‘Puppy’ With Flowers and a Hammer Is Shot by Police

Ron Kessler walked along the suburban highway, clutching a bunch of wildflowers in one hand and a claw hammer in the other.

As he went down an exit ramp, a car pulled up alongside. The young driver wondered if he needed a ride. “Get away from me!” Kessler barked, waving the hammer. Soon afterward, alerted to this encounter, two police officers in patrol cars appeared.

Kessler, 42, who had recently stopped taking drugs to treat paranoid schizophrenia, at first ignored their orders and kept walking. Within two minutes, he lay dead on a lawn with five bullets in his chest, leg and wrist.

It was the first fatal shooting by the 56-member police force in this town next to Lake Ontario. And it raised questions about how well police here--and in departments around the nation--are trained to cope when mentally ill people break the law.

“I saw the bullet holes,” said Kessler’s sister, Marlene Zazzara. “They didn’t have to shoot him so many times.”

When officers saw her brother was despondent, she said, why not try nonlethal means?

“Why didn’t they Mace him? Why didn’t they net him or call for backup? They didn’t know he was trying to go get help.”

Tears flooded her eyes as she sat in her kitchen recalling that July morning in 1998.

“It was like losing a child,” she said. “I was his lifeline, through good, bad and indifferent. I was always there for him.”

Large institutions that once housed psychiatric patients began shrinking or shutting down in the second half of the 20th century as doctors switched to community care and the use of new anti-psychotic drugs.

One result was that police increasingly have found themselves dispatched to the front lines of mental health care.

Encounters with people behaving in bizarre ways brought on by depression, delusions, intense anger or anxiety usually end peacefully. But hundreds of times in recent years, officers’ attempts to deal with what they see as a public threat have lethal consequences.

“Police departments are recognizing that they need to be more effective in their dealings with the mentally ill because these shootings have become all too common,” said Terry Garahan, a mental health clinic supervisor in Ithaca, N.Y. After a deranged woman fatally stabbed a police inspector there, Garahan helped bring about changes in tactics police use in crises involving the mentally ill.

Special Training in Some Communities

Led by a Memphis, Tenn., program begun in 1988, at least 15 cities from Houston to Roanoke, Va., and Waterloo, Iowa, have “crisis intervention” officers trained intensively to handle emergency calls about emotionally disturbed people.

Some cities--including Los Angeles, Birmingham, Ala., and Knoxville, Tenn.--pair mental-health specialists with mobile police units.

More typically, departments rely on academy training, often an eight-hour regimen using role-playing scenarios. That’s as much as many departments feel they can afford.

“Should we train all our officers to be psychiatrists? Hey, I’d love to. Have you got $30,000 for each officer to send him back to college?” said Capt. Mark Bonsignore, police training officer in Irondequoit, a Rochester suburb.

“We train our people to deal with crises in a general manner and they do a tremendous job at that. We did a great deal of soul-searching after Mr. Kessler’s death. Our training worked exactly as it was supposed to work.”

But Lt. Sam Cochran, who coordinates the Memphis program, believes police everywhere can handle mental-illness complaints better at little extra cost, and dramatically reduce injury rates to officers and the public.

Some 200 of the 900-plus patrol officers in Memphis have undergone at least a week of special training: meeting mentally ill people, studying medications and symptoms, and learning how to adjust their voice tone, stance and expectations during standoffs.

The first step, Cochran said, is recognizing that the mentally ill are not “always violent, out of control and always going to kill you.”

Memphis also opened an emergency clinic where unstable people can be quickly dropped off by police.

“It’s much more than just training,” Cochran said. “It’s an infrastructure. It’s about changing attitudes and behavior.”

Marlene Zazzara’s telephone picked up a message from her younger brother around 9 a.m. He said his car was missing when he awoke. He sounded frightened.

Whenever “Ronnie” was in trouble, he’d go in search of her. Two hours after the call, he’d walked 10 miles from his studio apartment in the neighboring Rochester suburb of Webster and was three blocks from her home when he ran into the police.

