From the right: David, his father Carl, and his brother Kristopher

A few days ago, I called David Kerstetter's parents in Arizona. I wanted to know what they thought about the D.C. Police Department's sudden change in policy in how it handles mentally-ill residents. Their son had been suffering from mental-illness and was shot and killed by a police officer on Nov. 6 inside his home. The department's investigation into the shooting is "still ongoing," according to its Internal Affairs bureau.

After hearing the awful news on Nov. 6, the Kerstetters immediately flew from their Phoenix-area home to D.C.

They had to identify their son's body in the morgue. They had to bury him in Rock Creek Cemetery. And they went to his apartment to try and make sense of the scene the police left behind. They saw David's blood on his bathroom floor. They saw multiple bullet holes.

The family wanted answers so they asked to meet with Chief Cathy Lanier. They had read her statements in the Washington Post that seemed to quickly exonerate her officers. They never got to talk to her. Instead they got Assistant Chief Peter Newsham, who heads up Internal Affairs.

David's parents, Carl and Susan Kerstetter, returned to D.C. a second time—from Jan, 10 through Feb. 6. They had come to close out David's townhouse, which involved arranging for biohazard people to clean the blood—splatters and congealed matter in David's upstairs bathroom. There were also bullet holes in the bathroom door frame. "Sue wouldn't go upstairs unless I was with her," Carl remembers.

They spent very little time outside of David's apartment. Carl recalls taking one five-hour break to visit a museum. They watched the Super Bowl at their lawyer, Doug Sparks' home. Sometimes they would go out for lunch or dinner around Logan Circle. There was just too much to do.

They spent a lot of time figuring out what to give away to charity and what to keep. The Kerstetters took home their son's military medals from his time fighting in the first Gulf War. Susan wanted David's bed and they arranged to bring it back.

They didn't call police brass to ask about the investigation into their son's death. "I knew that they wouldn't talk to me," Carl explains. "It was like the first time we were down there....I would like to sit down with the Assistant Chief [Peter Newsham] and the Chief of Police."

At the press conference regarding the arrest in the Chandra Levy murder, Lanier denied the Post's initial reporting on the Kerstetter case where she is quoted giving a favorable opinion on the officers' shooting. "Do you believe everything you read in the Post?" she asked. But she went on to defend her cops.

Early on, one of the most powerful things Lanier brought to the top cop job was her ability to empathize with family members who have lost loved ones to violence. It showed when she pushed to get the Chandra Levy and Shaquita Bell cold cases solved.  I've seen her comfort a family at their worst moment. Her ability to feel your pain had not gone unnoticed.

But Lanier never reached out to the Kerstetter family, never held their hands.

"I am disappointed in her," Susan says. "She never talked to us. She would never talk to us....We didn't get an apology, nothing from her. I just felt like she didn't really care, like it was another day at the office. If she has compassion for victim's families, we didn't see it."

Susan is suspicious that the police department's sudden policy shift in how they treat mentally-ill residents will actually happen. "I don't have a lot of faith in it," she says.

Carl had this to say: "I'm glad to see they've finally done something. But it's a little too late to help David."

*photo courtesy of the Kerstetter family.

D.C. police have decided to overhaul how it responds to mentally ill residents in crisis and police brass have requested training assistance from the Department of Mental Health, says DMH director Stephen T. Baron.

The decision follows two police-shooting deaths in recent months involving mentally ill victims. In November, police shot and killed David Kerstetter in his Logan Circle residence. In late January, an officer killed Osman Abdullahi inside an unlicensed group home near H Street NE.

The department plans to adopt what's called the "Crisis Intervention Team," or "CIT," model, which would train a core group of officers who would be assigned to respond to emergency situations involving the mentally ill, Baron says. Mental-health advocates and police watchdog groups have long pressed the department to adopt such a model.

The program was developed in the late '80s by the Memphis Police Department after one of their officers shot and killed a knife-wielding mentally ill man. The model has since been replicated by police departments across the country from Georgia to Houston to Seattle.

"We've begun planning training" for the officers, says Baron, who was approached by police brass three weeks ago. He says that it will take a couple years to get the program fully staffed. "We hope to start in the next few months with the first training class."

"They came to me," Baron says of the police department.

For years, the department resisted making the switch to a specialized unit. Former Chief Charles Ramsey and current Chief Cathy Lanier had rebuffed earlier lobbying efforts. When asked to explain the sudden change, Lanier said: "It's my decision. I think it was time."

Lanier says the move had nothing to do with the Kerstetter incident. The change came about, she insists, because the department has seen an increase in officers and resources. [This is news to FOP head Kristopher Baumann, who says the last time he checked, the department appeared to be behind in their staff goals. The police press office says they have approximately 4,000 officers.]

But Assistant Chief Peter Newsham, who runs the department's Internal Affairs Unit, says the shootings did prompt officials to think about the CIT model. "Obviously, it's a good idea," Newsham says. "There's been some concern recently about how we deal with people [who have] mental illness....The recent shootings have definitely drawn attention to the issue."

