Like all mothers, Amity Dimock loves her son. “Kobe was my first child, the first love of my life,” she said. “You don’t understand real love until you have a child. We had a very special bond.”
On August 31, 2019, Kobe Dimock-Heisler, who had autism and mental illness, was killed by Brooklyn Center police after his grandfather called 911 to report that they had had an argument that had escalated to threats of physical violence. He was concerned about his grandson’s outsized reaction.
Dimock explained that her 21-year-old son had a history of self-harm and that Dimock-Heisler’s grandfather called police because he was concerned that his grandson might hurt himself: “His only history of harm to anybody was to himself.”
Dimock said that Kobe calmed down before officers arrived, and his grandfather called the police to tell them not to come. But it was too late: Four Brooklyn Center police officers — Brandon Akers, Steve Holt, Cody Turner and Joseph Vu — pulled up.
At this point, reports of what happened at the scene vary depending on the source. (Most of the events were captured on the officers’ body cams. Those images were made available to the public.) Dimock and her supporters say that Dimock-Heisler’s grandfather met the officers at the door and told them they weren’t needed, but they explained that they had to look at everybody in the house to confirm that the situation was under control. The four officers then entered the home.
While police were in the house, Vu, a trainee, was assigned to work with Dimock-Heisler. The situation escalated, there was a struggle, and Dimock-Heisler was tased multiple times. Upset by the idea that he might be sent to a hospital for psychiatric evaluation, he ran from the officers, retrieving an object from a couch that police say was a paring knife. According to a report filed in August 2020 by the Hennepin County Attorney’s office, Dimock-Heisler attempted to stab Vu with the knife. (His family objects to this description.) Officers shot him multiple times. He died at the scene.
Dimock-Heisler’s death adds to a growing list of people in mental health crisis who have been killed by police. When Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman announced his decision not to file charges against the officers in the case, the family felt that justice had not been served. Last month they joined Communities United Against Police Brutality (CUAPB), a Twin Cities-based volunteer-run watchdog group, in filing a federal wrongful death civil suit against the Brooklyn Center Police Department.
Michelle Gross, CUAPB co-founder, said her organization conducted a reinvestigation of the case and felt they had grounds to file the suit. She explained that CUAPB often reinvestigates cases.
“One of our workgroups is a reinvestigation group,” Gross said. “After the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) does their investigation, we go out and reinvestigate cases involving police brutality or death to understand if their investigation was good quality. We find, frankly, that the BCA often does a poor job of investigating these cases.”
Sometimes, these reinvestigations result in legal action. Other times, Gross said, CUAPB determines that the organization’s attorneys have no grounds to take on a case.
“Our lawyers can’t take on cases where there is no basis,” she said. “There are cases that we turn down because they aren’t founded. But I do think this is a very good case. Our reinvestigation found things that led us to believe that the police made serious mistakes. I don’t believe that Kobe needed to die that day.”
[image_credit]Courtesy of Michelle Gross[/image_credit][image_caption]Michelle Gross, CUAPB co-founder: “After the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) does their investigation, we go out and reinvestigate cases involving police brutality or death to understand if their investigation was good quality. We find, frankly, that the BCA often does a poor job of investigating these cases.”[/image_caption]
Jason M. Hiveley, an attorney representing the City of Brooklyn Center and the involved police officers, declined to comment further on the case. “We are in the process of evaluating the claims in the complaint and will be filing our answer in the next few weeks,” he said.
Gross explained that CUAPB sees lawsuits like this one not only as a show of support for families of people affected by police violence, but also as a way to challenge accepted ways of policing.
“We believe it is important to do things like file lawsuits as well to try to change policies,” she said. “It is an effective tool that we can use to make a difference in these kinds of cases.”
‘A mental health crisis is not a criminal matter’
Gross believes that too often, when a person experiencing a mental health crisis interacts with police, the result can be deadly. Her organization is actively working to change that reality.
