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03/17/2021 08:00 AMIt was the evening of Jan. 5 last year that Denise Paley walked into the Guilford Police Department (GPD) headquarters. Her 18-year-old son, Ellis Tibere, had left the house around noon, ostensibly to meet friends at the library to work on school, but had never arrived, and Paley quickly became worried as he did not respond to phone calls or text messages.
A little more than 24 hours later, Tibere used a knife to attack a woman, apparently at random, in a strip mall parking lot in Westport, causing life-threatening injuries to the victim. Ellis readily admitted to the assault, according to police reports. Though he was twice found mentally competent to stand trial, he has also exhibited signs of mental illness, including identifying himself as another persona with another name, according to police reports.
More than a year later, Paley is speaking out, sharing with lawmakers and the public the terrifying, frustrating, and heart-rending experience of seeing her son go through this mental health crisis, something neither she and her family, nor the authorities were able to prevent.
Specifically, Paley has worked with State Senator Christine Cohen (D-12) and spoken in favor of a simple bill, only a few sentences in its current form, that would study mental health crisis training for police “in order to ensure that police officers have the tools they need regarding mental health awareness and crisis intervention.
“I knew something was wrong when, without notifying us, [Ellis] did not come home for dinner,” Paley told lawmakers at a public hearing on the bill last month. “I went to the police station to report him missing. As developments unfolded throughout the evening, we became certain he was experiencing a mental health crisis.”
In her testimony, Paley added that the GPD officer to whom she and her husband spoke “lacked the training to put the evidence together and make this determination himself, whose predetermined narrative did not consider Tibere’s mental state.”
“I felt like I was unraveling,” she said. “I didn’t know who else to call other than my police department. My husband went down to the station...and still no action was taken.”
“I can’t help but wonder if our town had had the training, could the whole story have ended differently?” Paley asked.
The Courier reviewed almost two hours of body camera footage and recordings of 30 phone calls between the GPD and Paley; her husband and Ellis’s father, Eric Tibere; friends of Ellis Tibere; and other police departments, spanning from 10:22 p.m. on Jan. 5 when police first received reports that Tibere had gone missing all the way through 2 p.m. on Jan. 6, when Westport Police called to inform his parents that he was in custody and a suspect in a stabbing attack.
What these partially redacted recordings reveal is frustration—from GPD officers, who are repeatedly told that Tibere has no history of or current behaviors suggesting violence or self-harm, and also from Eric Tibere and Paley, who express fear for their son’s safety and make it clear that his behavior is wildly abnormal and concerning.
There is nothing in the recordings to suggest to an untrained listener that Ellis Tibere was on the verge of violence. Though his parents emphasize just how odd Tibere was acting and plead with GPD to find or detain him, they are unable to articulate a basis for their concerns to meet the standards for further action, which include that he might have been a danger to himself or others.
Paley said she feels GPD officers were not prepared and did not believe that her son was indeed experiencing a mental health crisis, causing them to ignore the totality of evidence, which she argued was enough to show there was danger, or at least push officers to pursue further questioning or investigations along those lines.
“Their standards were really like, checking the box,” Paley told the Courier. “They weren’t really listening to what we were saying.”
In a recent conversation with the Courier, GPD Chief Butch Hyatt expressed sympathy and support for Paley and lauded her for her advocacy on mental health issues, but made it clear he thought his officers did everything they could within the law, and with the extremely limited information available to them.
“They were caring, they were trying to gather as much information as they could. Not having any background or context to take it to a different place, that’s the difficult part with this thing,” Hyatt said. “But I do think, not knowing anything else, they did a good job of trying to get the information that would have been helpful.”
The Crisis
Throughout the night of Jan. 5 and the morning of Jan. 6, 2020, multiple GPD officers asked about Tibere’s mental health, including if he had a history or had made any “questionable statements or comments.” They were informed by friends, as well as Eric Tibere and Paley, that he had not, though his parents informed GPD he was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, which Hyatt said by itself is not enough to indicate that someone is in danger, or likely to act out.
GPD also put out an “attempt to locate” on Ellis and the car he was driving shortly after Paley reported her concerns that he had been missing, and using a credit card purchase that his parents were able to track, police were able to locate him within just a couple hours at a rest stop on I-95 in Darien.
There, state police interviewed Ellis, and called GPD.
“He’s kind of refusing to cooperate, and we just wanted to make sure there was no emergency committals or anything like that that we should be aware of,” the state trooper said.
GPD officer Seth White, who took that call and had earlier interviewed Paley and her husband, asked the trooper if Tibere would talk to his family or anyone else. White then spoke to GPD Lieutenant Jeffery Provencher, double-checking if there was any reason that the police could detain Tibere.
