By Jay Syrmopoulos,
A Roy, Utah man, Jose Calzada,
35, placed a call to a suicide prevention hotline at 4:00 a.m. Tuesday morning
and threatened to kill himself, seven hour later he was shot and killed by
police, according to law enforcement.
According to ABC 4, neighbors
described Calzada as a quiet, friendly man, who was divorced and now lived in
the home with his girlfriend and her children.
The first tragic mistake in
this case was made when the Weber County Consolidated Dispatch Center sent
officers to the residence rather than some type of crisis response team trained
to deal with suicidal individuals.
From previous cases, such as
that of Jason Turk, who was shot twice in the face after a suicide call to
9-1-1 by his wife, or that of Christian Alberto Sierra, who was suffering from
depression and had attempted suicide when police showed up and shot him four
times, killing him, most know all too well what happens when you send officers
to “assist” people threatening suicide.
Subsequently, a SWAT team came
to the residence and “negotiated” with Calzada for more than seven hours before
taking his life.
“At some point those
negotiations failed and unfortunately the SWAT team was involved in a shooting,
and the subject is now deceased,” said Roy PD spokesman Matt Gwynn.
Eyewitness Ron Smith told the
Standard-Examiner that he heard “one shot, and then a pause, and then four or
five shots after that, that were very rapid.”
Specifics of the case were not
released but Gwynn was sure to explain the cop logic of reasonableness stating,
“Officers are authorized to stop a threat whenever their life is threatened, or
the life of another is threatened. And at that point if the officer feels he is
justified, he may act to stop that threat.”
“This is being treated as a
officer assisted suicide or suicide by cops,” Gwynn said.
While that could potentially be
the case, this is usually the default position of law enforcement when
unprepared officers show up to deal with individuals experiencing severe mental
health issues.
Often police go into these
situations with an ingrained mentality of looking at citizens as threats to the
safety of the officers and thus feel empowered and justified to use lethal
force as the suicidal person has already threatened to kill someone,
themselves.
Gwynn went on to state, “We
encourage those having suicidal thoughts or tendencies to contact a physician
or expert that can talk them through it. In this particular case he attempted
to do that — it’s unfortunate and sad that it failed.”
Sadly, Gwynn’s words ring
hollow as Calzada did exactly as Gwynn suggests and ended up paying the
ultimate price as is far too often the case in these situations.
