- Taun Hall worked for years to get help for her son who was struggling with mental health issues.
- The only recourse he found was law enforcement, but in the end he was killed by the police.
- This is the story of her loss and her efforts to bring about change, told to reporter Haven Orecchio-Egresitz.
This is an essay as told based on a conversation with Taun Hall, Miles Hall’s mother, who was killed by police in Walnut Creek, California on June 2, 2019. Today he runs The Miles Hall Foundation and co-sponsored bills to improve access to services for those experiencing a mental health crisis. The essay has been edited for length and clarity.
Ever since he was a kid, my son Miles was bright and goofy with a magnetic personality that drew people to him. He had an especially gentle soul and always thought about how his actions would make other people feel.
He was so kind, in fact, that if there was a bug in the house, he put it outside. He wouldn’t hurt a spider.
And just as he wanted to protect others from harm, I, as his mother, wanted to protect him.
As he entered his senior year of high school, my husband and I began to see red flags that worried us.
Miles, who started high school with an “academic GPA,” wasn’t interested in making post-graduation plans.
That seemed strange in our home, where my husband, Miles’s younger sister, and I value the importance of college and getting an education.
So when he didn’t find that record, we realized we had to be on the lookout for why he suddenly seemed uninterested in school.
It turned out that this was the first sign of serious mental health problems. After graduating, Miles began experiencing delusions. He was ranting about the Bible and since we’re not particularly religious this was weird and we didn’t understand what was going on.
But when he started knocking on our neighbors’ doors, representing himself as Jesus, we knew we needed help for him. Fast.
But my son did not think he was sick and did not listen to our pleas for psychological services. At the time, he was over 18 years old, and no matter how sick he was, the state considered him an adult.
I wanted to be proactive, not reactive, so I started taking classes with the National Alliance on Mental Illness to get ideas on how to deal with someone who has a mental illness but doesn’t know they are.
I also began to build a relationship with the local police department’s mental health liaison.
Over the next three years, I contacted the department on multiple occasions when Miles began experiencing delusions or acting strangely.
I wanted to let you know that my son is African American, we live in a white neighborhood and he is knocking on people’s doors.
He wanted people to know that he belongs here, he is part of this community.
I wanted them to know that they didn’t have to be afraid.
Miles Hall was shot by police outside his home in 2019. His mother had worked for years with the police to prevent exactly that nightmare.
Taun Hall
Long stretches of normalcy, then a setback
For a while, Miles kept going. He was fine. He was definitely showing signs of mental illness, but it wasn’t too extreme.
He didn’t want to involve the police in every problem. We wanted to manage it ourselves.
But in April 2018, Miles started knocking on doors again, so I reconnected with the mental health officer.
He told me they couldn’t get involved unless he wasn’t a danger to himself, a danger to others, or seriously ill.
If that were the case, the officer told me, I could get him involuntarily committed for treatment.
There, mental health professionals could adjust your medication. They could help you.
If there were several of these documented interactions, he said, then he could file for conservatorship and finally have a say in his treatment plan.
A few months later, Miles entered a neighbor’s pool without permission. When the police showed up, I saw the bright side. This erratic behavior could prove to the police, and later to a judge, that guardianship was a good idea.
Miles was sent to an inpatient treatment center for a few weeks and given injectable medication.
He was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, which explains his behavior.
When he came back, he got a job he loved. She was doing very well. She was making friends and dating. He was a normal guy. It was like we had our old Miles back.
But then a problem arose: the criminalization of people with mental illness in our country dealt a serious blow to the progress our family had made.
After working for three months, police filed charges against Miles for that 2018 incident because they said he resisted arrest when they showed up at the scene.
He didn’t understand how that could happen when he worked so closely with the department. How then could they press charges? I thought we were working together to help my son.
Miles became paranoid and the stress of the criminal charges took over his life. He told me that he wanted to resign from his job because he was convinced that he would go to jail, although I was almost sure that the case would be resolved without such severe punishment.
I wanted to ease this burden on my son, so I wrote a great old letter to the public defender. I explained that the point of calling the police was because he has a mental illness, and we were trying to get him help, not because he is a criminal.
Taun Hall believes that the police are not necessary in most mental health emergencies.
fake images
What was a nightmare became our reality
Miles continued to spiral, and by May 2019, he was in a full-blown psychosis.
He thought it was Jesus again. He was running around with a lot of energy, planting in the garden.
I called the non-emergency police line on Saturday June 1st, only to let the officers know that Miles was in crisis again. He made the call for his safety, not for their safety. He wasn’t going to hurt anyone.
At no point did anyone give us any other recourse, and the next day, Miles was in a full-fledged mental health emergency.
He was in a state of delusional hallucinations, and a well-intentioned neighbor lent him a gardening tool.
He went to our window and broke the door. It was the first time in history that Miles had done anything physically aggressive.
My mom who lives with us called 911 and Miles yelled at us to get out of the house.
To defuse the situation, we did.
She then started knocking on neighbors’ doors and one of them also called 911, also letting them know she was in crisis and needed help.
The mental health officer called me and said he was on his way to the scene. But she was too late.
The officers who arrived before her saw Miles on the road with his tool. She was sent to the ground, but she didn’t go. She started running towards our house, which was behind the officers, and they perceived it as a threat.
They shot and killed him in the street.
All the work I did to prevent this exact nightmare was for nothing.
making the change
After two years of trying to get help from Miles, trying to use the resources that were there, which was law enforcement, to get help from someone who didn’t know he was sick, we had to criminalize our son.
It was devastating because Miles died as a result of it.
His presence, his silly jokes, his caring spirit, are missed every day.
Since then, my family has worked to make sure no one has to live with this kind of trauma.
We started The Miles Hall Foundation, which advocates for change. As part of that, I have co-sponsored California bill AB 988. The bill, which is on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk waiting to be signed, will link the national 988 crisis hotline with mobile response teams.
When this goes into effect, people experiencing a crisis or their loved ones anywhere in California will be able to call the number 988 and behavioral health experts and colleagues will be dispatched to the scene to deescalate the situation. The goal is to find immediate and follow-up behavioral health care for the person.
cities across the country have started to implement these crisis response groups, who respond in place of the police. The California bill aims to improve the way they are sent.
Police officers are not trained to work in the mental health field, and many of them do not want to spend their shifts responding to these types of calls. It’s not what they signed up for.
Presumably they wanted to be police officers to work with criminals, and people like my son are not criminals.
It’s been good to have a voice in these conversations and in writing laws that can help other moms.
It may not be exactly everything I’d want on a bill, but I know if we had something like this the day before Miles was killed, it would have made a difference.
He may still be alive.
