Steller: Sometimes police aren't best to handle crisis calls

Unfortunately, as it turned out, one of their first acts was to call 911.

The tragedy that unfolded over the next three weeks — first Marty Sr.’s suicide, then the shooting death Wednesday of Maiden’s son, Marty Jr., by a Pima County sheriff’s deputy — might not have happened if they had taken care of the father themselves, friends and family members have concluded. If Marty Sr. had been saved, his son, a soldier, would never have come home on leave from Afghanistan, only to die in Tucson.

Kyle Peart, whom Marty Sr. took in as a son when Peart was about 14, had the agonizing experience of talking for hours with him on the phone Oct. 31 as police surrounded the house, then going through the same experience with Marty Jr. on Wednesday, only to lose them both. Deputies stopped Peart and one of Marty Sr.’s close friends, Bruce Lucas, from talking to Marty Sr. by phone on Oct. 31 and would not let them in the house, despite Marty Sr.’s requests.

“I can’t tell you, guaranteed, we would have got him out,” Peart said. “But I can tell you we were the better option.”

Peart has filed a complaint against the Sheriff’s Department, but I suspect his experience shows not that they mishandled the cases so much as that they followed their own protocols, contrary to what might seem common sense from a family member’s perspective. For example, Capt. Byron Gwaltney said the agency does not let outsiders conduct negotiations with barricaded people and won’t let friends or family members into a home where a suicidal person is armed with a weapon.

“To have somebody outside our control engaging in conversation, we don’t have any way to know where that conversation is going,” Gwaltney, who commanded the second scene, said Wednesday. “If you invite us in, we have to bring all of our skills and capabilities with us.”

You can imagine that concerns about liability also are among the considerations of a Sheriff’s Department that was just forced to pay a $3.4 million settlement in the death of a criminal suspect killed in a SWAT raid in 2011.

This two-part tragedy started about 2:35 p.m. on Halloween, when Marty Sr. posted on Facebook an eight-sentence suicide note, saying, “I’m leaving some excellent people behind and I must say to you that I have had all the pain I can handle for this life time in the past six months.”

Marty Sr. had not been an isolated man — he had a network of friends and family members — but complications related to diabetes and a breakup with his wife months before had made him despondent that day.

“I talked to him within a minute of his suicide note,” Peart said.

Immediately, Peart drove to Marty Sr.’s house, and others showed up, as did sheriff’s deputies.

“He was not aggressive,” Peart said. “He said, ‘I just don’t want to talk with the cops.’ I talked with him on and off for about three hours.”

Marty Sr. wanted Peart to come inside, but officers wouldn’t let him, in large part because they knew Marty Sr. had guns in the house. As the standoff dragged on, the Sheriff’s Department called in the SWAT team. When officers realized Peart was on the phone with Marty Sr., they made him stop.

The same happened with Lucas, one of Maiden’s close friends.

Lucas and Maiden were among a group stationed at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in the 1980s who became very close friends and remained close through the years. They would frequently camp at the same spot on Mount Lemmon, and as each got married and had kids, they brought as many as 23 kids up there.

Lucas also was speaking with Marty Sr. at the scene on Oct. 31, and deputies made him hang up, saying they would handle communications, Lucas said. At the time, Lucas said, Marty Sr. was asking him to come inside, but officers wouldn’t let him, and Marty Sr. caught the drift.

“He says, ‘I love you Lucas, and bye,’ ” Lucas said. “That was the last I heard from him. I can’t go a day without crying.”

The Army sent Marty Maiden Jr. home from Afghanistan for his father’s services. As an heir, the 20-year-old also had legal burdens to take care of.

“He was just dealing with a lot,” said Peart, who is a pastor as well as a surrogate family member.

On Friday, Nov. 15, they held Marty Sr.’s funeral, and on the next day, a smaller group went to Mount Lemmon to scatter his ashes at the site where he had spent so many good times. Then the days began ticking till Marty Jr.’s four-week leave from Afghanistan ended. He wasn’t ready to go back.

On Wednesday morning, he posted a suicide note on Facebook and called 911 threatening to kill himself. This time, Peart said, he raced to the house to try to get there before police blocked him out.

“We didn’t want the cops involved because of how it went last time,” he said.

He failed to get there first and was left outside again, talking on the phone, though this time the police let him go on, planning to take over negotiations when SWAT arrived.

Marty Jr. was more volatile than his dad had been, Gwaltney said, threatening to shoot officers if they approached the front of the house.

But as time passed, Peart and Lucas felt they were making progress and Marty Jr. was calming down. They had contacted his military recruiter and were trying to reach someone at Fort Hood, his unit’s home base, to get his leave extended.

Then a problem cropped up: Marty Jr.’s phone was losing its charge. Peart had a charger in his car and asked the officers if they would take it to him. Peart arranged with Marty Jr. that the charger be left in the side yard and that Marty would call back in 10 minutes.

The sheriff’s officers didn’t see the deal as so clear-cut. The SWAT team had arrived, Gwaltney said, and they needed to arrange a safe way to deliver the phone charger and have Marty Jr. pick it up. The deputies have protocols for all these processes.

“He tells me, ‘I’m going to call you in 10 minutes and I’ll let you know I got the charger,’ ” Peart said. “Ten minutes go by, and I don’t hear from him. Then the cops start coming toward me and they say he’s deceased.”

It was apparently in that 10-minute time frame when Marty Jr. came out of the side door, Peart said. He was carrying a shotgun and an AR-15-type semiautomatic rifle.

Peart suspects that Marty Jr. thought the phone charger was waiting for him out the side door, and Gwaltney acknowledged that may be the case. But when he came out, he pointed his AR-15 in the direction of the officers, Gwaltney said, and one deputy fired a shot, killing him.

Now the Sheriff’s Department will conduct a pair of investigations into whether the deputy acted correctly — an internal investigation and a criminal investigation. Then the Pima County Attorney’s Office will decide whether to seek charges. But let’s be honest: Considering the guns Marty Jr. brought outside, the deputy will be deemed to have acted justifiably.

The bigger question for Tucsonans faced with a friend or family member in crisis is whether they’re better off calling 911, seeking help from some other crisis agency, or using their own insights and resources.

Local agencies have learned a lot about crisis intervention in the last decade. In 2000, Joe Mucenski called 911 when his son threatened suicide, and his son pulled a knife on the police, prompting them to kill him. Mucenski, a retired New York police detective, then pushed for crisis intervention training for police officers, so that they can have tools to de-escalate even those intent on “suicide by cop.”

Although hundreds of local officers have received the training, they’re not always on the scene, which bothers Mucenski.

“A person who’s trained in de-escalation and who recognizes mental health issues should be the one to respond,” he said.

Local officers successfully resolve thousands of “suicidal-person” calls a year, Gwaltney said. But when the patrol officers can’t make a breakthrough and the person is armed, they go through procedures such as surrounding the house, evacuating neighbors and calling in SWAT to ensure no one else is harmed.

The instinctive reflex of calling 911 brings all these police protocols into play, something that friends and family of the Maidens now believe may have cost a father and his son their lives.