Transcripts

text | pdf |

---

SPEAKER 1: A year ago today, a man called 911 to ask police to check on his 22-year-old brother in Stillwater. He was afraid his brother, Keaton Larson, might try to kill himself. Larson died that night, not by suicide but rather by a gunshot from the police. Alisa Roth walks us through what happened. And a warning now, this story may be disturbing to some listeners.

ALISA ROTH: The body-cam footage from that night is dark, which makes sense. It's after midnight on one of the longest nights of the year. The police officers' flashlights make circles of sidewalk and grass and patchy snow as they walk towards the house. If you're watching carefully, you can catch a glimpse of Keaton Larson standing inside the screen door, lit up by the flashlights as the cops approach and announce themselves.

SPEAKER 3: Keaton, police! You got a knife. 220--

ALISA ROTH: I can't make it out in the video, but they say he's holding a knife. And they tell him to put it down.

SPEAKER 2: Drop the knife!

SPEAKER 3: Keaton, drop the knife.

KEATON LARSON: No!

SPEAKER 2: Drop the knife.

SPEAKER 3: We're here to help you.

ALISA ROTH: The people there to help him are four police officers, two from the Stillwater Police Department, one from Bayport, and one from Oak Park Heights. There are other officers around for backup, but these four are the ones directly involved in what ended up happening. Larson's anguish is hard to listen to. When one of the officers says he's there to help, Larson says no.

KEATON LARSON: I don't to live.

SPEAKER 2: Drop the knife.

ALISA ROTH: I don't want to live, he tells the officers. About 1 in 5 fatal police shootings across the country last year involved a person with mental illness. That's according to a database of police shootings The Washington Post keeps. So far this year, numbers are on track for the same.

The night Larson's brother called the police to check on him wasn't the first time his family had been scared about his well-being. His mother, Tessa Andrews, told me he'd been diagnosed with major depressive disorder and anxiety that he'd been dealing with since high school.

TESSA ANDREWS: I think it was ninth grade. Yeah, it was ninth grade when Keaton was in the hospital. He wanted to kill himself. And after that, it seemed like we were always in and out of the hospital after that.

ALISA ROTH: Andrews and I met a few months ago, near the house where she had raised her sons and where Larson was living when he was shot. She guesses he ended up in the hospital at least six times between the ages of 14 and 20. He'd done day treatments, too, and he'd had therapists.

High school had been hard for him. He was absent a lot because he was so sick. And being absent that much made it hard to keep up. Plus, being depressed and anxious made it hard for him to focus and get his work done.

TESSA ANDREWS: And it was his plan to go into becoming a math teacher. And so he had been researching some things about becoming a math tutor and doing some help with younger students.

ALISA ROTH: His mother said he often helped his younger half-sister with her math homework. And he had a special bond with his cousin who on the autism spectrum and often has a hard time communicating with people.

TESSA ANDREWS: Keaton just got him and could understand and could relate with him.

ALISA ROTH: In the meantime, he was working at the local Fleet Farm, earning money and just trying to get his life together. Still, the medications didn't seem to be working that well. And his mother said that lately, it had seemed like the crisis had been coming more and more often.

The night Keaton Larson was killed, his little brother had called 911. He was worried Larson would kill himself and was heading over to check on him. But he thought the police would get there faster. The dispatcher put out the call.

SPEAKER 4: I have a possible suicide attempt, our complainant stating that [BLEEP] may commit suicide, may have already cut his throat. Our complainant is--

ALISA ROTH: Two officers from Stillwater got there first. That's what we heard at the beginning of the story, when they yelled that he needed to drop the knife. By the time the officers from Bayport and Oak Park Heights get there, the Stillwater cops have changed tack. One of them, the man whose name is Hunter Julien, stopped shouting and started talking to Keaton Larson.

HUNTER JULIEN: I've been where you're at, man. I've had really hard times in my life. I didn't think I was going to make it either, but I did. And I'm really glad that I stayed alive.

ALISA ROTH: In-between promising help, he and his partner keep telling Larson to drop the knife.

SPEAKER 2: Drop it.

ALISA ROTH: By this point, Larson is outside, in front of his house. He's wearing a T-shirt and shorts, like boxers or pajamas, and he's barefoot. It's hard to tell from the video how far the officers are from him. In testimony she gave after the shooting, the other Stillwater officer guessed it was 12 or 15 feet. When Julien asks how he can help, Larson says only by shooting him.

HUNTER JULIEN: What can I do to help you?