“I’m not aware of anything [to keep him there],” Provencher said. “There’s nothing we have. I would just advise the parents that they [the state troopers] spoke with him, and that he’ll be home at some point.”
Speaking to the Courier, Hyatt emphasized that GPD had never interacted directly with Tibere and had almost no information on his background, behavioral history, or mental health issues other than what had been conveyed over the last few hours, which he argued would never have justified detaining or involuntarily committing a legal adult (Tibere was 18 years old at the time).
“We don’t want to violate somebody’s civil or constitutional rights,” he said. “Not everybody is going to be in a situation like Ellis was.”
Even informing someone’s family of their whereabouts could potentially be problematic, according to Hyatt. Though GPD officers did tell Paley where Tibere was located, Hyatt said officers are often careful even doing that in order to avoid violating someone’s privacy—someone who might simply be out with friends, as Tibere claimed he was, according to state police.
State law allows any police officer “who has reasonable cause to believe that a person has psychiatric disabilities and is dangerous to himself or herself or others or gravely disabled, and in need of immediate care” to detain and bring that person to a hospital.
GPD provided the Courier with the form used when an officer decides to involuntarily commit someone for mental health reasons. The “Risk of Dangerousness” options include 11 reasons for the committal, including “Homicidal Thoughts/Behavior,” “Assaultive Thoughts/Behaviors,” “Self Injurious Behaviors,” “Medical Concerns,” and “Substance Abuse.” It also asks the officer to assess the person’s condition—speech, attitude, mood, or appearance, and whether they show signs of things like disorientation, dirtiness, obsessiveness, or anxiety.
Hyatt again qualified that no GPD officer had made direct contact with Tibere and that he had no direct knowledge of the state police and their procedure, but argued there was nothing on this list that officers could have told state police that could have caused Tibere to be taken into protective custody.
“We give this information [to the state police]…’It’s unusual that he’s not home, the parents say he’s got no issues, but can you just kind of vet it,’” Hyatt said. “Based on the phone calls I heard from the state...he had a lucid conversation.”
White called Paley shortly after Tibere was interviewed by the state police. She expressed surprise upon hearing where he was, and over the course of a five-minute call, tried to figure out a way for police to keep Tibere there until his parents could reach him and questioned whether he might have been “in no condition to drive” and said she was “very concerned about leaving him” at the rest stop.
“The behavior is just so unusual,” she said.
“That’s a valid concern, but because we don’t have a legal standing to make him do anything at the time...he’s not having a psychotic break that we can determine, we can’t make him do anything from a police standpoint,” White said.
Paley told the Courier that not just at this point but throughout the night, she felt GPD officers were simply not willing to believe Tibere’s behavior was the sign of a tremendously concerning mental health episode, and if they had, they might have asked state police to push further in their interactions with Ellis or asked “the right questions” themselves in order to potentially have him committed.
“The narrative of the police officers is very telling,” she said. “They just were not on the same page as us. I can understand that early on...but when he’s there [at the rest stop] two hours later sitting in his car, all his friends are looking for him, his neighbors are looking for him, his family’s looking for him. Everyone’s saying, ‘There is no way in his right state of mind he would be doing this’—this is when the police should have been like, ‘Maybe we need to think about this. Maybe we need to rethink what is actually playing out here.’”
A handful of times, frustrated GPD officers indicated they thought Tibere might be avoiding his parents for any number of non-criminal, non-life-threatening reasons, emphasizing that he was a legal adult who had not committed a crime. Hyatt reiterated to the Courier that GPD had no background with the family and officers repeatedly asked about Tibere’s mental health history and if Tibere had said, done, or indicated anything that would lead to violence.
“We’ve had teenagers or young adults who have been in this situation a number of times,” Hyatt said. “The laws don’t allow us to grab onto somebody, even as a juvenile.”
The morning of Jan. 6, only a couple hours before Tibere drew his knife in Westport, Eric Tibere returned to GPD headquarters, speaking to another officer, Meredith Anderson, with no one having any contact from Ellis Tibere since his interview with state police around midnight.
“Too many signs are pointing that there’s something deeper that we need to get to, and there’s a problem,” he said.
Anderson told him that police across the state were still looking for Tibere and the car, but they still couldn’t do anything like track his cell phone or detain him without an imminent threat. She promised to again to call him or Paley if Tibere was located.
“God forbid he does something to himself. I’m here, my wife [was] here yesterday—how does that reflect on our system?” Eric Tibere asked.
Training and Laws
Currently, much of police training statewide is centered around a program provided by a non-profit law enforcement advocacy group called CABLE. Voluntarily, police and first responders can sign up for an approximately one-week program totaling 40 hours that focuses on mental health laws, de-escalation, suicide prevention, and children’s mental health and trauma, according the CABLE’s website
This Crisis Intervention Team, or CIT training, has been a significant focus of efforts in law enforcement and mental health, though some local departments have their own in-house training or course. Cohen, when she spoke on the bill she had introduced, also focused on the CIT program.
