Fatal Police Shooting of Seattle Woman Raises Mental Health Questions
Officers
with the Seattle Police Department were no strangers to Unit 4303 in
the Brettler Family Place apartment complex in the northeast part of the
city. After they responded to at least three domestic violence calls
there in the past year, the police were dispatched there again on Sunday
morning to investigate a theft in Charleena Lyles’s unit.
Ms.
Lyles greeted them at her front door, let them inside and then calmly
explained that an Xbox video game console was stolen and a bag of
clothes on her bed looked to have been disturbed, according to an audio
recording of the officers. But after an officer repeated out loud what
was stolen, the encounter suddenly escalated after the two officers
present said they saw Ms. Lyles, 30, clutching a knife, the police said.
“Get back, get back, get back!” an officer yelled.
“Get ready,” Ms. Lyles responded, using an expletive.
“Tase her,” the other officer instructed his partner, but neither officer had a Taser.
Seconds
later, the officers fired at least five shots, killing Ms. Lyles, as
three of her four children were in the apartment. The family said she
was pregnant.
The
fatal shooting has outraged Ms. Lyles’s family, who said she struggled
with mental illness after years of abusive relationships and threats of
her children being taken away. It has also evoked similarities to past
cases of Seattle officers using deadly force in encounters with people
with mental health issues. Those episodes resulted in a Justice
Department investigation, and the Police Department was placed under a
federal consent decree in 2012.
Continue reading the main story
“I
don’t know if my sister had a knife or not, and even if she did, she
was so tiny,” her sister, Monika Williams, said in a phone interview on
Monday night. “There was no reason two trained police officers had to
shoot her down.”
Her
father, Charles Lyles, who lives outside Los Angeles in Lancaster,
Calif., said he had spent Monday replaying the four-minute audio
recording of the episode. He said he struggled to understand why the
officers did not use anything but a gun, adding that she weighed about
90 pounds and had no history of violence.
“They
were talking calm, and all of a sudden, you heard the gunshots,” Mr.
Lyles said in an interview. “That really messes me up to hear her die.”
The
Police Department placed the two officers, whose names have not been
made public, on paid administrative leave while the episode is under
investigation — standard procedure in fatal shootings by the police. As
required by Seattle police policy, both officers were equipped on Sunday
with “less-lethal force options,” the police said, but they did not
have Tasers. It is unclear if the two officers used any other nonlethal options.
Chief
Kathleen O’Toole of the Police Department called the shooting a
“horrible tragedy.” “The community is distraught,” Chief O’Toole said on
Monday, according to The Seattle Times. “The family is distraught. The
officers are distraught.”
When
Ms. Lyles called the police on Sunday to report a burglary, the Seattle
police said they intentionally sent two officers to respond to her
apartment because of a confrontation on June 5. On that day, Ms. Lyles
asked for help after a former boyfriend, and the father of her two
oldest children, showed up unannounced at her apartment.
By
the time the officers arrived around 11:25 a.m. on June 5, the man was
gone, and the police found Ms. Lyles sitting on a couch holding large
scissors next to her youngest child, a 1-year-old girl. Their guns
drawn, the officers ordered her to drop the scissors, the police said.
Ms.
Lyles refused. Still holding the scissors, the police said, she got off
the couch and warned the officers, “Ain’t none of y’all leaving here
today!” She then started talking about how the police were the devil and
how she could morph into a wolf and clone her daughter, according to
the officers’ description of the episode.
She
eventually surrendered and was booked into the King County Jail on
harassment charges. Unable to pay the $7,500 bail set in the case, Ms.
Williams said, she spent 12 days in jail until a judge ordered her
released last Wednesday on the condition that she seek mental health
treatment.
Ms.
Williams said her sister’s mental health was fine until about a year
ago, when her four children were reported to child protective services
for neglect. For the past year, Ms. Lyles had been fighting to prove to a
judge that her children were in good care, her sister said, and that
they were only at risk because of an abusive ex-boyfriend who is the
father of her two youngest children.
In
May 2016, the ex-boyfriend confronted her at her apartment and hit her,
according to police records. Two weeks later, as she was trying to
escape him, he bashed in her car windows as she was trying to drive
away, according to the police and the family. The shattered windows sent
glass falling on her children, which led child protective services to
open a case because of concerns about their safety.
After
those episodes, Ms. Lyles received a protection order against the
former boyfriend, according to the police. But the man returned to her
apartment in August and assaulted her again. He pleaded guilty to
assault and was released from jail in February, according to court
records.
“She
had her teeth knocked out, had numerous black eyes. She has permanent
scars from being abused, and she begged and begged for help,” Ms.
Williams said about her sister. “Then she finally got the help, and then
you take her life in front of her children.”
No comments:
Post a Comment