Parents of Christian Glass devastated after another police shooting death in the mountains involving a person in crisis
The issue of mental health and how to respond to people in crisis is still in the minds of many in Colorado after two Clear Creek County deputies shot and killed Christian Glass last year. At the time, the 22-year-old was having a mental health crisis on the side of the road near the town of Silver Plume. A $19 million settlement was reached in the case in May.
Qusair Mohamedbhai, a civil rights attorney representing Christian's parents Simon and Sally Glass, says they spent the last year working on ways to try to prevent issues like the one that happened in Summit County over the weekend from happening. The Glass family says they are heartbroken for the family of an 18-year-old who was shot and killed by a Summit County sheriff's deputy in the Summit Cove area near Keystone on Sunday.
Simon and Sally say the weekend shooting brought back a lot of strong feelings, considering they lost their son in a similar situation last year. They were hoping the dollar amount of their settlement would alert other law enforcement agencies to sharpen up when it comes to situations involving a subject with a possible mental health crisis.
In Clear Creek County, local leaders agreed to establish a crisis response team and it is expected to be in place by the end of the summer. The idea is to get a person trained to deal with situations like Christian Glass's without violence.
"When they learned near the one-year anniversary of Christian's death there was another killing of a young man going through a mental health crisis, they were simply triggered," Mohamedbhai said. "They started bawling. They were brought back to their first 24 hours which they described as the worst of their lives, and these types of incidents with law enforcement are simply devastating in our community."
Though the two cases are different, the Summit County Sheriff's Office has the system-wide mental assessment response team, or S.M.A.R.T. program. The goal of the program is to de-escalate situations that have historically resulted in arrest or hospitalization and to assess whether the person should be referred for local treatment services or a higher level of care.
In the Summit County shooting, a news release stated the shooting victim pointed a weapon at officers. It is unclear what type of weapon it was. The S.M.A.R.T. team had been in contact with that person for a period of three weeks prior to this weekend, according to the Summit Daily newspaper. That team allegedly thought that person was not a danger to himself or others.