“We have to provide our law enforcement officers with those tools as well as ways to collaborate with local mental health organizations,” she said. “It is imperative that we are equipping our police officers with these vital resources.”
The state Police Transparency and Accountability Task Force, formed last summer through the Police Accountability Bill, reported that 116 departments have CIT-trained officers, according to Cohen.
A subcommittee of that task force recommended late last year that departments study whether to embed social workers in police departments to help with crisis calls. That recommendation was tabled.
It was not immediately clear exactly how many police officers around the state receive CIT training. A spokesperson for CABLE, Louise Pyers, said they have only been able to provide training for between 250 and 350 people per year, including non-police emergency responders.
There were about 6,700 officers working for municipal police departments, according to a 2016 study by the state. Pyers said that spots for CIT training are filled three or four months ahead of time.
According to Hyatt, GPD is attempting to get more officers CIT trained, but only have “a couple” right now. He said those investments were extremely important, but added that trying to make an evaluation without any direct contact with a subject, as in the case with Ellis Tibere, was still “difficult.”
Cohen has introduced two bills related to Tibere and these issues. The first in its current form is only a couple sentences, and merely calls for an examination of current crisis training for police officers. The second would allow officers to track the phones of young adults who are still living with their parents and are believed to be in a mental health crisis.
Cohen said she felt the first step was to study the issues involved in mental health and crisis training, both in regards to Tibere’s case and a broader increase in police responding to mental health issues during the pandemic.
That study will look at educating departments, expanding the limited CIT training, and looking at “what extent” police and mental health providers should collaborate.
“When a huge percentage of your calls are mental health related and you have an opportunity to de-escalate and intervene in a crisis...hav[ing] tools available that don’t require use of force, that’s huge,” she said.
Lieutenant Dave Wolf of the Westport Police Department told the Courier that his department actually has system where people can confidentially and voluntarily provide information to the police on anything they feel a responding officer should know about them, including but not limited to mental health issues, which he described as an important tool along with CIT training in successfully understanding and addressing crises.
Wolf added that while there are legitimate concerns about privacy when police departments use tools like that, having more information about someone is always going to help officers in crisis or mental health situations, which Hyatt said was something to take away from Tibere’s story.
GPD Deputy Chief Chris Massey said that the department does not have any sort of registry for those with disabilities, but an initiative called the Empower Card program allows people with intellectual or cognitive disabilities to sign up for a special ID that can be used to help identify their needs if they’re distressed or unable to communicate with a first responder. That program was created about three years ago by Sergeant Martina Jakober in collaboration with some local parents.
With a situation like this where the police had no background and the crisis was apparently sudden and unprecedented, Hyatt again said he thought officers had done everything they could to determine if Tibere was a threat, or in danger himself. Destigmatizing mental health moving forward and “getting good, accurate information to the police” will help prevent these things, he said, adding that he had no reason to think Paley or Eric Tibere had withheld anything from GPD officers.
“The message really is, there really shouldn’t be a stigma attached to this,” Hyatt said. “Mental health issues are real...It is critically important that police understand there is a crisis, and that the people that are reporting that are forthcoming with information that would benefit the police.”
Paley, who had lauded Westport Police in her testimony on the bills, told the Courier she was also hurt that in the days, weeks, and months following Ellis Tibere’s arrest, no one from GPD reached out to her just to check on the family, though a detective from Westport has maintained contact and been “very empathetic,” she said.
GPD officers did appear outside their house after Tibere returned home on bail, according to Paley, but said they were just there to prevent anyone from “bothering” the family.
“No one had ever checked in—not a phone call, not nothing,” she said.
Paley said she continues to believe that GPD mishandled the case, particularly in failing to believe her and her husband but also in other ways, with one GPD officer claiming there had been a fight before Tibere left home when she and Eric Tibere had repeatedly said that was not true, and GPD not reaching out immediately after the arrest.
“No one calls us, no one says, ‘This is what’s going on with your child,’” Paley said. “No one cared about us, or him.”
Ellis Tibere is still in prison after violating conditions of his release last December during what appeared to be another mental health crisis. It took her some time to get to this point, but Paley said she has researched and learned about police and crisis training, and she is committed to making sure other people across the state aren’t harmed due to a lack of training or understanding.
At the local level, Paley said she would welcome a meeting with Hyatt and a conversation about all these issues, including “going through every single video and every single audio [recording] with them.”
“I would be willing to collaborate with [GPD] any way I could,” she said.