lot more than police training,” Pyers says. “You’re also bringing the mental health professionals from the community, so it doesn’t become a revolving door of people being treated and released, where they decompensate and end up in the police’s hands in a very tragic situation.”

Pyers and Edwards say it costs about $2,500 to train two departments simultaneously, ideally departments working within the same geographic area, so the officers can meet the specialists in their jurisdictions. The $2,500 does not include overtime costs to free up officers for a week and other such expenses departments will incur. That, plus the fact that so many other mental-health groups are asking for similar funding, is a difficult obstacle to overcome.

“Community-based mental health agencies are in a lot of trouble,” Edwards explains. “They’re finding it hard to keep their heads above water financially. Fund-raising for the YMCA is easy. You put pictures of cute kids on a letter and send it out. This is more difficult.”

The state could act to spread CIT training this year, says Gail Sturges, executive director of the forensic division of the state Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services. For one, her department recently applied for a portion of Connecticut’s federal Byrne Grant. The money would enhance the New London program and possibly others.

Sturges also helped to draft a report that was recently filed to the state Legislature’s Alternatives to Incarceration committee. The report’s number one recommendation was expansion of CIT training to all state and local police jurisdictions.

“The actual wording does reflect that the police chiefs need to want this,” Sturges says. “These things don’t work very well when the Legislature tells the chief of police they want them to do this program or that program.”

An advocate like Capt. Edwards in New London is key, she says, as was the support of the city’s chief, Bruce Rinehart.

“It’s a very worthy program to be involved in,” Rinehart says. “Unfortunately, because we’re in an area where an institution was closed, a lot of these people are on the street. The only way we can deal with it successfully is to try to understand and work within the system.”

Beyond top-level police support, CIT programs need funding, Pyers says. She fears the Legislature will propose unfunded mandates and is working through her CABLE organization to prevent them.

Meanwhile, with Pyers and Edwards as its driving force, CABLE has had a few recent successes. In January, West Haven became the second police department in the state to have CIT-trained officers on duty around the clock, and in March, the group plans to hold a training session that could form round-the-clock teams in and near Norwich. Nearly a dozen other agencies, including the Southeast Connecticut chapter of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, are involved in coordinating the weeklong training program.

It will occur almost seven years to the day that Pyers’s son was shot.

 

Officers in New London, Connecticut—with help from one very dedicated mother—are spreading their message statewide: Special training is needed to handle offenders with mental illnesses