Chicago Public Radio is exploring the intersection of police and people with mental illness. Last week we reported on a Chicago Police Department program that trains officers to handle mental-health emergencies.

Our report mentioned a February 28 incident on the city’s West Side. A mother there called 911 for help with her 21-year-old son. She says he was having a schizophrenic crisis. Police arrived and ended up shooting him. He died the next day.

We’ve learned the officers involved did not have the crisis-intervention training. From our Humboldt Park bureau, Chicago Public Radio’s Chip Mitchell reports on the incident and what’s happened since.

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Raúl Barriera sold perfumes and scented oils out of a briefcase. He dreamed of becoming a chef.

He got arrested once for riding in a stolen vehicle. But neighbors remember him for walking his grandma to the bus stop.

His smile was a little crooked. His hair was dark, and stretched down his back. He weighed nearly 300 pounds. His friends and family called him “Rocky.”

Barriera’s mother is Lynette Wilson. She says her call to 911 the last afternoon of February was clear.

Wilson: “I told them that my son was sick, that he had mental illness and that he was barricaded in his room, and that I’m pretty sure he was off his meds and that I needed help with him, because I wasn’t sure what was going on in there.”

Paramedics and police officers climbed the stairs to the second-floor apartment. From the kitchen, they spoke to Barriera through his bedroom door.

Lynette Wilson’s husband says he saw what happened next. But the family’s attorney, Standish Willis, insists for now on telling the rest of the story.

Willis: “The sergeant, he was talking to Rocky in a kind of provocative way. He says things like, ‘I’m going to tase you.’ And Rocky would respond, ‘Whatever you want to do.’ And he said, ‘I’ll shoot you too.’ And Rocky said something like, ‘You better have a big gun’ or something.”

The sergeant hit Barriera twice with his taser. That’s a gun that shoots electrodes attached to metal wires. Then a police officer fired his regular gun at least once, hitting Barriera in the face.

Soon after the incident, a police panel found that the force was justified because Barriera was lunging with a knife.

But Willis, the family’s attorney, says the officers were not in danger. He says they’d managed to push open the barricaded door only a few inches.

Willis: “There’s no time where this door [creeking] was open. There’s no time where Rocky came out into the kitchen where the police officers were.”
An officer in the department’s crisis-intervention program told Chicago Public Radio that none of the police on the scene had received the training.

An ambulance took Barriera to Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center.

His mother and her husband say they ended up at a police station. The couple says officers questioned them for more than five hours that night.

Barriera died in the hospital the next morning. The Cook County Medical Examiner found the cause of death to be gunshot wounds. In a federal lawsuit filed last week, Barriera’s mother is seeking 5-million dollars in damages.

Wilson: “I’m devastated. I’ll never be the same again. Things will never be the same.”

The case has another twist. Six days after Barriera’s death, Chicago police filed three counts of aggravated assault against him for allegedly swinging the knife at the officers.

Those charges led to an unusual hearing in Cook County Circuit Court last week. Given Barriera’s absence, Judge James Brown ordered a forfeiture of bail. In his chambers a few minutes after the hearing, the judge told Chicago Public Radio he didn’t know the defendant was dead. The state’s attorney’s office says it had no idea either.

Veteran criminal defense attorney Tom Decker says he’s never heard anything like it. He says the post-mortem charges could have resulted from innocent mistakes.

Decker: “Another possible explanation is that somehow the police felt that getting the charges to the court system would in some fashion assist them in contending with the internal investigation or with any lawsuit that resulted.”

We can’t tell you how Chicago police respond to that theory. The department hasn’t returned any of our calls about the shooting or responded to written requests for public records on the case.

We did get through to Captain Jack Murphy, who commands the third watch of the department’s 25th District. He says he supervises the officers who went to Barriera’s apartment. He wouldn’t speak on tape about the incident.

But we saw him a few weeks before the shooting, just blocks away. That encounter sheds lights on what the district’s officers are up against.

Murphy: “Ten hut! At close intervals, dress right dress! Ready front!”

Murphy often lines them up in front of buildings where there’s been trouble.

Murphy: “Good evening folks. Tonight we’re doing a street roll call here because we do have gang issues in this area. We know we have problems with the Spanish Cobras. We know we have problems with the IGs. And we have problems with the MLDs. My officers, they’re under direct orders to basically have a zero tolerance in all parts of the 25th District, but especially where we experience gang activity. Our officers are young. They’re aggressive. And they want to do a good job.”

Andriukaitis: “Officers are trained to, when they come on a scene, take charge as fast as possible.”

Suzanne Andriukaitis directs Chicago’s Alliance for the Mentally Ill.

Andriukaitis: “If that means saying, ‘You do what I tell you or else,’ then that’s what they do.”

Andriukaitis helped develop the Chicago Police response training for mental-health emergencies. So far, 300 officers have taken the 40-hour course.

Andriukaitis: “Part of what we’re trying to teach them in the Crisis Intervention Team training is that there are times when people cannot obey the order, not because they don’t want to but because there’s something else interfering with their thinking process so that they’re not able to make a coherent response to what the officers say. And they may not even be able to understand it.”

The officer in the crisis-intervention program says only a handful of cops in the 25th have received the training. Captain Murphy says he’s not familiar with the program.

The shooting has rattled other parents in Barriera’s neighborhood. In a house across the street, Sandra Gil has a 15-year-old with autism.

Gil: “Do you want to know how alarmed I am that my son might one day get out of hand or make a comment that he’s going to hurt himself, and that his sister or I call the police to intervene, and my son ends up dead? It’s very scary.”

Police officials say they hope to have a thousand officers trained in crisis intervention by the end of next year. But Sandra Gil says she’d think twice before calling 911 for help with her son.

In Humboldt Park, I’m Chip Mitchell, Chicago Public Radio.

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Stacie Johnson contributed to this report.