On Friday evening, a 23-year-old man was shot and killed by St. Louis County police officers in Jennings, Missouri, after allegedly charging at them with a knife and behaving in a manner that was “not normal,” according to a police statement.
“He had a Bible in one hand and a knife in the other, and he did drop the Bible,” St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar said at a news conference the following day. “Obviously we were hoping that he would drop the knife. Had he done that, then the officers were already prepared to physically engage him, ground him, and then this would have been over. He would have been in the hospital instead of where we are today.”
The incident occurred after officers responded to a call from a woman who was concerned that her son, Thaddeus McCarroll, was acting out of character and requested that he be removed from her home, according to the statement. The woman told police officers that McCarroll, who was allegedly carrying a knife, had locked her out of her house and was “talking about going on a ‘journey’ and a ‘mission’ and mentioned a ‘black revolution.’ Officers could see the subject through the front window of the residence, walking around the inside of the house with several knives and a Samurai sword,” the statement says.
Police requested additional support from the Tactical Operations Unit, who tried to negotiate with McCarroll but ultimately ended up shooting him after he allegedly “charged the officers at a full run with the knife still in hand. Fearing for their safety, two officers shot the subject multiple times.”
The St. Louis County police department released blurry video footage from an officer’s body camera shortly after the incident.
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Listen as Tact officers try to diffuse the situation in #Jennings before being forced to shoot a suspect. https://t.co/mvmOw2xFy7 #stl
— St. Louis County PD (@stlcountypd) April 18, 2015
In the footage police can be heard ordering McCarroll to “drop the knife,” inquiring “who are you gonna stab, Thaddeus? What do you need tonight, Thaddeus? Your mom’s worried about you. You know we’re not here to harm you.”
A few moments later, a single shot rings out followed by a blast of several more. McCarroll died at the scene.
Around 70 protestors gathered outside a Jennings Police Station Saturday afternoon in commemoration of McCarroll, an attendee who asked to be identified by his Twitter handle, “Search4Swag,” told ThinkProgress. “It was about 30 of the regular protestors that you see about at every other protest, and the rest were a mix of people we assume lived near the neighborhood…There are no set plans to come back at a certain time or day. That’s how we like it. To be more organic.”
Activists and community members expressed concern about the police’s handling of McCarroll — whose behavior the police report characterized as “not normal” — and more generally, officers’ treatment of the mentally ill. “Cases like #KajiemePowell and #ThaddeusMcCarroll pose a serious problem for families of the mentally ill. The risk of calling the police,” St. Louis Aldermann Antonio French, tweeted on Saturday.
In the absence of sufficient mental health services, people suffering from mental illness are increasingly coming into contact with police officers who may not be adequately trained to deal with the mentally ill. In some cases, police have become “the first line of contact” for people who would have otherwise gone to a mental health clinic, psychiatrist Dr. E. Fuller Torrey told the New York Times.
In August, St. Louis Police officers shot and killed 25-year-old Kajieme Powell, who was widely reported to be suffering from mental illness. “There are, shamefully, lots of people with public mental illness who are known to public systems, out there on the streets, very much at the risk of being victimized or engaging in conduct that could get them in trouble with the police,” Robert Bernstein, the president and executive director of the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, told New York Magazine.
“Let’s be honest. Anybody who walks outside the house with a sword and a bible must be having a mental issue,” Search4Swag told ThinkProgress. “There’s no doubt about it…Why not call in some clergy, a mental health expert? You don’t have to kill somebody to disarm them. There have to be better options than ‘hey we did all we could and we killed him.’”