“He didn’t try to calm him down. He just walked in and immediately shot my son,” Castillo said.
Time and time again in the US, police kill people experiencing mental health crises, but the exact number is unknown due to a huge gap in government information.
A law passed by Congress in 2016 requires the Justice Department to collect and publish data on how often federal, state, and local officers use force, how many times that force ends up being fatal, and how often the deceased suffered from a Mental illness. But the law does not require police departments to tell the Justice Department how many people their officers killed. The FBI, for the first quarter of this year, estimated that only 40% of all law enforcement agencies submitted use-of-force numbers.
Arcadio’s parents had sought mental health treatment for their 23-year-old son and even tried to commit him. But the system, such as it is, failed them.
Across the country, in West Virginia, another system failure, another death.
Apparently, Matt Jones was having a severe manic episode while standing on a highway with a gun. Police were everywhere, sirens wailing. The July 6 scene in the Bradley community was captured on video by a bystander. One officer fired and then others opened fire, killing Jones in a hail of bullets.
The 36-year-old had been unable to refill his medication and was experiencing delusions and hallucinations, his fiancée, Dreamer Marquis, said.
“He desperately wanted help,” Marquis said. “He knew that he needed the medication to live a normal life because he knew that he would have manic episodes that would get him into trouble.”
Advocates for people with mental illness say it’s clear they face a higher risk that an encounter with police will result in their death.
Hannah Wesolowski, director of advocacy for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said the deaths of Castillo and Jones “highlight a larger systemic problem we have in helping people who are struggling with their mental health or are in a mental health crisis.” ”.
Many communities lack a mental health crisis infrastructure, with nearly 130 million people in the United States living in an area with a shortage of mental health providers, he said.
People with untreated mental illness are 16 times more likely to die during an encounter with police than others approached by police, the Treatment Advocacy Center said in a 2015 report.
In Portland, Oregon, 72% of the 85 people who were shot and killed by police between 1975 and 2020 were affected by mental illness, drugs or alcohol, or some combination of the two, according to Jason Renaud of the Portland Mental Health Association. Portland. The group doesn’t have the numbers of those affected by mental illness alone, but they are sometimes intertwined. Long-term use of methamphetamine, for example, can cause psychosis.
Lt. Nathan Sheppard, a spokesman for the Portland Police Department, said he couldn’t confirm those numbers. All Portland police officers receive crisis intervention training, he said, but more needs to be done to address what he described as a “public health emergency … where services and treatment are not available or are not easily accessible to those who need mental health care. treatment.”
Misty Castillo is suing a Salem police officer and the city for failing to use crisis intervention tactics and training before the officer used deadly force in shooting Arcadio on July 9, 2021. A grand jury found that the shooting was justified. The district attorney’s office said Arcadio ran toward the officer with a knife in a stabbing position, but his mother denied this.
A social worker at a psychiatric crisis center was unable to diagnose Arcadio because of his drug and alcohol use, Castillo said. Arcadio’s parents tried to commit him to a psychiatric institution, “but everywhere they told us that he was not sick enough to be admitted,” Castillo said. “And a week later they killed him.”
A video of the West Virginia murder hit social media before Jones’s loved ones were made aware of his death.
Nicole Jones, her sister-in-law, was browsing Facebook when she clicked on a video showing a blond man with shoulder-length hair walking down a highway, pursued by at least eight police officers with guns drawn. The man held his arms above his head, a gun in one hand. He pointed the gun at his own head briefly.
Jones’s heart sank as she recognized the man’s gait and the way he swept his hair over his shoulder, realizing it was her husband’s brother, Mark.
Mark Jones said that Matt, who had been a star baseball player and wrestler, struggled with mental health since childhood. Matt built a landscaping and tree removal business but was also getting into trouble, often under the influence of alcohol, driving without a license or violating probation, his family said.
While incarcerated, Matt was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and prescribed medication. But weeks before his death, he was running low on pills and burst into tears, his fiancée said.
He didn’t have a driver’s license. His social security card and birth certificate were elsewhere. That made it difficult to make medical appointments, Marquis said.
Mark Jones was working on the landscaping when he saw the video of his brother being shot.
“I was trying to understand, ‘What was he thinking?’” he said. “What I keep coming back to is that he was lost and he really wanted help, not just once, but his whole life.”
Willingham reported from Charleston, West Virginia. Associated Press reporter Gary Fields in Washington contributed to this report.
