Caregivers, relatives hope mentally ill man’s death after police encounter can bring changes to ‘impossible situation’

ST. LOUIS — In 2006, Julius Graves was pepper-sprayed, shocked with a Taser and beaten by police during a mental health crisis. He ended up in the ICU, then jail, charged with assaulting officers.

The incident so shocked and outraged mental health advocates that they demanded changes in the way police interact with the mentally ill. And they thought they had a deal.

But in the nearly 13 years that followed, Graves was arrested at least twice more and shocked at least five more times with a Taser. He was jailed four times, and involuntarily hospitalized seven times as his caregivers struggled to keep him on antipsychotic medication.

Graves’ final encounter with police, on April 13, 2019, led to up to three more Taser shocks, a struggle with police and the forced medication of Graves with a sedative and an antipsychotic drug. Graves went into cardiac arrest and ended up in the ICU again. His family took the 43-year-old off life support four days later.

Graves’ life and death are the story of society’s failure to deal with the mentally ill. Advocates struggle to keep clients on medication. Families don’t know how to support their loved ones. Police, trained in crime prevention and suspect apprehension, struggle with the role foisted upon them: to deal with someone in the midst of a crisis.

“This is not a one-off. It’s a systemic problem,” said LeAnne Buttice, a former leader of a team that cared for Graves.

A May report from the Treatment Advocacy Center, a group promoting better access to mental health treatment, estimates that half of the 8.3 million Americans with severe mental illness are untreated, and often don’t receive treatment until a crisis occurs and police are called. That means officers effectively have to diagnose mental illness during “a chaotic encounter.” Those officers also must “strike a balance between upholding public safety and serving the needs of the person in crisis.”

A Reuters investigation found more than 1,000 deaths in the U.S. after police use of a Taser. One-fourth of those were people “suffering from a mental health breakdown or neurological disorder.”

Jefferson County Sheriff Dave Marshak’s deputies recently had several run-ins with mental illness, prompting a frustrated Aug. 7 tweet about the “impossible situation” law enforcement officers are in.

“We just dread getting those calls for those people because we know … there is going to be some sort of physical confrontation,” he said in a recent interview. “There’s a lack of resources, there’s a lack of funding, and law enforcement is consistently dealing with these issues and we are not the mental health experts.”

For this story, the Post-Dispatch reviewed hundreds of pages of Graves’ treatment notes and records as well as police reports and EMS records. Graves’ father, Larry Graves, gave permission for Places for People, which helped Graves for years, to speak to a reporter and share Graves’ mental health treatment records.

‘A steady decline’

When Graves was well, he was funny and intelligent, relatives and current and former staffers at Places for People said. He wanted to become a professor, an accountant, a T-shirt entrepreneur or study in Egypt.

But he’d shown a “steady decline in function” after high school, his records say. He won a basketball scholarship to a Kansas junior college but didn’t stay. His records say he’d either had a dispute with his coach, or his family had run out of money to keep him there. He later tried two more colleges without success.

Graves was always religious. But after 1996, he arranged his bedroom to resemble a church, treatment records show. He said he saw a beam of light that he called “God’s robe.” He stayed in his room, talking to himself and laughing.

On Dec. 17, 1997, after he was living on the streets “in an apparently completely psychotic state,” police took him to the Metropolitan St. Louis Psychiatric Center.

He stayed for nearly seven months as the center tried to find an antipsychotic medication that would work.

Graves would be hospitalized against his will regularly for nearly a decade, including once in 2000 after he was shot by a neighbor during a dispute and then left the ER, saying the wounds were a “sacrifice” and that he didn’t need medical treatment because he “lives outside of his body.”

He believed mental illnesses did not exist, saying they were made up by doctors. Because of that, he was difficult to treat. He could be verbally abusive. He made inappropriate, sometimes sexual comments to staff.

He complained about the effects of his antipsychotic medication, Haldol, and constantly requested a lower dose. He ultimately wanted to be weaned off the drug. He also resisted the addition of other drugs that could have helped him.

Legally and ethically, the Places staff could not trick Graves into taking a larger dose, or medicate him against his will — even if failing to do so meant he would become psychotic, and they would soon be filling out paperwork to get him involuntarily committed to a hospital.

