Welfare Check Took A Turn, With A Knife

A young woman who had reportedly struggled with thoughts of hurting herself — whose father had reached out to the cops for help — ran down Davenport Avenue away from Officer Tyler Evans.

She then turned, took a knife from the front of her pants, and plunged it into her own body.

She then took the knife out of the left side of her stomach, and swung it back into the left side of her chest ​“where her heart is,” Evans recalled.

She ran and ran as Evans chased on foot, eventually turning around and heading in the direction of the hospital. 

In the direction of her dad. In the direction of a pedestrian passing by on the sidewalk. Not far from a childcare site on Davenport. 

Evans knew he needed to stop her before she did further harm to herself, and potentially to others. So he took out his Taser and prepared to fire.

This incident took place in the late afternoon on Saturday, July 1.

Evans, a 25-year-old New Haven native and Wilbur Cross graduate, has worked for the New Haven Police Department for two years. He’s currently assigned to the Hill policing district.

With homelessness on the rise, in the Hill and across the city and state, Evans has plenty of interactions through his job on the beat — and through extra-duty shifts he picks up providing security at the APT Foundation on Congress Avenue — with people living outside, in various states of emotional and physical distress. 

During a recent interview at a downtown cafe, he said he’s gotten to know many people in such states in the Hill by name and by face. When, say, an employee at the McDonald’s on Kimberly Avenue calls him to make a complaint about someone asking for money or sleeping outside of their restaurant, he often recognizes the person in question and can talk with them in a calm, measured way about why the business needs them to leave and where they can go.

“Building a relationship and taking some time” to just talk and listen, he said, is a key part of the job. ​“You don’t know what they’re going through” until you really listen.

But on July 1, the 20-year-old woman at the center of an apparent mental health crisis in the Hill was someone Evans had never seen before. He didn’t know what to expect, didn’t realize how dangerous the situation would suddenly become.

According to an interview with Evans, contemporaneous police reports obtained by the Independent, and Evans’ body camera video from the incident, this particular situation began at around 5:35 p.m. outside of Yale New Haven Hospital’s York Street campus.

A hospital security worker and a second man approached a New Haven police officer about how the latter person’s daughter ​“recently had been suicidal,” to quote from the police deport.

The man told Officer Diamond Dickerson that he had tried to bring his 20-year-old daughter, who was in the passenger seat of his car parked a few feet away, to the hospital to get help. He had approached the police officer to let her know about his daughter’s distressed state and recent history of suicidal ideation. He said he feared she was off of her medication and might hurt herself. He also told police that she had been homeless, that he had found her walking around New Haven, that he had picked her up and taken her to the hospital.

But seeing her dad talking to a cop ​“spook[ed] her,” Evans said. She jumped in the driver’s seat of her dad’s car and sped off.

With the help of her dad, Evans and other responding officers tried to track down the car and the daughter. Ultimately, they found their way to Davenport Avenue near Vernon Street.

The dad urged Evans to keep his distance so as not to further concern his daughter. The dad, meanwhile, approached the car on Davenport, used a spare key to open the door, and was able to turn off the ignition as his daughter remained in the vehicle.

Evans then approached the car. After he made eye contact with the young woman, she began to panic.

“No!” she shouted from inside car, the panic in her voice rising and rising, as recorded on Evans’ body cam video. ​“No! No!!”

“I promise you. I promise you. I’m not trying to hurt you,” Evans tried to reassure her.

She jumped from the driver side of the vehicle to the passenger side, ​“screaming, attempting to get away from me,” the police report reads.

Evans thought back to his training on what to do when encountering people in such apparent emotional distress: Stay calm, he told himself. Speak in an even-keeled manner. Don’t be threatening in body language or the position of your hands. But also be extra alert for the unexpected.

As he tried to remain calm, the young woman in the car became ​“very combative and uncooperative,” Evans’ police report reads.

“She lost her mind because she sees an officer,” he remembered.

She exited the car ​“in rage screaming” and attempted to ​“push and shove [her dad] in frustration. I stepped between them to separate” father from daughter. She pushed away and ​“began reaching for the crotch area of her pants” before running, according to Evans’ police report.

“As I kept saying, ​‘no, no, no’ and ​‘I just want to talk’ … she began to run away from me.”

As she ran down Davenport away from her dad and Officer Evans, the young woman pulled ​“a black military style knife out of her waistband.”

Evans started to run after her, and radioed in that she had a knife and was attempting to harm herself.

That’s when she stabbed herself in the left side of the stomach. She took the knife out, and stabbed herself again in the chest. 

“Stop stop stop stop,” Evans can be heard shouting in the body cam video as he pursued her on foot. 

“She [was] running down the street with a knife in her chest,” Evans remembered, as he chased behind her. She turned and headed towards her dad, towards a person nearby on the sidewalk, in the area of a daycare, taking the knife out of her chest and holding it again. Evans urged her ​“to put it down, put it down.”

“I feared for her safety as I did not want her to keep inflicting pain on herself or become a threat to [her dad] or the community,” Evans wrote in his report. That’s when he pulled out his taser and fired it. 

The first shot only partly hit her, so he deployed it again. The second taser shot hit her, ​“her body tense[ed] up, the knife [went] flying out.”

As she lay on the ground, Evans and his fellow officers handcuffed her, called for immediate medical assistance. An ambulance arrived and transported her into the nearby hospital. ​“Sarge, she stabbed herself twice,” Evans can be heard in the body cam video telling a supervising officer who soon arrived at the scene.

Evans later learned that she had seriously hurt herself, inflicting ​“life threatening” injuries, including a puncture to her lung. Evans filled out the paperwork needed to ensure she was put on a 72-hour hold at the hospital for a mental health evaluation.

Assistant Police Chief David Zannelli said that, even though she hurt herself so seriously that day, the young woman survived after sustained medical treatment. (The Independent was not able to reach her or her parents for this story to get a comment from them on this episode.)

“He essentially saved her life,” Zannelli said of Officer Evans. He credited the officer with staying calm, then using his Taser to stop this woman as opposed to trying to tackle her and potentially causing the knife to do even further damage to her body. 

“Our policy is to deescalate situations first,” which Evans and the other officers here tried to do, Zannelli said. ​“Force is an absolute last resort.” But when the knife came out and she started harming herself, Zannelli said, Evans had to act quickly to try to keep her, her dad, himself, and the community safe.

In reflecting on this episode, Evans said that, at least at the start, this situation could have been a perfect one for the city’s non-cop crisis response team, COMPASS, to attend to. There was a person in apparent emotional and mental distress. The presence of a police officer was clearly further agitating her. He said he had been planning on calling in COMPASS if she hadn’t fled, panicked in the car, and then pulled a knife.

But then all of that happened. He had to act, and act quickly.

As Evans described the July 1 situation, ​“It took a left turn.”

Asked for advice for fellow officers who haven’t experienced such a situation before, Evans returned to what was going through his head throughout the episode: ​“Stay calm,” he said. ​“Stay calm.”