This "good idea" wasn't deemed so by the police department for more than a decade. Since the early '90s, the department had been lobbied by a group defense attorneys and mental-health advocates to adopt the CIT model. "There was a strong recommendation," recalls Dr. Robert Keisling of Pathways to Housing. "I remember going to the meetings in the early 1990s. It's been over 15 years of efforts."

Mary Ann Luby, a longtime outreach worker with the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless, also urged the police to change. "We have an ongoing struggle with the police and the way that they sometimes approach people that are mentally ill," Luby says. "We've talked about it for a very long time.... When Ramsey was here, we tried to introduce it to him. This is going back six or seven years ago."

The Office of Police Complaints had been lobbying for the CIT model since issuing a report in 2006. The agency's efforts had been ignored despite the mounting anecdotal evidence that the department had a problem.

"I am pleased that the MPD for whatever reason is moving forward with the Crisis Intervention Team," says Philip Eure, OPC's executive direstor. "The CIT concept has been tried and tested around the country. There is every reason to believe that D.C. will benefit from it just like Memphis and other cities around the country."

The CIT model may have come in handy on the morning of Nov. 6. Two officers responded to a call for an open door at Kerstetter's Logan Circle apartment. Once they arrived, they were briefed on Kerstetter's deteriorating mental-health condition by a neighbor. One of the officers, Frederick Friday, told Washington City Paper that he made several calls seeking assistance. He says that he tried calling Kerstetter's therapist.

Kerstetter told the officers to not enter his home. After waiting around outside, Friday and his partner Christian Glynn, decided to enter Kerstetter's condo. They found Kerstetter holding a knife and a struggle ensued, according to a police press release.

Friday shot Kerstetter multiple times. Kerstetter ended up in his bathroom. [A review of the pictures from the scene show nothing out of place, nothing that would indicate a struggle.]

Kerstetter died from his wounds. Friday says he acted in self-defense. The shooting is still under investigation.

When questioned about the case yesterday, Lanier defended the officers' actions. "They followed policy," she said.

Lanier added that they had to make a "split-second decision." But when asked about the 30 minutes the officers waited outside Kerstetter's apartment, she had added a new wrinkle to the boilerplate: "So sometimes they have to make a 30-minute decision."

This scene turned into the police-involved shooting death of Mr. Kerstetter.

The Kerstetter shooting remains under investigation. But decades ago, in Memphis, another mid-size city, a similar scenario sparked outrage, political turmoil, a task force, and ultimately some real change. That same man-with-knife scenario ended up spurring major reforms within the Memphis Police Department. Those reforms have since become models for the rest of the country's police departments.

In 1987, Memphis cops were called to a scene involving a mentally-ill man wielding a knife. "Our department received a call from this individual's family members that this individual had a mental illness," recalls Maj. Sam Cochran, "armed with a very large knife, cutting himself and he was threatening family members and neighbors." Cochran says that after a brief encounter, police shot the man multiple times. The man died.

The shooting was ruled justified. But it still felt wrong.

"Many felt the Memphis Police Department should have done more," Cochran says. "It was a very unsettling time for our community. Got lots of criticism. The mayor saw that our community was hurting and the department was hurting. [The mayor] set up a task force to come up with a plan to provide safety for all and what would best work."

What did they come up with? The Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) Model. Here's how I described the CIT model for a piece published this past April:

"In addition to training the rank-and-file cops, the department selected officers to undergo an additional 40-hour training session. These officers became mental health crisis specialists operating much like a SWAT or vice squad.

Instead of diffusing a hostage situation or nabbing corner dealers, CIT cops specialize in taking care of the bipolar teenager in the midst of a manic episode. When such a call comes in, at least one CIT officer is dispatched to head up the case. With trained personnel on the scene, the outcome is less often a night in jail followed by arraignment and more often a call to a social worker or psychiatrist."

The CIT model is significant in a number of ways:

*It recognizes that not all officers are the same. Some have a natural empathy towards a resident in a mental-health crisis and some do not.

*It works hand-in-hand with various community organizations so that residents are taken to treatment and not a jail cell. Community groups have bought into the program.

*Officers volunteer to enroll in the program. But before they were accepted, they are carefully vetted. They are interviewed and their personnel file is reviewed.

*Officers are given a 40-hour training on the CIT program. Once they graduate, they are then on-call to handle cases like Mr. Kerstetters.

Maj. Tim Canady, the current CIT-coordinator in Memphis, says the reason the program has been successful is because the officers are trained in verbal de-escalation skills, know how to come up with an action plan for various police calls, and can call in the clinical, social-service side once they assess the scene.

What should you take from all this? The Memphis Police Department is not flying blind when they come to a scene like the one at Mr. Kerstetter's home.

The question remains: Does the D.C. Police Department know what to do when faced with a resident in crisis? Do they have a plan? If so, did they follow that plan when they entered Mr. Kerstetter's home? And why aren't city politicians talking reforms?