If they ignored his demands to reduce his dosage, they risked him walking away and going off his meds.

As Graves’ Haldol dosage dropped, problems resurfaced. For years he cycled through a pattern of sickness, crisis and forced hospitalization, with frequent calls to police.

Graves was 6 feet 4 inches tall and ranged between 200 and 230 pounds. When sick, he got in people’s faces. And he scared them. He was loud, telling Pam Leeper, leader of the team that cared for Graves for more than seven years at Places for People, that it was “because God has lots of questions.”

Relatives and current and former Places staffers said Graves prided himself on the fact that he’d never hurt anyone, even when sick. Larry Graves said his son didn’t understand that people could be intimidated by him.

“He was tall and big and black, which of course figures into this,” Buttice said. “He became very frightening to people who didn’t know him.”

‘I’m already dead’

On Nov. 6, 2006, Graves was in the courtyard of his apartment building in the 3100 block of Lafayette Avenue, in the city’s Gate District, yelling and singing. Neighbors didn’t want to “violate his rights” by calling police, his landlord told Places for People staff. But the next night, the same thing happened. He yelled, and cursed at neighbors who told him to “shut up.” Police were called, but Graves retreated to his apartment and refused to talk to them.

The next morning, his landlord gave him an eviction letter and called Places for People. Graves didn’t seem to understand, repeatedly questioning his landlord about the letter, spouting gibberish, laughing “nonsensically” and rolling in the grass.

Leeper called police. She asked for a Crisis Intervention Team officer, specially trained to deal with the mentally ill, so Graves could be taken to the hospital. She also sent Graves’ caseworker, Joel Sjerven. Sjerven said he’s never seen anyone, before or since, who “was that visibly psychotic.”

Sjerven and Places for People treatment notes say that the CIT officer did not appear to perceive Graves’ behavior as a threat and was “calm and collected.” But he called for backup in case Graves needed to be handcuffed.

The second officer to arrive was unhappy with the pace of the encounter, according to Sjerven and treatment notes. He began barking commands, yelling, “Put your hands behind your back!” Graves held the letter in front of him and asked the officer not to hurt him.

“Perhaps he didn’t have time or perhaps he didn’t have the skills,” Sjerven said of the second officer, “but what he did know was how to make demands and make orders. And Julius was unable to respond to those orders given the state of mind that he was in.”

That officer shocked Graves with a Taser, but it had no effect. Graves simply plucked out the Taser barbs. As more officers arrived, Graves was repeatedly shocked, pepper-sprayed, knocked to the ground and eventually hit with nightsticks multiple times in the head as he cried, “I’m already dead. I can’t see,” the treatment notes say.

Sjerven said Graves was resisting because he didn’t understand. “He thinks he’s being assaulted,” Sjerven said.

ICU and jail

Graves was taken to St. Louis University Hospital. He was so agitated that staff administered a large dose of sedatives, triggering breathing trouble. He spent two days in the ICU. He was charged with four felony counts of second-degree assault and transferred to a psychiatric center before being taken to jail on Nov. 28 of that year, 2006.

Sjerven said Graves immediately forgave police. “These are my brothers, and we are all from the same creator,” Sjerven recalled Graves saying.

But Sjerven, straight out of school, was “stunned” by the violent arrest of someone he was trying to help and with whom he had a therapeutic relationship. His colleagues and other advocates demanded action from officials.

The staff and director of Places for People worked to have the charges against Graves dropped and to have the “the failure of the CIT to manage the situation” investigated, treatment notes say. Places for People and National Alliance on Mental Illness staff also met with police and prosecutors.

“That was my main complaint,” recalled Francie Broderick, who was executive director of Places for People at the time. “The CIT officer was handling it, and what was the big (expletive) rush to deal with it?”

Prosecutors did drop the charges. A police investigation determined officers “handled the situation appropriately,” but police Capt. Mary Warnecke, who started the city’s CIT team in 2004, asked Places staff to call her in the future, “so she could help coordinate and avoid problems,” the treatment notes say.

Leeper said the incident changed how Places staff members were supposed to do things. If they wanted someone arrested, they were supposed to call 911. If they wanted someone hospitalized, they were to call CIT. Broderick said staff were supposed to stress, if appropriate, that clients were not violent and did not have weapons and ask officers to wait for a social worker to arrive.