KEATON LARSON: Just shoot me.

HUNTER JULIEN: I don't want to shoot you, dude.

KEATON LARSON: Please.

HUNTER JULIEN: I don't ever want to have to hurt anybody.

ALISA ROTH: Larson starts moving slowly toward the sidewalk. Now the officers tell him to stop and to drop the knife. He's been holding this long kitchen knife in his left hand and a utility knife in his right hand. He throws the utility knife down and switches the kitchen knife to his right hand. And then suddenly, he dashes into the street.

In one of the videos, you see him circle around. Three of the officers fired their tasers at him. But the autopsy reports only show one bar making contact.

The fourth officer was Hunter Julien. He wasn't wearing a body camera that night. But what he and his partner told investigators afterwards is that he started backing up away from Larson when Julien fell backwards. As Larson approached, Julien shot him.

The Washington County Attorney's Office decided not to file criminal charges against Julien, saying the shooting was justified. Fred Fink is the investigator for the county.

FRED FINK: The officer who ultimately was forced to shoot this man was the one that was trying to de-escalate the situation. And very frankly, I thought he did as good a job as could be expected under the circumstances.

ALISA ROTH: But did he? I talked to a lot of people about the case, and they agree it's a complicated one. There's the fact that Keaton Larson is in a mental health crisis, and it's police who respond, not mental health workers.

And then there's the knife. Even if the officers were only 10 feet away from Larson-- and remember, Julien's partner thought it might have been farther-- he wouldn't have been able to reach them. Everybody I talked to agreed that things got really messy when Larson started running and Julien fell, even if they also agreed that it's hard to armchair quarterback something like this.

SETH STOUGHTON: Situations like this are challenging.

ALISA ROTH: Seth Stoughton is a former police officer who's now a law professor at the University of South Carolina.

SETH STOUGHTON: They are difficult. The officer's adrenaline is up, and it's difficult to tell anyone in a tense and potentially dangerous situation, act calmly and communicate authentically. But that's exactly why training and policies are so important.

ALISA ROTH: Julien, the officer who shot Larson, had been on the force for about five years at that point. His record shows that he'd done lots of training in subjects from shooting to field sobriety testing but none in de-escalation and none in crisis intervention. In July 2018, just a few months before Larson died, a new law went into effect in Minnesota, which requires police to do additional training in diversity, conflict management, and-- this is the part that's most relevant to this story-- crisis intervention and mental health crises.

Officers are licensed every three years. And the training comes within that cycle. So it's still early to know how departments are implementing it. Advocates are already working with police chiefs from around the state, though, to amend the law and to clarify what that training should look like. The goal would be to get the legislature to change it next session.

Stoughton, the law professor, says he wants to be clear that the officers were in a tough spot that night. But when he walked me through the incident, he pointed out ways that it could have gone differently. When the officers walk up, the first thing they do is tell Larson that he needs to drop the knife loudly. And Stoughton says they didn't necessarily have to.

SETH STOUGHTON: Officers should never ignore the knife. But if the knife isn't a threat to anyone except the subject that they're dealing with, then there's really no imminent risk to anyone else if they let him keep holding the knife. So instead of fixating on the knife and yelling, drop the knife, drop the knife, you try and connect with the person holding the knife. What's going on tonight? What can we do for you?

ALISA ROTH: He says the officers did do better after that.

SETH STOUGHTON: They did stop yelling, drop the knife. They did take a more conversational approach. They did reduce their volume and change their tone of voice. What they did, though, was a lot more talking than asking, a lot more speaking and not enough listening.

ALISA ROTH: And ultimately, what needs to happen in these kinds of situations is connecting with the person to try to defuse the situation and to figure out how to get that person help, without hurting themselves or anybody else. Stoughton told me some other things the cops could have done, like positioning themselves differently so they were further away from Larson and moving backwards when he started moving forwards. But he says it's also hard to point to one moment when things went wrong because sometimes all the small mistakes can add up and compound themselves.

Really, he says, the most important thing is training to make sure officers are taught to slow down and to think before they act. He hopes that what happened to Keaton Larson that night isn't just tossed off as an unavoidable consequence but instead gets used as a teaching moment to prevent future shootings.

I spoke to Julien briefly, but he told me through his chief that he didn't want to be interviewed. And Tessa Andrews is still struggling to come to terms with what happened to her son.

TESSA ANDREWS: My son didn't want to kill himself. He was crying for help. My son was screaming for help.

ALISA ROTH: Alisa Roth, MPR News, Stillwater.