“What we know is that 50 percent of people killed by police have a mental health diagnosis,” she said. “Quite a number of them are in a mental health crisis at the time of their killing.” This fact was made all too clear in 2018, she said, when, “five people were killed by police across the state between Thanksgiving and Christmas while they were in the throes of a mental health crisis. That was just too much.”
In response to these incidents, in early 2019 CUAPB formed a mental health work group. The group, Gross said, “wrote a very robust white paper on ending police-only responses to mental health crisis.” The ultimate result of that work led to Travis’ Law, a 2021 law named for Travis Jordan, a man with mental illness who was shot and killed by police in 2018. The law requires state 911 center dispatchers to send mental health crisis teams rather than police to most mental health crisis calls.
“Basically,” Gross said, “what the law means is that 911 call centers shouldn’t do the knee-jerk reaction and just call the cops.” When the law was passed, all of Minnesota’s 87 counties had mental health crisis teams. Travis’ Law just required dispatchers to use those teams when appropriate, she said: “We are asking 911 to educate themselves on how to detect mental health crisis calls and send mental health responders first instead of police.”
Dispatching police to deal with a person in crisis is, Gross said, “absolutely bad protocol. When people are dealing with a mental health crisis they should be trying to de-escalate. For a number of reasons, police often are not good at de-escalation.”
She said that bodycam footage from the day of the killing shows Vu standing close to Dimock-Heisler and peppering him with questions, something Gross said actually escalated the situation. Professionals trained in mental health crisis response know that the best way to work with a person in crisis is to step back and speak to them in a low, calm voice, giving them time and space to respond.
While a police presence is appropriate in many situations, most officers are not trained to help calm a person like Dimock-Heisler in the middle of a crisis, Gross said. The point of Travis’ Law is to make sure that the right professionals show up in the right situation.
“If there is a house fire,” she said, “the fire department should be the primary responders. If I’m having chest pains, I want an ambulance, not the police.”
This approach supports Gross’ belief that having a mental health crisis is not against the law. “By taking law enforcement out of the situation, what we’re saying is that a mental health crisis is not a criminal matter. Why do we criminalize mental health? It doesn’t work and it’s not right. We’re trying to get the right responders to respond.”
The cards stacked against him
While CUAPB is a volunteer-run organization, the two lawyers who file cases on their behalf are paid employees. Paul Bosman, a Twin Cities attorney, works full time for the group. He said he believes that the BCA’s report, as well as Freeman’s decision not to bring charges in the case, were flawed. Dimock-Heisler, an agitated 6’3” Black man with autism and mental illness, had the cards stacked against him.
“I do know that what we see, not just here in Minnesota but across the country, is that people of color who have interactions with the police are going to have more negative outcomes,” Bosman said. “People of color who have a mental illness are even more likely to have negative outcomes with police.”
Once the officers entered his grandparents’ home, the chances of Dimock-Heisler being shot rose dramatically, Bosman said: “I think it is a reasonable thing for a person to believe that because Kobe was big and Black and had a mental health issue he had a higher chance of having a bad outcome with police. Was it because he was young and African American and mentally ill? Was it all three of those things?”
Bosman said that Dimock-Heisler was also developmentally delayed, and that fact will be a centerpiece of his case. A professional trained in working with people in mental health crisis might have been able to recognize this about the irritated young man and respond appropriately; the Brooklyn Center police in this case did not, he added.
“We’re talking about someone with the mental capacity of a child who may or may not have been holding a three-inch paring knife. There are four officers in the room, enough to control him. The officer in charge instead fires a shot downward, killing Kobe. That’s a tragedy any way you cut it.”
Lori Bardal is a CUAPB volunteer and a member of the expanded response subcommittee created as part of Brooklyn Center’s Daunte Wright and Kobe Dimock-Heisler Community Safety and Violence Prevention Resolution. She said that both groups advocate for appropriate response to 911 calls involving people in mental health crisis.
“We’re leaning toward the co-response model, where a mental health professional dressed in street clothes will go in first. The police officer will be around the corner, not visible, so it doesn’t escalate the situation. They are there to provide backup if they need it.”
