Police Assailed for Cornering Man in Closet

An apparently distraught 23-year-old Oxnard man killed by police nine days ago had retreated to a small bedroom closet before officers ended a standoff by opening the closet door and shooting the knife-wielding man as he rose toward them, officials said Saturday.

“He started coming forward to the officers and he still had the knife,” Assistant Oxnard Police Chief Stan Myers said Saturday. “That’s when the shots were fired.”

Robert Lee Jones’ fatal shooting was the fifth by an Oxnard officer this year. A sixth Oxnard man shot by police survived.

Police confirmation that Jones, an unemployed artist, was pursued after apparently attempting to hide in his closet prompted criticism Saturday by his family and the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.

The NAACP has asked for a federal civil rights investigation, alleging that Jones was not only killed unnecessarily but that he was a victim of racial profiling when arrested twice by Oxnard police earlier this year. He was cleared on one charge, and the second was pending.

“They murdered my son in a sanctuary, in a hiding place in his own home,” Ida Perkins said Saturday, choking back tears. “All they had to do was wait. He wasn’t a threat to anybody but himself. If they couldn’t help him, why couldn’t they just wait? Why didn’t they just walk away?”

Jones, who was suffering from depression, had seen a psychiatrist a week before he was killed but had refused to take medication for his problems, his mother said.

He was shot Aug. 24 in his north Oxnard home after Perkins, worried that he might hurt himself with a long kitchen knife, called police in hopes they would take him to a hospital for treatment.

Perkins, an insurance company sales representative, criticized police for not calling the Ventura County mental health crisis team to defuse the tense situation, instead of escalating it by confronting her son.

She also said she had called the county’s Crisis Mobile Response Team twice the morning her son was killed only to be told to call 911 for police assistance.

“I told the [crisis team], ‘My son is afraid of the police. They will only agitate him,’ ” she said.

By policy, the crisis team will not respond to citizens’ calls if a weapon is involved and the police have not secured the scene, said Michael Ferguson, head of the 35-member unit.

“If there’s a weapon, we encourage the calling party to call 911,” Ferguson said. “When police secure a setting and they give us a call, we could be out there in a second.”

Perkins, her husband Stephen and Jones’ 19-year-old fiancee, Bobbi Marshall, said that police failed Jones when they did not call the mental health unit.

All described Jones as a gentle, kindhearted artist who excelled in high school and college before studying at the Pratt Institute for fine arts in Brooklyn, N.Y.

He’d moved in with his mother and stepfather in a new Spanish-style home in a middle-class Oxnard neighborhood on Christmas and was considering enrolling in a Pasadena arts college this fall, his mother said.

“This was a beautiful person,” she said.

On Saturday, Jones’ family focused on a tragedy they said could have been avoided.

“I see a kid who was withdrawing from aggressors,” family lawyer Gregory Ramirez said. “They get him cornered and they keep coming at him. He was probably praying for his life, and they open that closet door and start shooting.”

Oxnard police spokesmen have said officers used lethal force against Jones because they were in danger when he moved toward them holding a 13-inch knife.

Assistant Chief Myers said his department is investigating the shooting. A final determination on whether the shooting could have been avoided won’t be made until the district attorney’s office and a special state attorney general’s inquiry are completed in several months, he said.

“If you’re talking about appearances, I would agree with what [we’ve said] . . . based on the information we have right now,” Myers said. “But what it appears to be right now may not be accurate based on total information. Too many people are coming to too many conclusions [too soon].”

For example, Myers said he doesn’t know for a fact that Jones was trying to escape police when he retreated into his closet.

“It would be purely speculation,” he said. “Was he going for additional weaponry? Was he hiding? I don’t know. I know he had ample opportunity to drop the knife. That’s all the officers wanted.”

According to Myers, Jones was shot with beanbags, pepper spray and then a handgun only after officers tried repeatedly to talk him into dropping the knife.

When police entered Jones’ Bahia Drive home, they found him in a small bedroom about 12 feet long and 10 feet wide. After talking to Jones for about 20 minutes from outside the bedroom, officers shot Jones twice with a beanbag shotgun and pepper spray, Myers said. Still clutching the knife, Jones backed into a small closet and closed the door.

Three officers entered the room, and a sergeant pushed open the closet door with the muzzle of his beanbag shotgun, Myers said.

“There was an additional beanbag round fired, and additional gas sprayed and that’s when Mr. Jones came up,” Myers said. “He came out toward [the officers] and that’s when the shots were fired.”

Officer George Tamayo, an eight-year veteran, fired both handgun rounds, one grazing the closet entry and exiting the house through a wall and the second striking Jones in the chest, Myers said. Tamayo is on paid administrative leave, a routine procedure after an officer-involved shooting.

Police Chief Art Lopez acknowledged last week that Oxnard officers need more training in dealing with mentally ill people. Four of the department’s six shootings this year involved people with mental problems, he said.