This story was updated at 5:05 p.m. on March 22, 2016.
A Burlington police officer fatally shot a distraught 76-year-old man after a lengthy standoff at his College Street apartment on Monday night, authorities said.
Burlington police, who were summoned to the apartment by a mental crisis worker, tried for five hours to negotiate with Ralph “Phil” Grenon, Vermont State Police said. Around 10 p.m., Grenon approached officers with two knives in his hands and refused to drop them, Vermont State Police said. Officer David Bowers, 23, fired multiple shots at Grenon, who was pronounced dead at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
Bowers, who joined the department in 2014, was placed on paid administrative leave, Burlington Police Chief Brandon del Pozo said during a press conference Tuesday afternoon.
Grenon had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and was involuntarily medicated in the former Vermont State Hospital several years ago after refusing treatment, according to court records.
Grenon had threatened to kill several neighbors in recent weeks, and local crisis workers had several encounters with him.
“This whole thing started as an effort to deliver services to Mr. Grenon,” del Pozo said. “There are several things we did to bring this to a nonviolent resolution. We deployed every [nonlethal] device in our arsenal. If someone would present me with a perfect plan that could guarantee the safety of him and the officers, we would implement it. If the outcome went well, none of you would have ever known it happened.”
Vermont State Police gave the following account of the shooting:
Around 5 p.m. Monday, a crisis worker from Burlington’s Street Outreach Team, tasked with caring for mentally ill people and calming situations without the help of police, summoned Burlington officers to Grenon’s apartment.
While officers were en route to 101 College Street, police received a call from the building manager who told them that tenants said Grenon was acting in a threatening manner.
Grenon refused to open his door for police. When officers opened it, Grenon stood with knives in each hand, and ignored commands to drop them. Officers fired a stun gun at Grenon, “which was not effective.”
Grenon shut the door and the officers backed away. During the next few hours, officers tried talking to Grenon, but he was unresponsive. Police drilled a hole above the apartment door and inserted a camera, but could not see Grenon.
In order to “check on his welfare,” officers with tactical shields entered the apartment. They found Grenon hiding in the shower with the curtain drawn. When officers pulled back the curtain, they saw he had at least one knife in his hand. Officers backed away and told Grenon to come out. They fired “pepper balls,” projectiles with a chemical irritant, into the bathroom, but Grenon remained in the room.
After a while, officers again entered the bathroom and pulled back the shower curtain. Grenon was holding “two large knives” and began making a thrusting motion with one of them. Officers again fired a stun gun, but Grenon walked toward them with both knives.
Grenon did not speak with officers during the entire encounter. “Not one solitary word,” del Pozo said. “He gave us nothing to go on.” Crisis negotiators on the scene attempted to call Grenon on 12 occasions but he never answered his phone, del Pozo said.
Del Pozo said he was attending firearms training at the Vermont Police Academy in Pittsford last night, but arrived at 8 p.m. to take command of the scene.
State police and the Chittenden County State’s Attorney’s Office will review the shooting.
Burlington police have turned over their body cameras to investigators, state police said. An autopsy is scheduled for later Tuesday.
“We fully support this important exercise of democratic oversight of our use of deadly force,” del Pozo said in a prepared statement. “We expect the full disclosure of facts, identities and evidence as the process of law allows.”
In March 2009, Grenon was charged with misdemeanor unlawful trespass. He allegedly entered a Kinko’s in Burlington and harassed customers for two hours, according to Chittenden Superior Court records. Grenon accused an employee of misplacing documents he said he left in the store, and refused to talk to police officers, according to a police affidavit.
He resisted while officers handcuffed him, and refused to talk to police back at the station, according to the affidavit.
Grenon was sent to the Vermont State Hospital for a psychiatric evaluation in April 2009, and had a guardian ad litem appointed to represent him.
After refusing medication and engaging in “several aggressive episodes in the hospital,” Grenon was involuntarily medicated, psychiatrist Richard Munson wrote in a letter to the court.
“He has schizophrenia … which causes him significant impairment in reality perception, thought process, mood and judgment,” Munson said. “He says he is not ill and that any talk to the contrary shows a conspiracy.” A judge deemed Grenon incompetent to stand trial and ordered him hospitalized for up to 90 days.
His was the second fatal police shooting in Burlington in four months. In December, members of a Drug Enforcement Administration Task Force shot and killed an alleged drug dealer on Elmwood Avenue after he brandished a firearm at them when they entered his apartment.
In November 2013, Burlington police officers killed a mentally ill man who walked toward them with a shovel and refused commands to drop it.
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***”they entered was because they feared for the man’s own safety”****
Do you not hear what you are saying? They entered by force to protect the man’s safety, the result of which was, THEY KILLED HIM. I think this fits the definition of “contradictory” pretty dam well.
