The standoff lasted 4 minutes, but the questions go on and on

from The Oregonian, by Kate Taylor and Dana Tims


SUMMARY: The police shooting of Lukus Glenn, 18, has both loved ones and authorities trying to find answers
On Lukus Glenn's last day, he and his mother argued about the job he had just quit, but made up later with playful text messages.

He was polite at dinner with his girlfriend and her parents, but brooding at a football game, talking with friends how his high school football career had soured.

When he took his girlfriend home at 12:30 a.m., he kissed her hand and told her he trusted her enough to tell her that, now and then, he felt so low he thought of killing himself.

Hours later, the 18-year-old former football star at Tigard High School was dead, shot during a standoff with police in front of his Tigard-area home Sept. 16.

It was a brief, violent convergence of forces --a drunken, suicidal teen with a knife and police who stake their lives on the procedures they follow. When domestic-violence situations escalate to the point that police face knives and guns, they are trained to stop the threat and protect innocent bystanders.

But across the Portland area, police increasingly are adopting a new model of crisis intervention that has shown remarkable success at defusing violent encounters. The Memphis model emphasizes "active listening" to the pain released by a person in mental crisis and recognizes that such episodes probably involve severe depression and psychic breaks with reality.

There is no way to know whether that approach would have made a difference in the case of Lukus Glenn. What began as a yelling match with three officers escalated into the fatal shooting in just four minutes.

No simple explanation satisfies. Questions linger. As do stories of a loving, and loved, teenager with problems and three police officers who grew up dreaming of public service, stepping into a tragic nightmare.

Remembering

a soulful friend

In the past week, family and friends have mourned the beautiful, as well as the troubled, sides of Luke Glenn.

He was his dad's fishing and Yahtzee partner. He was the one who called his mother "Skerniffles" --a pet name he made up --and text-messaged her sometimes 30 times a day to make jokes or tell her what he was doing or what kind of food he wanted in the pantry, his parents said.

Sitting on the living room couch where she's spent most of her time since her son was shot, Hope Glenn said she'd been his soccer coach for years, beginning when he was 5, and that he still watched many of the soccer games she coached.

He was funny and unpredictable in a lovable way, said Tony Morales and David Lucas --the two close friends who witnessed the shooting. He puppy-tackled friends, and he could lighten up any situation with one of his jokes, but he was also a great listener, Morales said.

To his girlfriend, 17-year-old Beth Salzberg, he was soulful and supportive, she said.

"You know how it is when you're a girl --there's times you don't feel like you look good, you feel bloaty. . . . He would be like, 'There is only one way for you to look, and that is perfect,' " she said. "He made me feel like a million bucks. He was a good, good person. I miss so much about him."

Yet nobody who was truly close to Glenn denied that he struggled. He liked vodka mixed with energy drinks, and he drank a lot of what he called "Sparks," friends said.

"He really did drink a lot --he did it less around me," Salzberg said. "When I talked to my friends about it, they still said, 'He's a keeper.' "

Sometimes, he also cut into his arms with a knife, or got a friend to cut him, while he pointed out to whoever was around that he could withstand pain, friends and relatives said.

He'd argued plenty with his mother in the past year, and once she called the police to her home after he ran away. He returned before police arrived, she said.

His depression, friends and family say, began with the departure of a beloved coach who supported him and was essential to his record-breaking performance as a kicker in his junior year.

Back then, he was featured in an August 2005 community newspaper article, with a picture of him running across a sunlit field after a great kick. He's quoted as dreaming about being a kicker for Arizona State University.

But he left the team last fall and had brooded about it ever since. He never got the football scholarship he'd dreamed of, his mother said, and as many of his friends went off to college this year, "he felt like a failure."

Still, she thought he was leaving the problem behind as he learned more about the world outside football, at least until she saw him through the window of her house, blood-streaked with a knife at his throat.

She picked up the phone at 3:05 a.m. Sept. 16 and dialed 9-1-1.

Six minutes later, Washington County sheriff's Deputy Mikhail Gerba, 27, arrived at a chaotic scene, followed quickly by Deputy Timothy Mateski, 26, and Tigard police Officer Andrew Pastore, 29.

Altar boy grows

into police officer

Growing up in Portland, Gerba dreamed of being a police officer. In high school, he enjoyed nothing more than going on "ride-alongs" with local cops.

"From the start, that's all he wanted to do," said his grandmother, Wynema Gerba. "He always said it was the best way he could help people."

His mother, Diana, named him Mikhail to underscore her love of ballet, associating it with Russia's grand tradition of dance.