Police often make the person who died look like the bad guy, Bardal said, but if mental health responders are there during a mental health crisis, tragedy can be prevented. “Kobe was not a criminal: He was just having a bad day. Everybody has a bad day. You shouldn’t die because of that,” she said.
‘He never hurt anybody one day in his life’
Dimock, who said she is “not anti-police,” finds it troubling that police reports seem to focus on Kobe’s size as a factor in the officers’ decision to use deadly force. “It seems they all start with something about how large he was,” she said, “but they don’t add that he had the mentality of a 9-year-old: He was basically a child in a big, tall body.”
Dimock said that the three years since her son died sometimes feel like they’ve passed in an instant. Other days it seems like it’s been a lifetime. She sees the CUAPB lawsuit as a way to clear her son’s name — and to hold the police officers who killed him accountable for their actions. She wants them to see that Kobe was a person who mattered — a creative soul who enjoyed riding bicycle rickshaws with his father, who rode in the annual May Day Parade, who liked to crochet, who loved to cook and dreamed about one day making food for a living.
Dimock wants people to know that for her, the suit is about much more than financial gain: “The only other recourse I have is a civil case. Screw you if you think it is just about money. This is about my child. He never hurt anybody one day in his life. It was wrong. You tell me I should just accept it? I will not.”
I’m not clear on what expertise, Michelle Gross’s group has to ‘reinvestigate.’ She manages an office.
If someone has a weapon, mental health responders may not respond. I do question why police could not talk to household members outside. Many police officers have significant mental health training, even mental health responders are faced with having to walk away from situations frequently with no resolution.
Thanks for writing the article, Andy. There has to be a better way of dealing with situations like this.
It would really help sort out what kind of maladies are being reported as “mental illness” when violence and tragedy strikes.
I am both autistic and have three mental illnesses from being abused: depression, anxiety and PTSD.
There are around 300 different types of mental illnesses with many different kinds of symptoms and signs. Moreover, the press often portrays peolpe with autism as fools and idiots, which defies realities.
Twenty-four percent of this nation’s presidents from the early days of this republic to 1974 had depression, bipolar disorder, alcoholism and other mundane medical problems which are considered mental illnesses. I was hospitalized in a psychiatric unit of a local private hospital in 2019 for having insomnia, for goodness sake. I still consider it a stretch that the medical director of that department had the right to coerce me into a stay when I was of no danger to myself or another person.
Individuals who were presidents with mental illnesses included Dwight D. Eisenhower, Calvin Coolidge, Teddy Roosevelt, Abe Lincoln (and his wife Mary Todd Lincoln), and both John and John Quincy Adams among others. Key words which can be used to identify presidents, and others, with mental illnesses are “U.S. Presidents and mental illness.” Princess Diana, Prince Harry, Prince Harry’s great grandmother Princess Alice, Martin Luther King, Jr., Apollo Astronaut Buzz Aldrin and British World War II Prime Minister Winston Churchill also had mental illnesses, as a Google search with their names and the term “mental illness” can avail to assist you in seeing this reality.
I have been conversational to fluent in four languages, studied abroad on my own with no one holding my hand, and have enjoyed friendships and working acquaintances with peolpe from very poor to multi-billionaire status. I grew up in the Lowry Hill neighborhood down the block from U.S. Vice President and Ambassador to Japan Walter Mondale, and around the corner from Minnesota Supreme Court Justice Alan Page. I worked with Mondale and enjoyed conversations with him in the years leading up to his death on April 19, 2021.
I am really concerned about how the press and entertainment industry talks about peolpe with the nearly 300 types of mental illness, primarily as killers and violent people; when data from National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) provides in a blog that only 5% of violent crime is associated and originated with people with mental illnesses. This means that 95% of violent crime is associated with the 80% of society which does not have a mental illness.
