DeOnte Rawlings. David Kerstetter. Both cases of police-shooting deaths. Both cases where there are outstanding questions left unanswered. The D.C. Police Department, so far, has remained mum on some of those questions which City Desk eloquently wrote up this morning. We also have a detailed account of the Kerstetter shooting.

In the police department’s latest annual report (2007) on use-of-force investigations, its authors champion accountability in the very first graph:

“The Department is responsible and accountable to its members and to the citizens of this community for ensuring that appropriate use of force training is provided and member-applied force is both reasonable and within Department policy.”

D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier gives a blurbed quote at the top of the report’s intro. She states: “The success of a police department is measured by the level of trust and confidence that the community has for it.”

The use of force numbers are also pretty interesting.

Read More “Putting the Kerstetter Shooting In Context” »

A belated kudos to the Washington Post editorial page, for nailing a thoroughly reported editorial-cum-investigative piece on the DeOnte Rawlings situation. Though we’ve already cited the piece in our fabulous Loose Lips Daily, a more complete breakdown is in order.

Rawlings, 14, was shot and killed by an off-duty police officer on Sept. 17, 2007. Subsequent investigations by the U.S. attorney’s office and the police department have concluded that the officer, and another off-duty police official, broke no laws or departmental rules. They returned to their jobs.

The Post editorial concerns itself with the city’s handling of the case, a response characterized by secrecy; details of the investigations have not been released to the public. Here are some of the shocking-but-then-again-not-so-shocking revelations in the Post editorial:

—James Haskel, the officer who shot Rawlings, pursued the youth after he found a minibike missing from his garage. Haskel and another officer spotted Rawlings riding it and testify that Rawlings shot at them. So Haskel fired back, hitting Rawlings with a fatal shot to the head. Though the U.S. attorney’s office exonerated the officer, the Post points to some holes in the case: “No gun was ever found, the minibike went mysteriously missing and the officers, who at the time did not identify themselves as police, left the scene — issues that have never been adequately addressed.”

Read More “DeOnte Rawlings in Mid-Morning Blog Post” »

On the morning of November 6, two D.C. police officers responded to the home of David Kerstetter. The door to Mr. Kerstetter’s condo had been been busted open. It looked suspicious. So the police were called. The officers were eventually confronted with a very simple scene: Mr. Kerstetter in his bedroom, allegedly holding a knife.

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.

Read More “Will The Kerstetter Shooting Spark Reforms With D.C. Police?” »

In the wake of the police shooting death of David Kerstetter, I was told by the D.C. police department that its point man on issues related to dealing with residents in crisis is Commander Brian Jordan. Kerstetter had long suffered with his bipolar diagnosis. When the police arrived at his Logan Circle condo on November 6, Kerstetter was in crisis.

While police administrators were pushing Jordan publicly as their go-to guy, I learned that he was actually no longer charged with dealing with this mental-health issue. In fact, at the time of Kersetter’s death, Jordan had already been transferred to head up the department’s school security division. He had made the move around a month or so ago.

Since Chief Cathy Lanier isn’t returning my requests for an interview, I went ahead and interviewed Jordan today. I thought he could offer some insight in how the D.C. police are trained in handling residents who are suicidal or are having a bad reaction to their meds or are just having a freak-out moment.

Read More “D.C. Police vs. Mentally Ill Residents, Part 2″ »

David Kerstetter was shot and killed by a D.C. Police Department officer on Nov. 6. We wrote a cover story on the incident. During the course of my reporting, I spent hours on the phone with Kerstetter’s family. They talked about his love of Mel Brooks movies, his caustic wit at the dinner table, his graduation from the University of Maryland, his archaeological dig in Israel, and his troubles with mental-illness and meth addiction. In an early e-mail, his brother wrote about Kerstetter serving in the army during the first Gulf War. The family sent me one letter which I quote in my story.

A few days ago, the family sent me a few more letters. I’d like to quote from one of them.

Read More “David Kerstetter Shooting: A Letter Home” »

This week we published a cover story about the D.C. Police shooting death of David Kerstetter. Kerstetter lived at the Iowa, a complex located at 1325 13th Street NW. During the course of reporting, I interviewed a neighbor, Sherry Lichtenberg who met with the two cops that morning, who talked to them just before they went inside Kerstetter’s condo.

Some of Lichtenberg’s account of that morning on Nov. 6 are in the full story. Here is the rest of our conversation.

Read More “David Kerstetter Shooting: The Witness” »

David Kerstetter was shot and killed by D.C. police on November 6. The story merited little attention. Police say simply that they found Kerstetter in his home, that he was brandishing a knife, that there was a struggle and that they used self-defense when they fired their guns.

