Suicide At The Hands Of Police

Only after pumping three bullets into Moshe Pergament did officer Anthony Sica learn the brutal truth: He had killed a college student who had threatened him with nothing more than a toy gun.

Sica stood over the bleeding body wondering what had happened here.

It was only after an ambulance took the body away that detectives found an envelope on the front seat of the Honda. It was addressed "To the officer who shot me," and inside, on a Hallmark card, was a neatly written note.

The police report classified Pergament's death as a justifiable homicide.

But what happened that stormy November night has another name: police-assisted suicide.

"It's another form of euthanasia, like when people reach out for Dr. Kevorkian," said Dr. Harvey Schlossberg, retired director of psychological services for the New York City police. "Only here, people are in mental pain and the doctor is the cop."

No one knows how many people manipulate police into killing them; no national studies have been done. But two recent regional studies suggest that it is surprisingly common.

Researchers who examined police shootings in British Columbia and in Los Angeles County found that in at least 10 percent of cases, the dead and wounded had wanted to be killed.

Every time it happens, there are victims on both sides of the gun.

"It's an officer's worst nightmare," said Clinton Van Zandt, an FBI supervisory special agent who teaches hostage negotiation at the agency's Quantico, Virginia, headquarters.

On June 17, 1981, Van Zandt commanded police and FBI forces during a 3 and 1/2-hour standoff with William Griffin, who had taken hostages inside a Rochester, New York bank. Griffin's only demand: that police execute him.

Van Zandt refused. So Griffin ordered teller Margaret Moore, a single mother of a baby boy, to stand by the front exit. With his shotgun, he blasted her through the doors. Then he walked over and pressed his face against a full-length window, allowing sharpshooters to kill him.

It's not just a big-city phenomenon: Police-assisted suicide has stung communities across the United States, from leafy, suburban towns to rural outbacks.

Everywhere from Burlington, North Carolina, to Tuscon, Arizona, to Melvina, Wisconsin, has had recent incidents of police-assisted suicide.

Freak tragedies?

"Afraid not," said FBI agent Van Zandt. "These aren't flukes. This is real. And we better start recognizing that. This is not just going to disappear."

Suicide by cop may have implications for police-community relations acrss the United States.

It "raises a lot of questions about policing in America," said Nicholas Pastore of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation in New Haven, Connecticut. "It cries out for 'smarter' policing."'

Experts suspect suicide by cop has gone on for decades, but no one had studied it until 1996, when Richard Parent, a Canadian constable, examined cases of fatal police shootings in British Columbia from 1980 to 1994. His conclusion: Ten percent of the shootings were suicides by cop.

A more recent study found even higher numbers in California. One in six officer-related shootings were suicides by cop, according to the study.

Some police say better training and improved police tactics might indeed help prevent some of these deaths.

Bill Trenery, chief of police in Woodbridge, New Jersey, isn't so sure.

Catherine Falzarano, 42, pointed a handgun repeatedly at three officers in Woodbridge during an 11-minute standoff before being shot seven times.

Says Trenery: "I don't see what you can do about this."

If Matthew Pyers ran his car into a concrete wall, the man who tried police-assisted suicide said in a recent interview, "I might have lived through it and been paralyzed. But with a gun at close range, it'd be more likely to kill me."

Pyres led police on a chase through four towns. When he noticed they had given up, he doubled back and rammed his car into the rear of one of the cruisers. But waving nothing more than a champagne bottle at the officers, he lived through the incident.

"When I get into a depression," Pyres said, "I don't think of anyone but myself. But after he shot me, I thought about the officer, what I could be doing to him. Seeing his face, that horrible look, I realized how the officer would probably regret this for the rest of his life."

By Todd Lewan