Deputy Kills Suicidal Woman at O.C. Hotel

A Florida woman who dialed 911 and threatened to commit suicide in her hotel room was shot and killed Monday night by a sheriff’s deputy after she pointed a handgun at him, officials said.

DeLoura L. Harrison, 43, of Gainesville was pronounced dead at the Hampton Inn in Mission Viejo shortly after the 10:30 p.m. shooting, Sheriff’s Department Lt. Richard J. Olson said. Harrison had apparently been despondent over marital problems.

“I’m angry at what happened,” said her father, Ralph H. Lewis, also of Gainesville. “Instead of someone qualified to help her, they send two sheriff’s deputies. We don’t work that way in Florida.”

Harrison had checked into the hotel on Oso Parkway for three days while she negotiated a divorce settlement with her husband, Eugene G. Harrison of Laguna Niguel. The two have a 17-year-old son.

The Orange County district attorney’s office is investigating the incident, a routine procedure for all officer-involved shootings. The Sheriff’s Department declined to comment on the incident, or address Lewis’ allegation that the department mishandled the case. The department also refused to identify the deputies involved.

“We certainly have a lot of compassion for the family,” Sheriff Brad Gates said. “This is a tragedy that none of us are happy about.”

“We ought to let the facts come out through the district attorney,” Gates added. “If there’s facts that indicate (the deputies involved) did something that wasn’t within the law, those facts will come out.”

Olson said that deputies went to the Hampton Inn after Harrison told a 911 dispatcher that she had pills and a handgun and was going to kill herself. The taped 911 conversation was collected by the district attorney’s office as part of its review. Investigators refused to give a copy of the tape to The Times.

When the deputies first knocked on the door, “the woman would not let them in,” Olson said.

At that point, the deputies, worried that the woman might have been harmed, obtained a pass key from the hotel night manager, Olson said. Returning to the room, they knocked again, and announced that they were going to enter the room.

But when they entered, Olson said, they came face to face with Harrison, who allegedly pointed a .25-caliber semiautomatic handgun at the head of one of the deputies.

The unidentified deputy fired once, knocking the woman to the floor.

While the Sheriff’s Department would not comment on how suicide calls are typically handled, Timothy P. Mullins, director of mental health services for the Orange County Health Care Agency, said the deputies appear to have acted according to standard procedures. He said deputies typically go to the location, assess the situation and call in a SWAT team or negotiators only if they or others are threatened.

Within the previous 48 hours, deputies successfully “de-escalated” four suicide threats without calling in negotiators or SWAT teams, Mullins said.

In the three weeks preceding Monday’s shooting, there were two high-profile incidents involving suicidal men armed with guns. In both cases SWAT teams were called in. On May 31, a Huntington Beach man held police off for more than seven hours. And on June 7, another man kept Irvine police at bay for almost five hours. Both men surrendered to police.

A suicide response expert who works for Los Angeles County said it is not surprising that the deputy was apparently caught off guard by Harrison.

“They sometimes drop their guard and run to the rescue, as opposed to a situation dealing with a homicidal person,” said Susan Baltimore, a coordinator for the county’s Psychiatric Mobile Response Team. “But unfortunately, a suicidal person is as likely to turn homicidal as a homicidal person is to turn suicidal.”

Gates declined to discuss details of the Harrison case, but said that deputies generally try to communicate with the individual who is threatening suicide. “We’d talk to them on the phone . . . talk to them through a window.

“Sometimes the situations, once you’re on the scene, don’t allow you to do what you’d like to do at the time,” Gates said. “The situation itself in that particular incident is going to dictate how we handle it.”

Harrison, a schoolteacher who had come to Orange County to finalize her divorce, had been granted a divorce decree hours before her death.

Her ex-husband declined comment on the shooting. “Right now, I’m consoling my son,” Eugene Harrison said. “I don’t really know what’s happening. I can’t talk about this.”

“She was a beautiful girl,” said her father, with whom she had been living since her separation.

But when her marriage began breaking up four years ago, Harrison began suffering bouts of depression. Eventually this became so serious that she was admitted to a Gainesville-area hospital, her father said. She was continuing treatment by a psychiatrist, he said.

She seemed to “have come around in the past few weeks,” said Lewis. She had even submitted an application at a local school to resume her career, which had been put on hold during her fight with depression.

Lewis, who said he was hiring an attorney to look into the shooting, remembered her last words to him as she packed her bags to fly to California last week.

When he asked if she wanted him to come to California with her for moral support, “She said, ‘No, I’m fine . . . as soon as I get the divorce, I’m going to get back to teaching and get on with my life.’ ”