But there were still tons of questions left unanswered. Who was David Kerstetter? What was his mental-health history? What were the events that led up to the police showing up at his Logan Circle doorstep? Who was the officer that fired those fatal shots? What did the officer know about Kerstetter? Did they have a history? How did Kerstetter end up bleeding out in his bathroom? How well do the police handle residents in crisis? We found some answers, which you can read in our story on David Kerstetter and the circumstances of his death.

*passport photo of David Kerstetter provided by the Kerstetter family.

Last Thursday, David Kerstetter was shot and killed by a Metropolitan Police Department officer. Kerstetter lived just south of Logan Circle in a condo. Two officers responded to his address after receiving a call that his door was open or that he was suicidal (the stories are conflicting). We wrote about the incident here and here.

Kerstetter was well known to police and neighbors as deeply troubled. He was under 6 feet tall, according to neighbors, and was all skin and bones (he looked like he had stopped eating).

When police arrived, he allegedly had a knife. He and the officers allegedly got into a scuffle. One of the officers shot and killed Kerstetter. Both officers are being investigated for their use-of-force.

One resident saw Kerstetter being taken out on a stretcher. “They had a breathing mask over him and a blanket thrown over the main part of his torso,” the resident says. “People got the idea that they didn’t want us to know that he was already dead.”

Read More “MPD: Name The Officers Now” »

As you all know by now, a D.C. Police Department veteran shot and killed a suicidal man, who allegedly was brandishing a knife, at 1325 13th Street NW. The incident took place yesterday morning following a 911 call.

David Kerstetter, the man who police shot and killed, was familiar to officers who worked on 13th Street and officers who worked in the Gay and Lesbian Liaison Unit.

“He had some issues in his life,” says Brett Parson, who oversees all of the D.C. Police Department’s liaison units. “Whether it was mental health or stress in his life, I can’t tell you that….It’s a sad case.”

The incident may eventually be ruled as justified. But it calls into serious question the D.C. Police Department’s continued refusal to adequately deal with mentally-distressed residents.

Just a few days ago, the Department of Mental Health (DMH) launched a new outreach program aimed at preventing such incidents. On November 1, the department started up its mobile crises response teams. The teams have a staff of 20 working 16 hours per day, seven days a week.

Stephen T. Baron, DMH’s director, says that mobile crises response team may not have been called over a technicality. His agency is still waiting for the police department to sign a memorandum of understanding.

“I don’t know all the details,” Baron says of the Kerstetter incident. “I spoke to Chief (Diane) Groomes briefly about it. It’s a tragedy for everybody all around.”

Would his new crises team have responded to such a case? “I’m sure it would have,” Baron says. “I’m sure they would have shown up. But who knows where they were in the process? The police are handling it. They can’t stop.”

Read More “David Kerstetter Shooting: DMH Responds” »

This was the worst-case scenario.

Yesterday morning, the D.C. police department received a 911 call for a reported suicide attempt at 1325 13th Street NW. Two officers, a 20-year veteran and a rookie fresh out of the academy, took the call.

When they arrived on the scene, the officers found a man clutching a knife, according to a Washington Post story. It is yet unknown how much training the officers had in dealing with suicidal residents, in tamping down a volatile situation involving a citizen with extreme mental distress.

According to the Blade’s more definitive account, the man, David Kerstetter, “had been suffering from bipolar disorder and had become severely depressed when his domestic partner died last year.” The Blade goes on to report that police were familiar with Kerstetter. They had gone to his house many times.

No one is saying publicly what the officers told Kerstetter or how they initially reacted to him when they first arrived. But apparently a scuffle ensued between the officers and Kerstetter. Suddenly, an already difficult situation became a deadly one.

D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier told the Post that at some point during the struggle, one of the officers, the veteran cop, fired his weapon. Kerstetter was shot. He was then taken to an area hospital where he was pronounced dead a short time later.

This is the scenario that police watchers have long dreaded. The Office of Police Complaints (OPC), in particular, has lobbied—for years—then-Chief Charles Ramsey, Lanier and the D.C. Council about upgrading the police department’s abilities to handle mentally-ill residents. We wrote about the problem this past April.

Philip Eure, OPC Executive Director, told City Paper that he saw enough citizen complaints related to mishandling a mentally-distressed resident that he made it a priority. “What I know is based on reviewing the complaints and the narratives,” Eure said at the time. “You have a variety of reactions to people who are mentally ill. There are some officers who have the natural empathy.…And you have other officers [who] because of a lack of good training don’t know how to respond. Some officers make fun of these people, laugh at them, mock them. Much of that is based on ignorance.”

Read More “David Kerstetter Shooting: D.C. Police vs. Mentally-Distressed Residents” »