Despite Baltimore Police Department policies that call for officers to de-escalate in behavioral health emergencies, police forced entry through two different doors and shouted commands at 70-year-old Pytorcarcha Brooks before fatally shooting her on June 25, newly released body-worn camera footage shows.
Police initially sought to leave the scene, stating that Brooks clearly didn’t want to be bothered and it’s not within police policy to remove someone experiencing a mental health crisis from their home when they don’t appear to be a danger to themself or others.
“Mom’s okay,” Officer Stephen Colbert said to a family member on the phone. “She’s okay, well, as far as moving around and being able to open and close the door. She just don’t want to be bothered by nobody, it looks like.”
The footage shows that Baltimore police spent about thirty minutes debating how to approach Brooks, then kicked down her door and confronted her with tasers before shooting her when she approached an officer with a knife in her hand.
The incident is one of three police-involved deaths in the span of eight days in June that appeared to involve people experiencing mental health crises and raised questions about Baltimore’s crisis response system.
The officers who responded to Brooks’ house did not call for the Baltimore Police Department’s Crisis Response Team, which pairs police with mental health clinicians. The department’s only Crisis Response Team was also handling another call at the time.
Only one officer at the scene had received Crisis Intervention Team training, Baltimore Police Commissioner Richard Worley said at Wednesday’s press conference.
BPD’s crisis intervention policy calls for the officer with CIT training to “take the lead” on the scene of a behavioral health incident, but Rashad Horsey, the officer Worley said had the training, did not lead or even enter Brooks’ house, the videos show.
The footage shows the officers who responded to the 2700 block of Mosher Street knew Brooks was experiencing a mental health crisis. They spent close to a half hour standing in the alley behind Brooks’ house, debating how to approach the situation, and having emergency personnel from the fire department attempt to speak with Brooks.
After Brooks first refused them entry, Colbert suggested that they leave.
“We opened the door, she closed the door, looks good to me,” he said. The officers also told Brooks’ family member that he would need to file an emergency petition to have her hospitalized against her will.
A responding EMT indicated during the conversation that the fire department has different policies for dealing with behavioral health crises, but the department did not immediately respond to questions about how their policies differ.
After knocking on the front door several times, officers attempted to enter through the back door with a key provided by a family member, but Brooks pushed the door shut from the inside. A medic tried to ask Brooks basic questions through the door, like the year and how many quarters make a dollar, to assess her mental state. The responders could not hear answers through the door.
“I’m trying to be nice here,” the medic said through the door. “If you don’t answer my questions I’m going to have to take you out of here.”
The medic told the officers, “If she’s not answering questions, they have to take her appropriately, per our rules.”
When officers tried to force the back door open, they encountered pushback and then saw Brooks stick her arm out with a knife in her hand. She immediately slammed the door shut again.
The officers then decided to go back to the front of the house and enter that way. Worley said at the July 9 press conference that the officers needed to intervene when Brooks couldn’t answer the medic’s questions, and because there was concern about the extreme heat that day.
“I’m going hot with a taser,” one officer said, just before they forced entry.
An officer kicked down the front door, and then another officer kicked an inner door open and entered the house. Brooks was inside, holding a knife. The officers shouted several commands, including “drop the knife,” “get on the ground,” and “get back,” according to the video.
One officer proceeded forward into the house and tased Brooks when she did not drop the knife, causing her to fall backwards onto a couch. Brooks stood up again and approached the officer, who had moved further into her home. The officer then tripped on a piece of furniture, falling to the ground. Brooks swung the knife in his direction and another officer fired three shots. Brooks can be seen slumping to the ground. She was transported to a hospital, where she was pronounced dead.
The Maryland Attorney General’s Office, which investigates fatal police shootings, previously identified two of the officers involved as Colbert, who has worked in the police department for eight years, and Officer Stephen Galewski, who has worked in the department for three years. Colbert appears to have fired the shots, according to the video. Police Commissioner Richard Worley said the involved officer has been placed on administrative leave, per department policy.
Worley said the department has “come a long way” in handling mental health crises, “but this video, clearly, and other videos, not just here but throughout the country, has shown that we’ve got a long way to go dealing with behavioral crisis.”
“Police officers are police officers,” he said. “We give them the training that we can give them to deal with this, but behavioral health is a medical issue that we have to address, and people that aren’t police officers have to help us address this.”
Worley said previously that police had received about 20 calls for behavioral health issues at the house this year. The city launched a Behavioral Health 9-1-1 Diversion Pilot Program in 2021 with the aim of avoiding police involvement in mental health crises and diverting those calls to clinicians.
The police department is auditing the earlier calls it received to see what happened in each incident, Deputy Police Commissioner Brian Nadeau said at the press conference.
On the day of the shooting, police received two calls about the residence: one from a social worker who checked on Brooks and received no answer, and another from a family member who said Brooks attempted to stab him with a knife. Police responded at about 1:35 p.m. and spoke with the family member, who provided the key to the back door.
Baltimore Beat previously reported that a family member sought to take over Brooks’ medical and financial decisions through guardianship less than a month before the shooting, but was hindered when a judge denied his request to waive the $165 filing fee.
David Jaros, a law professor at the University of Baltimore, said it is important to examine the entire crisis response system, not just the final moments before the fatal shooting.
“These repeated events are a reminder that we have to consider the whole response to the problem if we want to make reforms to prevent this kind of tragedy from happening,” he said.