Me personally, I actually do have the expertise to say what coulda been done, at 24 years old I would fight 2 or 3 people at a time barehanded or with knives, full contact, no padding. 30 years later I can still take a knife away from practically anybody and not even break a sweat, and that isn’t even part of what I do for a living. A 24 year old police officer that can’t take a knife away from a 76 year old man without killing him, shouldn’t have the badge, he isn’t qualified.
In other countries the police don’t even carry guns and six seconds of searching on youtube will bring you hundreds of videos where they subdue strong, young men with knives with little effort. I’ve done it, it really isn’t that hard, at all.
By plain, simple fact; they went in to protect his safety, he wound up dead. I would say that was an EPIC failure.
We, and by extension copse, can only do so much. If someone chooses to hurt themselves in the privacy of their own home then that’s just something we have to be willing to live with. We can attempt to talk them down or trick them into giving us an opening to subdue them. But if things get heated and subduing them is no longer a possibility then we need to back off. A life-taking like this should be the rare exception NOT the rule. But the statistics in this country say otherwise.
To those who support the actions of the police, I ask, “Why are you unwilling to examine the basic fact that this event simply would not have happened in a country (like England) where police actually live up to the “protect and serve” motto? Isn’t it a possibility that your judgement is tainted by the fact that you operate within a system that presupposes a completely different set of values? Might it be a worthwhile exercise to imagine a different way of doing things? Or, better yet, to actually look at the techniques in use in countries where cops don’t go around murdering multiple people a day, year-in and year-out?
The point here is that non-violent alternatives were available yet these alternatives were cast aside in favor of aggressive action. As a helpful analogy, I ask, “Is it OK if cops execute a person standing on a bridge contemplating suicide?” Absolutely not! Police are supposed to offer that person their support and do what they can to prevent them from jumping and/or hurting others. They are NOT supposed to shoot them in cold blood! I’m not believer, but these cops “played god”. Like so many before them, they stepped over the line, moving from protector to executioner. Naturally, I want police to protect people from themselves and others but there’s a limit. Looking critically, it was the police who escalated a tense standoff situation by breaking into the man’s apartment when all they needed to do was wait outside and observe. Folks who work in psychiatric hospitals don’t go around murdering distraught patients and neither should the police!
Wording here: “mentally ill”. Synonyms for this particular situation and others involving the “mentally ill” similar: “threatening”, “violent”, “weapon-yielding”, “uncooperative”, “agitated”, “dangerous”. Similar words are used to describe those who mindlessly murder un-armed individuals in public places…those people are also described as “mentally ill”. However you describe a “mentally ill” individual, each situation is unique. Sure, this man hadn’t murdered his neighbors…yet. And a crisis worker who is trained to deal with situations like these couldn’t handle this man and clearly felt that this situation had escalated over their head to the point where police intervention was necessary, FOR THE SAFETY of the man and his neighbors/the public. As an EMS provider, I absolutely stand with VSP/BPD or any other police department in this state and truly feel that they are here to PROTECT. Nobody wanted this man to be harmed, but when a situation escalates and the public’s lives become in danger, some “force” is necessary.
It’s important to remember that none of us were in the building. You can say “they should’ve waited it out”, but from what I understand, they entered was because they feared for the man’s own safety, and it was a judgement call, a call that police are trained to make. Police wake up every day prepared to have guns/knives/etc pointed at them. Do you prepare to handle confrontations like these each day on your peaceful Vermont drive to work? If not, you don’t have the expertise to say what Shoulda/Woulda/Coulda been done here.
I have two responses to this senseless and totally unnecessary cold blooded murder:
British police versus man with kitchen knife: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fvbcBZQ_9…
British police versus man with machete: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cX5CPx4RKW…
Or, even more obvious: Station a couple of officers and a mental health expert outside the guy’s apartment door (the only means of ingress/egress), send everybody else on their way and wait. Would that have been so hard? Instead we waste untold man-hours and end up with a tragic death. What a terrible waste all around!
This is police work at its absolute worst, but this kind of thing is far from infrequent:
https://www.facebook.com/KilledByPolice/?f…
ConcernedVTer: Thank you. As far as patience, let’s start with everyone in the building being patient with this fellow for years – enduring insults, snarling, yelling and more. The night of the incident started with his roaming the hallway threatening neighbors by name. It’s easy to say the police should have waited till he slept, but at that point they could not leave, as it was unsafe for him or his neighbors. They stayed for hours and tried to keep him from hurting himself or others. They finally decided to enter. He charged and they made a decision. If we could choose a better ending, having considered every possibility, he would be under observation now, but that was exactly what he didn’t want. We feel badly about it all, and of course lessons can be learned for future incidents.