Mother Grieves for the Son She Almost Saved : Shooting: The Los Alamitos woman said they were turning the corner in his battle with drugs when he was killed by police.

Choyce Tucker still cannot fathom the chain of events that led to her son’s shooting death by police this week.

He was strung out on drugs, she said, but he was desperately trying to kick the habit. After weeks of trying to help him, Tucker, a former psychiatric nurse, was hoping they had turned a corner.

Then, on Wednesday, all their efforts fell apart.

“All I thought about that night (before he was shot) was that if I could just get him through the night, tomorrow would be a different day,” she said.

For her son, tomorrow never came.

Los Alamitos police said her son, Michael Brown, 19, went on a rampage after being taken to a hospital for an apparent drug overdose. He was shot to death when he lunged at police officers with a pair of scissors.

“I know my son had problems but he wasn’t a bad kid,” Tucker said. “He had to harbor a lot of grief and just didn’t have the coping mechanism to deal with it.”

Tucker said her son’s problems seemed to start with a series of painful losses that culminated in her divorce from her second husband in 1993. With the loss of his father figure, Brown turned to marijuana and crystal methamphetamine to help cope, paying for the drugs with money from odd jobs, she said.

Tucker said Brown’s biological father walked out on the family in 1981, and his older brother, Richard, whom he was close to when they were children, had left home some years ago.

“As kids, whenever someone thought of me, they’d think of Michael, and vice versa. That’s how close we were,” Richard Brown said.

“He didn’t have his dad, and later on he didn’t have his brother,” Tucker said. “Then, my second husband left.”

Last month, Brown decided he wanted to straighten out his life so he could some day start a family and buy his own store. But he knew he couldn’t do it alone.

One morning before leaving for work, Tucker said she found a note on the family’s kitchen table from him saying that he needed her help.

“That day, he cleaned the house, washed his clothes and even went to the grocery store to buy a loaf of bread,” she said.

Tucker warned her son that rehabilitation would be rough. He would have to follow orders, even if that meant staying away from certain friends. Mother and son set out some limits and goals. She gave him 30 days to get a job, and he decided he would enroll at Laurel High School as a full-time student, Tucker said.

“It was like I had my son back again,” she said.

A close friend, Montague Bailey, said he noticed the change in Brown during the past few weeks. But the change didn’t come easy.

“There are a lot of drugs out there in the streets. It’s hard to be around it and not do that stuff,” said Bailey, 20. “Some days, he would call me up and ask me to stay with him during the day because he knew I didn’t touch that stuff.”

Tucker said her son was doing fine until Wednesday. About 1 a.m. he came into her room and asked to call a friend who also had drug problems.

“I knew then he wasn’t lucid anymore,” she said. “So I told him if he wants to, he could sleep in my room.”

Brown dragged a mattress beside his mother’s bed and the two talked themselves to sleep. As he dozed off, Brown told Tucker, “I’m just a kid, Mama,” she said.

When he woke up again just before 4 a.m., he shouted “something about the holy Bible and him going to heaven,” Tucker said. She dialed 911 and summoned paramedics.

Tucker said she wanted to hospitalize her son to help him through the drug withdrawals he seemed to be going through.

Brown was taken to Los Alamitos Medical Center, where he stayed a few hours before leaving against doctors’ orders, police said.

Brown tried to break into several houses before kicking in a door at one home, police said, where he struck a woman on the face and head. When officers approached him at the woman’s house, Brown thrust an eight-inch pair of scissors at them. Officers ordered him several times to drop the scissors, and when he lunged at them, an officer fired two shots, hitting Brown twice in the chest, police said.

He was pronounced dead at the scene.

Tucker said the officers could have shot to wound her son instead of shooting him in the chest.

“They told me they did that because they didn’t want any stray bullets to hit innocent people,” she said. “Well, the family was secured in the bedroom. There was no innocent person in the way.”

The three officers involved in the shooting have been placed on administrative leave, pending the outcome of an investigation by the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, police said.

In her living room, as she recounted her son’s troubles, Tucker glanced at her son’s football trophies from middle school. She was reminded of something a longtime friend said to her the day before her son died.

“I was doing the typical mother thing: I was complaining about my kids,” Tucker said. “She looked at me and said, ‘But you know, at least they’re around.’ I thought about it and my God, she’s right.

“This was supposed to be the turnaround for us,” Tucker said. “But he was shot before he could make that turn.”

Memorial services for Brown will be at 1 p.m. Friday at Friendship Baptist Church in Yorba Linda.