It was also supposed to change things for police.

Former police Chief Joe Mokwa did not respond to a message left with his lawyer. A police spokeswoman declined to make Warnecke, now a major, available. “We will not have anyone available to speak relative to this,” she wrote.

Police guidelines now say the CIT officer has “primary responsibility at the scene, unless a sergeant is present.”

Despite the agreement, Graves’ caseworkers are still worried about another run-in with police.

Buttice said her greatest fear for Graves was that he would die in the street.

A fatal encounter

On the morning of Saturday, April 13 of this year, a man walking his dog between Clayton Avenue and Highway 40 called 911, saying Graves was beating up a bus stop and acting as if he was going to approach the man.

Graves, who’d been evicted from his Maplewood apartment four days before, told responding officers that he was going to kill the dog walker and one of the officers. He said he wanted police to kill him, police reports say.

When Graves, who often feared forced hospitalization and medication while psychotic, saw EMS workers pull out a stretcher, he took off running onto Hampton Avenue. In their report, officers said they feared Graves would be injured by heavy traffic, so they chased him. They grabbed him, and two officers used their Tasers, or tried to. After a struggle, officers eventually handcuffed Graves and placed him in leg restraints. He was still struggling and being held down by four officers when EMS workers injected him with an antipsychotic and a sedative. Graves stopped “his active aggression” about one minute later, the report says.

But something — perhaps the electricity, perhaps the drugs, perhaps just the excitement — caused his heart and breathing to falter.

Medics put him on a stretcher and moved him into the ambulance.

He was declared brain-dead at the hospital.

“Why was he tased so many times?” Graves’ sister Violet Jackson asked. She also asked why he was sedated after he’d been restrained.

“For it to happen twice,” said Mattie Thomas, another sister, “is just heartbreaking.”

Aftermath

Graves’ current and former caseworkers and relatives were indignant after his death. Sjerven spoke out to friends and colleagues, as well as a Post-Dispatch reporter and a lawyer hired by Graves’ family.

The lawyer, Daniel Finney Jr., said police did not have a CIT officer on scene, and the officer who chased and tackled Graves was a “newbie, a probationary officer.”

Places for People Executive Director Joe Yancey approached city officials about the incident. There was an initial meeting months ago. But not much has happened since, Yancey said. He said St. Louis Public Safety Director Jimmie Edwards had discussed the possibility of Yancey talking to recruits at the police academy. Yancey called the plans “loosey-goosey.”

Yancey said that Places for People, the National Alliance on Mental Illness and others will be working with the Focus St. Louis leadership group, in honor of Graves, to come up with a plan to inform the public about mental health emergencies, and how they are no different than medical emergencies.

Yancey said he hoped that “mental health first aid,” or recognizing a mental crisis, will one day be incorporated into Red Cross first aid training. “That way, we stop separating the brain from the rest of the body,” Yancey said.

Edwards, in a phone interview this month, said, “We are looking for ways to try to make sure that stuff like that never happens again.”

Edwards, a former judge, said he is thinking of expanding a pilot program in the sixth police district that paired police with mental health professionals. “Often times, when police officers confront mental health scenarios, there are only two places to take people and that is either jail or the hospital. And I don’t believe they belong in either of those places.”

“I think the better way to deal with the (situation) is having mental health professionals available to try and de-escalate situations and try to rectify those triggers.”

Struggling with a mentally ill person is “not how you calm anyone down. Especially someone who is not rational,” said Buttice.

She also said mental health court needs to be expanded or strengthened, and everyone should have access to the team approach often used for those who are poor or on Medicaid.

“The system is not built to save someone like him,” she said of Graves. “Police become the fall guys.”

Graves’ father sued the city last month, claiming that the city failed to train employees in how to handle the mentally ill, police failed to notify CIT officers, and EMS workers were negligent in injecting the sedative and antipsychotic drugs after a struggle with police and into someone who was already restrained.

Larry Graves has started to circulate a packet aimed at building support to change state laws about dealing with the mentally ill. He calls them “Jul’s Rules,” using his nickname for his son.

Buttice said any changes that spring out of Graves’ death could be his legacy.

“Something has to happen,” she said. “He’s not going to die in vain.”

Janelle O’Dea of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.