Further, very notable people, including Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Charles Darwin, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Greta Thunberg, Jerry Seinfeld and Albert Einstein were known or believed to be on the Autism Spectrum. The running joke in the autistic community is if you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism: There is a vast spectrum of intensities and signs of autism. Some of the brightest and most valuable people to human development and society have been autistic. It is time that the press started taking note.
While I typically have a high regard for Greta Kaul, whose dad is a Facebook friend of mine, she gets negative points for not making these realities known.
My mistake: The piece was written by Andy Steiner, not Greta Kaul. I was looking at the photo and became a little confused. My apologies to Greta.
Andy, please start writing stories about people with mental illnesses who are prominent and useful to society and organizations. The political community has taken its nonsense and ignorance and bastardized our collective reputation. Stop calling us “the mentally ill,” and begin talking about the many gifts and achievements of both people with mental illnesses and people who are on the Autism Spectrum. Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton has been on record as having depression and alcoholism,
I hesitate to call autism a “disability.” We are often disabled only by the chauvinistic attitude of idiots who know nothing about autism and have read into old wives’ tales and bad literature on the topic.
Moreover, people with depression and bipolar depression have been known to be gifted in conflict resolution and humanizing others. Please stop thinking of us as ne’er-do-wells and criminals. More often than not, it is those with bad attitudes and ignorance which create problems for so-called “disabled people.”
I attended De La Salle High school, one of the top ten high schools in Minnesota, as an honors student and attended the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at age 17; and also attended a boarding school in Europe, Macalester College, University of Minnesota, a language and cultural institute in Central America, and both real estate and insurance schools. When not being beaten by either morons who had hang-ups about mental illness, and frequently ignored by University of Minnesota Police Department and Vice President of Student Affairs Marvalene Hughes when I was being attacked on campus by two men over a two year period, my grades have consistently been in the A and B range.
More needs to be done by journalists to write intelligent copy about folks in these two cohorts.
Mr. Peterson, you’re high school expertise not withstanding, spectrum disorders ARE legitimate diagnosis and this young man was clearly in the midst of a psychiatric crises.
Paul, my point was not to suggest that the young man’s developmental disability was not a factor. What I was saying is that when reports about mental illness and autism comes out, we are largely looked upon as freaks by intellectual and ethical freaks who don’t know what they are talking about. You never see a report which says, “Paul Simon killed three people with a gun and rand over a four year old. He is know to be mentally healthy and was having a bad day.”
No, it is always a negative commentary about people who see doctors or who are Black or Latino. This is the gist of the spirit of my commentary. Please think through both what you read and what you might say before engaging in a commentary which is being published.
Come now Paul, it’s been at least a few weeks since he’s posted a lengthy self-congratulatory screed, I expect he’s getting the shakes…
What makes you think this is a frivolous lawsuit? One would expect four officers to be able to subdue a non-criminal who merely holds a 3″ paring knife, not act as a firing squad.
Well, police officers are NOT trained to handle psychiatric crises, and commenters here clearly have no experience with this.
I worked on locked psych units with patients in acute, often violent crises on a regular basis. We routinely subdued violent patients who were dangers to themselves, others, or both, while being strictly prohibited from using common police tactics, and we had to do so without any weaponry of any kind. The idea that the only way to handle this scenario is to shoot the guy dead is simply ridiculous.
Basically we can spot two catastrophic errors here. The first is to assign the trainee to handle the most volatile guy in the house who is probably psychotic… that is just plain stupid. Second, police are trained to take control by demanding compliance, and then escalating force until they get compliance, and they are authorized to escalate up-to and beyond lethal force. This is a recipe for disaster when you’re dealing someone in a mental health crises for sooooooo many reasons. And unlike mental health workers who are trained to gain control by physically restraining people without weapons, police are trained to avoid physical contact and demand compliance from a distance… this training leads to escalating weapons deployments (i.e. tasers – guns).
Look… these compliance demands the police make assume a certain rational or logical mental state is functioning, but people in mental health crises may not even be able to process the commands, let alone follow a logic of self preservation. That doesn’t mean you kill them.