Zazzara thinks he picked the wildflowers for her. And the hammer? He was probably bringing it to help repair her husband’s broken-down pickup, as he’d done two days before, she says.

Ron and Marlene were reared by their grandparents. The family first recognized something was wrong when, at 19, Ron began kicking a family dog over and over. Years later, he whirled around in a church pew and punched an elderly man, thinking he was a vampire.

After both outbursts, gentle intervention calmed him and he went off in an ambulance. Although physically imposing--6-foot-2, 205 pounds with a muscular build--this was a laid-back, upbeat man who rarely lost his temper.

“He was like a puppy,” said Zazzara.

“He would make us laugh all the time,” her daughter, Christine, recalled.

Kessler taught her to swim and he played a determined game of Monopoly. Watching “Three Stooges” episodes, he’d laugh until tears ran down his face.

He also complained of hearing voices. He saw his name written in the snow. He believed doctors put an implant behind his ear to monitor his thoughts.

Medicine kept the demons at bay but left him prone to bouts of lethargy and dread. So for years, whenever he felt better, Kessler stopped taking his pills. Black moods would always return.

Only by his early 30s did Zazzara persuade him to switch to monthly, time-release injections. That worked well. But Kessler was now dabbling in cocaine, leading to petty thefts and brief spells in jail.

By 1998, he seemed finally to have broken his addiction. He’d started a painting-and-drywall business, moved to Webster and begun to date.

He also returned to his medication, but before long he stopped again. Within two weeks, Kessler had a noisy row with a supermarket cashier, pushed aside a customer’s cart carrying a little boy, then ran his car at a store manager in the parking lot.

Webster police found the car outside his apartment complex and towed it, but couldn’t locate him. That wouldn’t happen until the next morning.

Officer Carl Saporito arrived first, alerted to “a suspect menacing motorists.” Officer Todd Fitzsimmons pulled up moments later. Neither had ever fired his gun on duty.

Saporito, a 20-year veteran, told investigators he quietly asked Kessler to drop the hammer.

Kessler bolted down Culver Road, which runs through a mostly residential section. A dozen witnesses, many in cars, watched as the officers hemmed him in by standing on each side. Kessler now appeared highly agitated and suddenly raised the hammer.

“Put the hammer down!” the officers shouted.

Police said Kessler lunged at Fitzsimmons with the hammer, forcing him backward. Kessler then turned around and advanced toward Saporito. Four of the bullets came from Saporito’s .45-caliber gun.

“The way he was swinging the thing, it looked like he was blind,” said Chris Gress, 33, a gas station manager watching from across the street. “I don’t think it’s the officers’ fault and I don’t believe a man should have died over something like that. He should have been in the hospital.”

Taking Control of the Situation

The officers’ perception that Kessler was a deadly threat to them or others justified their action, prosecutor Ken Hyland said.

“What if he goes around the corner and there’s a little boy or girl sitting on the sidewalk?” Hyland asked.

“The officers couldn’t allow him to move on without evaluating the situation,” said Bonsignore, their trainer. “If Carl had not shot, he would have been seriously injured or dead because Kessler would have buried that hammer in his head.”

The officers declined to be interviewed. Both remain on patrol. They were cleared by a grand jury, and a civil lawsuit alleging excessive force was dismissed.

“My problem with the law,” Zazzara said, “is they have a right to do whatever their gut feeling tells them to.”

While reluctant to second-guess individual cases, some mental-health advocates suggested the officers might have waited for reinforcements while keeping close enough to protect others. “Why not walk in front? I mean, they can always shoot him,” Garahan said.

Ron Honberg, legal director at the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, said, “I’ve developed an immense respect for the police over the years, but if they deal with this as a confrontation . . . frequently that will feed right into the symptoms.”

‘Why didn’t they Mace him? Why didn’t they net him or call for backup?

They didn’t know he was trying to go get help.’

Marlene Zazzara, dead man’s sister