A ‘Less Lethal’ With Lethal Results

When the cops came to East 53rd Street in Long Beach and found an addled Glenda Lee Reymer out front of her house with a knife, they told Bill Taylor and his mother to go inside and leave the matter to professionals.

Taylor, 52, didn’t have a good feeling about where this was headed, but what could he do? He took his mother May, 86, inside the house, and they watched through the window as his lover of 25 years faced down police.

Reymer, 49, was a sad soul who never owned much more than her anonymity, and she was about to lose that. The former waitress had been withering physically and mentally, had no medical insurance and weighed barely 100 pounds.

“It’s a difficult situation,” says Taylor, “but when it’s love, you make the best of it.”

Passion brought the cops out several weeks ago, says Taylor, a disabled forklift operator. He was charged with domestic violence when he and Reymer argued and a door slammed on her thumb when she stormed out.

Friday morning, Reymer had one of her seizures; a lot of shaking and jabbering. When she came out of it, Taylor says, she was in a state. And then she was in the street with an eight-inch knife, holding police at bay and telling them to leave her alone or someone would get hurt.

“Every time another police unit pulled up, I ran out of my house and said, ‘Man, don’t hurt her. She’s sick,’ ” says Taylor. “Same with the canine unit. I put my hands in a praying position and begged them: ‘Don’t let that dog on her.’ ”

One thing no civilian can do is tell police how to handle their business, especially when they’re in the middle of it. This is when they’re soldiers, and behavior is not a conscious act, but a programmed response.

Somewhere between eight and 12 officers were in the street by Taylor’s estimate. A police spokesman said that sounded about right, but he didn’t have a more accurate number. They tried to talk Reymer out of the knife, but she wouldn’t give it up.

Reymer, who looked forward to holidays with her three grandchildren, sat down on the running board of a pickup truck, and the standoff continued. At one point, she put the knife to her own throat.

Some officers had guns drawn. One was armed with what Long Beach police call a “less lethal.” That’s a standard shotgun loaded with beanbags designed to knock someone back and stun them.

The officer with the “less lethal” took a position about 10 yards from Reymer. Twenty-three minutes from the time police first arrived, she was ordered for the last time to drop the knife. When she didn’t, the “less lethal” was “deployed,” as a spokesman described it for me.

And now we know why it’s not called the “nonlethal.”

Reymer took one in the chest, went down hard and that was the end of her.

She was pronounced dead at Long Beach Memorial Medical Center from what the county coroner’s spokesman called a “severe, focal blunt force trauma to the chest.”

Now I’m not one of those who lie in wait, eager to nail a cop every time something goes wrong out there. I’ve done my share of roadwork, including two ride-alongs in the past six months with Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies.

On the street, you quickly learn that the circumstances the media often portray in black and white are almost always gray: when to draw, when to fire, who’s in the right, who’s in the wrong.

I was with Sheriff’s Deputies Kamal Ahmad and Tony Guillen in Compton when a kid on a bike spotted us and tossed something over a fence. They ordered him to show his hands, but he paused, then turned slowly, as if concealing something.

Would he be dead in the next instant?

Would the cops be?

The kid turned out to be armed with no more than a beer can, and a potential disaster was averted. There were a dozen more that night.

So no, it isn’t easy out there. But having said that, there is no apparent excuse for Glenda Lee Reymer’s death by shooting squad Friday in Long Beach. There was no her-or-us moment.

Police obviously didn’t mean to kill her, and in fact were trying to keep her from harming herself or someone else. But she’d have been luckier if they’d gone after her with batons.

As for the “less-lethal,” Scott Carrier of the coroner’s office says he thinks two other people have been killed by “less-lethals” in L.A. County over the years.

It comes down to this:

This was a sickly, emaciated woman, and she was surrounded by a cavalry of police officers with firearms, protective vests and the strength of bulls.

What’s she going to do, overpower them and take out the neighborhood?

They could have used pepper spray.

They could have thrown a net over her.

They could have waited her out.

One brave soul could have risked a cut or two and just rushed her, because I don’t think you have to be Bruce Lee to disarm a grandmother in tennis shoes.

Instead they loaded up the elephant gun, 23 minutes down and not another to burn, and pulled the trigger.

“You killed her!” Taylor says he screamed when he heard the shot. He says police told him, “Calm down. We just knocked the wind out of her.”

Every last breath.

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Steve Lopez can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com