Before his family moved to Wilsonville in the early 1990s, he served as an acolyte, or altar server, at St. Peter & Paul Episcopal Church in Southeast Portland, his grandmother said. "The move meant he couldn't hold that position in that church any longer," she said. "He was so brokenhearted that he cried."

After high school, his eyes already set on a career in law enforcement, Gerba took criminal justice classes at Clackamas Community College's Wilsonville campus. Classmates there remember him as a standout student with a winning sense of humor.

"He was very excited about his future," said one classmate, who asked that her name not be used. "I never had any doubt that he was getting into law enforcement for the very best of reasons."

Little information on the two deputies' careers is available. Washington County law enforcement officials, citing the ongoing investigation into Glenn's death, have declined to release information detailing any commendations or demerits.

Others, familiar with the plights of police who have had to use deadly force on the job, say the pair's path back to patrol will be arduous.

If their actions in Glenn's death are upheld after review, the officers must undergo counseling as well as simulation training proving they can again pull the trigger in the line of duty.

"These are frequently career-ending events for police who take someone's life," said Don Rosen, director of residency training in OHSU's psychiatry department. "It's important to note that the tragedy for the family is also a tragedy for the officers."

Standoff spirals

out of control

Only 10 minutes elapsed between the time Hope Glenn called 9-1-1 for help and when her son lay dead.

She told a dispatcher that her son was threatening to kill himself and everyone in the house. That included her, her mother and Brad Glenn, the young man's father.

Her son was outside smashing her car's windows with a shovel, cutting his hands in the process. Two friends were trying to calm him down.

"You kill me or I kill me," Luke Glenn shouted as Gerba, Mateski and Pastore approached.

The officers yelled repeatedly at Glenn to drop the knife, a plastic-handled weapon with a serrated, hooked, 3-inch blade.

He bellowed back that they would have to kill him.

"Don't let them shoot him," Hope Glenn pleaded with the dispatcher. "Please don't let them shoot him."

Pastore had access to a Taser and beanbags --both nonlethal weapons. With Luke Glenn apparently retreating toward the house, where the family members he'd threatened to kill were standing inside, Pastore opted for the beanbags --considered a higher level of force than a Taser. He fired several rounds from his 12-gauge shotgun, striking the young man.

The impacts sent Glenn reeling against the garage, but he remained on his feet. He swiveled toward the house, his left side facing the officers. Less than two seconds later, the emergency dispatcher could hear the crackle of repeated gunfire, then nothing.

"Hope?" the 9-1-1 operator asks.

There was no reply.

"Hope?"

Assessing actions

and alternatives

The investigation into Glenn's death is just beginning.

Rob Bletko, Washington County's chief deputy district attorney, won't have reports for at least a week and will take another week before determining whether to present the case to a grand jury.

Already Glenn's death is raising questions about the amount of crisis intervention training that law enforcement officers receive.

In Oregon, few police departments have had formal training in crisis intervention for longer than five years. Such training is almost always voluntary.

Washington County, like a growing number of jurisdictions, employs the increasingly popular Memphis model, adopted by police in Memphis, Tenn., after a controversial shooting.

Washington County's new hires all undergo an initial four-hour training session, said Deputy Jason Leinenbach, the department's mental health liaison. Annual 24-hour classes updating the training are voluntary. Countywide, more than 100 deputies and officers have taken the classes, he said.

Clark County, by comparison, offers a 40-hour annual crisis intervention class. Sgt. Kathy McNicholas, the county's crisis intervention trainer, said instances in which force has been used against out-of-control people have declined markedly in the five years the county has used the program.

Washington County officials said neither Gerba nor Mateski had taken the department's voluntary course on crisis intervention.

Leinenbach declined to speculate whether officers who had taken the 24-hour class would have responded to the Glenn incident any differently from those who hadn't. But he added, "I'd hope they would do things differently, but I can't say they necessarily would. Even if you start out doing things differently, you might end up with the same outcome in the end."

With police nationwide encountering a growing number of mentally ill people on the streets, much more training can only help, said Bill Lewinski, executive director of the Force Science Institute at Minnesota State University at Mankato.

"We offer a 90-hour class, which we consider just the bare bones of what's really needed," Lewinski said. "Most departments don't even come close to that level."

Making sense

of tragedy

There's nowhere for Hope Glenn to look in her home without seeing her son. Her living room is full of pictures: infant Luke in the tub with his dad, 5-year-old Luke in his first soccer uniform. Luke, smiling in a field with his puppy Brandon, now a large, friendly golden retriever.

She doesn't know where to begin again, she says.

"That was my only son," she says. "I don't know what to do with myself."

"I don't know why it happened," she says in the low whisper that has replaced her usually vibrant voice. "Maybe something will change because of this. Maybe something will start to make more sense."