In some ways this kind of dovetails with recent news about mental health workers recent attempts to get labor contracts out of local hospitals after organizing unions. It’s been reported that this line of work or profession is one of if not the most dangerous professions in the country in terms of assault and injury frequency. I can confirm that personally. My point is that in over a decade of work with volatile people, aside from a rug burn here and there I never saw a single patient get injured, much less killed. When you move these scenarios outside of psych units and hand them off to cops who are trained to kill people who threaten or frighten them, people will die unnecessarily. We simply do not have an appropriate response for these scenarios, and until we do, people will keep dying.
Paul, this was a fine and excellent commentary. I am, however, competent to talk about these issues. Based on very little information, the police and a social worker were called to my apartment in 2019. Six officers were in my apartment, two EMT’s were also there. The lead officer was very professional, but the younger cops started investigating my apartment without a warrant. I remained relaxed and on the couch, noting another dumb response by someone who thought me be bizarrely mentally ill because I noted that I was having a bad day and that I experienced depression. Everyone has bad days, and I was not in crisis. I was going through a period of insomnia due to looking at a bright computer screen too late at night. Dr. Deana Bass, my former lead psychiatrist for depression, anxiety and PTSD which was typically under control, allowed an inept third year resident to continually change my sleep medication around. I kept having side effects.
Bass coerced me into a stay at the hospital over a three day holiday. There was no reason for this. I intelligently requested that the young quack at the department return me to the first medication which I was on. That didn’t happen until I was coerced into a five day stay at the private hospital, which cost my insurance over $14,000. I will note that I have severed ties with that department.
During my stay at the hospital, it became clear that a young woman was using heavily scented chemical shampoo and body lotion. I asked the staff to instruct her to not use that reagent because I am allergic to chemical scents and have somatic reactions to them. They were unclear in their vague comments of whether they would talk to her. I approached the desk twice for a clear answer. They were noncommittal in their response, again which was very vague. I am the son of a prominent prosecutor who knows how to be clear and direct in his comments. The young staff lacked those skills.
I began to contact the nursing supervisor on call that Saturday evening. I called through the hospital operator. On all three occasions that evening, they transferred me to the desk with which I had problems. On the third try, a nurse named Yue, a man, attacked me while I was sitting down and trying to make a call. He grabbed my wrist, wrestled me to the ground, left a bruise which lasted two weeks. In my effort to break loose from his grip, I made two weak karate cops to his forearm. In the report, he said that I attacked him. Nonsense. I am a peaceful and pacifistic individual who has borne the experience of ongoing physical assaults from people with hang-ups about mental illness. This lasted for two years at University of Minnesota. The police refused to assist, citing my mental illness and opining that “You bring on your own problems.” Hardly, I had either been walking alone on campus or sitting in a chair in a lobby when being attacked. Two years of this without assistance from University of Minnesota personnel. My grades floundered and I didn’t make it to grad school. I desired to be an attorney, businessman, diplomat and philanthropist. Family, acquaintances and friends and their families have been millionaires and multibillionaires. Due to the stigma of mental illness, even my parents failed to assist.
