It was March 8, 2003. I was sitting in my room in Tampa, Florida playing videogames. I felt my phone ring. It’s my friend Stephen.
“Dude, I just got my driver’s license. Do you want to catch the new Bruce Willis flick?”
“Sure,” I said. I threw on some clothes and got ready for the night.
Growing up, I lived on a small island off of downtown Tampa called Davis Island. Two one way bridges brought travelers on and off the island. At the end of the bridges, a parking lot for a small business building separated the two streets. It was in this parking lot that I witnessed one of the defining moments of my teens—and perhaps my whole life.
Stephen and I drove over the bridge. At the time, we were into punk rock, and to date, I still remember “Fat Lip” by Sum 41 was blaring on his radio when everything transpired. We stopped at a red light.
“So is the driver’s test as big a pain as—“ I stopped mid-sentence.
“What’s wrong?” Stephen said.
“Look left man! There’s a cop fight!” I said.
A disheveled looking man lunged at a police officer. She stepped back, attempting to escape him. He overpowered her, and managed to withdraw her night stick from her belt.
The exuberance we first expressed over the action soon turned to deep concern. Though the light had turned green, we were frozen in our seats watching what was unfolding. The disheveled man began to cudgel the officer with the night stick, violently striking her blow after blow.
“Should we help her?” Stephen asked.
Before Stephen could finish his sentence, the first shot had been fired. The man flinched but continued swinging.
Then another shot.
The swings continued, but with less velocity.
Then another.
The night stick dropped.
And then another.
The man limped slowly; his shirt began to stain with blood. He breathed his last breath and fell to the ground, dead.
And then another. And then another.
Six shots were fired into Alan Houseman that night, and they still ring in my ears. I distinctly remember the sound of each bullet leaving the officer’s gun. When you see a man killed, any preconceptions you may have from watching films go out the window. There is no dramatic descent to the knees, no last words uttered, no emotional score in the background; and when you’re a man who looked like he’d been to hell and back like Houseman, there’s no one there to celebrate your life as you are in your final moments. As I watched Houseman’s body fall to the ground, I remember how much it looked like a marionette puppet’s strings being severed instantaneously.
Alan Houseman lay face down as the officer stood trembling above him, injured from his assault, yet scarred from the turn of events that likely began as a routine patrol and ended with the death of a man.
Houseman, as it turned out was a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. According to his parents Ceida and David Houseman, he had been committed multiple times, never permanently institutionalized, and never with an order to stay on medication. The night he died, he was off medication. Perhaps the most tragic part of the story was that he had been committed via Baker Act just one day earlier, but the Deputy that was supposed to pick him up never came.
I don’t remember what the official story was. As I recall, Houseman had approached the officer’s vehicle suspiciously, and he had an episode when she approached him. Reasons aside, seeing Houseman murdered was something that took me years to get over. I would wake up in the middle of the night because I was traumatized over witnessing a man’s death. I can’t say I blame the officer for drawing her gun and firing off a round or two, but she was clearly emotionally wrought, which is perhaps the reason she reacted with such excess force. It’s hard to get that night out of my mind, and I don’t suppose it ever will be.
Fast forward to July 10, 2011. Kelly Thomas, a schizophrenic homeless man in Fullerton, California is approached by officers after a call that he was suspiciously peering into vehicles and trying to open their doors. A video surfaced just last week of Thomas’s beating and consequent death (Warning: Extremely Disturbing). It doesn’t take a genius to see that Thomas was the victim of excess police brutality. He was tazed multiple times, bludgeoned with heavy flashlights, and slammed into the ground. He can be heard yelling “I’M SORRY!” and “DAD! DAD!” in the video. Thomas came out looking like this. The coroner ruled his death as “asphyxia caused by mechanical chest compression with blunt cranial-facial injuries sustained during physical altercation with law enforcement.” He fell into a coma and was taken off life support five days later.
No matter how you spin the facts of Alan Houseman and Kelly Thomas, one thing is clear: neither man should be dead. One bullet to Houseman would have perhaps subdued him, and a simple handcuffing of Thomas would have done the same. Thomas was sedentary in the video when his questioning began, and posed little to no threat to the armed officers who also were significantly more heavyset than Thomas.
The deaths of Alan Houseman and Kelly Thomas tell me two things:
- There is a serious schism that exists between America’s law enforcement and the mentally ill. We aren’t sufficiently preparing our officers to deal with crisis control in a situation where the Housemans and Thomases of the worlds are acting irrationally through actions that are out of their control. One in four persons arrested in Florida are mentally ill. The Tampa police force offers crisis intervention training for the mentally ill. The officer who killed Alan Houseman did NOT take this course. Conversely, our law enforcement officers—at least in these two cases have inadequately approached situations involving the schizophrenic. Physical punishment is not and never will be a suitable or fitting approach to resolving conflict with the mentally ill.
- We aren’t providing enough facilities or treatment for the mentally ill. We build plenty of prisons in this country, and we fill them up with more people per capita than anywhere else in the world. 730 prisoners per 100,000 people, to be exact. According to Mary Beth Pfeiffer, author of Crazy in America, the US has lost 57,000 hospital beds since 1990. The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill gave the United States a whopping “D” in a report card. It often takes tragedies like the deaths of Houseman and Thomas to raise awareness on these problems, but both should show that the US has poorly addressed its mental health debacle.
Almost ten years ago I sat in a car and watched a mentally ill man shot to death in an excess show of police brutality. Just last week, I sat and watched every second of Kelly Thomas’s untimely death, and shuddered over the parallels between the two men—both of whom are gone far too soon. On September 21, 2011, Orange County District Attorney Anthony Rackauckas held a press conference announcing criminal charges against the police officers responsible for Kelly Thomas’s death. During the press conference, he said “The biggest shame about this case is the fact that it could have been avoided. This never had to happen, and it never should have happened…[w]e must do everything we can to make sure we protect that trust, including prosecuting police officers if they violate the law.” Rackauckas gets half of the story. The other “biggest shame” is that Thomas (and Houseman) weren’t institutionalized and under constant psychiatric care to begin with. Kelly Thomas and Alan Houseman died full of fear, alone, and on the streets that their mental illnesses condemned them to. I share the story of Alan Houseman—one that has deeply scarred me the last ten years because I wish to raise awareness with our mental health crisis. In no way, shape or form are we anywhere near a satisfactory state in the way we treat our mentally ill, both from a societal perspective, and from a law enforcement prospective. Let us not allow the deaths of Alan Houseman and Kelly Thomas to be in vain.