When I brought the complaint about the attack by the nurse to patient relations, they ignored me. I learned that the staff had said on a report that I was delusional and hallucinating. Again: Nonsense. I have been treated for depression and anxiety for over 40 years and no previous comment indicated psychosis. I did speak of my time on a U.S. presidential campaign in 1979 where I worked with two intelligence officers. The brain-dead personnel at the hospital may have interpreted that as being a delusion. One of the men’s name was Harry B. Katz, who was assigned to Nicaragua in the 1970s or 80s. He mentioned his mission to keep track of land, air and naval vehicles and vessels. He worked with U.S. Army military intelligence. He was hit by a car at 8th and Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis near our office during the late winter of 1979. I visited him at Eitel Hospital near Loring Park, now owned by my landlord and serving as high end apartments or condominiums. The other guy was a CIA officer whose name I don’t recall. The two of us and an Anoka County educational administrator traveled to Iowa in a car, to do Get out the Vote work. We stopped off at a smoky trucker’s bar in Moville, Iowa, for a bite to eat and to play poker. I was 17-years old and was fascinated by my experience with these men. They ere kind, friendly and professional. It was no big deal that they worked in the intelligence community. However the staff at the hospital may have incorrectly believed that a guy who worked on a presidential campaign would not meet intelligence officers. They were naïve. All kinds of people worked on the campaign. My neighbor, then U.S. Vice President Walter Mondale, was a co-worker who characterisitically came out to speak with me and tell me that I was doing a fine job. I learned in a telephone call with him in 2018 that he knew of my dad and thought of him as an astute attorney. Mondale was an attorney and served as the Minnesota Attorney General in the early 1960s. My dad served as an Associate Attorney General and an Associate U.S. Attorney in the late 1960s and early 1970s. My job on the campaign was to do filing and answer telephone calls.
The common thread in all of the abuse I have experienced over the years has been a vague understanding of my medical situation. I talk about it openly to get people to begin thinking about these things other than as they see them in obscene and violent movies and news stories. My background has sufficiently led to my understanding the abusiveness of some law enforcement and some medical professionals. I have stayed in touch with medical professionals for 42 years simply because 1) I find that the medication leads to positive outcomes in helping me relax without sedating me, and 2) in one case, I enjoy the company of my therapist who frequently talks about how nuts a lot of our community is and how more than 20% of the community should be seeing medical professionals and going to college to sort out both their personality issues as well as developing stronger critical thinking skills and knowledge — and worldly experience.
The problem which led to the death of the young man was the stigma and the ignorance of those in uniform. They see too many movies of cops killing other people with guns, and this may lead to their modeling what they see in the entertainment world. They may also lack sound critical thinking skills; as well, the pressure of being an officer may lead them to make tragic errors in judgment. My uncle was a cop. My friend, Paul Tschida, was an FBI Special Agent, MN BCA Superintendent and Commissioner of of Public Safety during Arne Carlson’s administration (Arne and Susan Shepard Carlson are Facebook friends of mine and working with their property in Florida which was damaged during the recent hurricane).
Apples to oranges
Amity Dimock, I’m sorry for the loss of your son, Kobe. I can only imagine how terrible this has been for you and your family.
As Gilbert & Sullivan opera “Pirates of Penzance” lyrics declared way back in 1879, “A policeman’s lot is not a happy one”.
Having done that work myself, I understand how things can go wrong in an encounter like this one. You answer this call with a mindset that you may be risking injury or death for yourself, your team, the other occupants of the home, and the person with the “outsized reaction”. (The initial call was described as “…his grandfather called 911 to report that they had had an argument that had escalated to threats of physical violence. He was concerned about his grandson’s outsized reaction.”)
I can’t emphasize enough how difficult it is to respond and handle calls like this, since you have no idea what you’re going to find. This sets up a damned-if-you-do & damned-if-you-don’t scenario where if you do too little, a guy with a weapon harms a family member and if you use too much force you trigger dangerous behavior that could otherwise have been avoided. It isn’t only people with mental illness, either. Drug and alcohol users can be violent and unpredictable. We expect the police to respond, but… how?
An ideal resolution is always one where no one is hurt. Police officers believe that, but sometimes they have to choose from the “no good solutions” set of responses. In retrospect, something else would have made it better, but that is not where you are at when things are happening fast and your training has not prepared you for parsing the situation with the time and expertise of a mental health professional. In fact, when time is of the essence, it is highly unlikely that mental health professionals can respond as quickly as the police. In that extra time an out of control person can injure or kill himself or others.
So yes, do better police and 911 training and by all means have mental health professionals respond when they can, but please know that sometimes there will be bad outcomes, especially when weapons of any kind are involved.
Patrick, “bad outcomes” in these scenarios are far too frequent, and that frequency is not acceptable. Difficult scenarios are why we have emergency responses and trained professionals, anyone can handle easy scenarios.