What exactly happened to Don Elkins?

[Jade]

Here is a post I made recently in the Facebook group that addresses this issue:

Hello everyone. I want to make an important and timely post that fits in with the current collective discussion about police brutality and imagining a different world.

I'm not sure everyone is aware of the details of this story, but the truth is, all of us here are intimately familiar with a dear person who was a victim of police violence: Don Elkins. Carla and Jim detail the events leading to Don's death in Tilting at Windmills, pg 423-426. I just reread the story and it made me weep. It's actually worse than I remembered.

In the last two weeks of his life, Don knew he was a danger to himself. He told Jim that he took his gun collection out to the country and disposed of it, out of fear of taking his own life. However, he still spoke sincerely to Jim about ending his life, which led Jim to believe that his only option was to get a mental inquest warrant. This allows someone to be taken for treatment/evaluation at a psychiatric hospital, against their will.

Don had already spent 5 weeks in a psychiatric hospital receiving very poor treatment. However, he had gained some weight and had some attitude shifts so they thought maybe there was some benefit - in the very least they thought it was their only hope. He was down to 140lbs from 210 - at 6'6". He had already been increasingly paranoid, believing that the FBI was after him. So when armed officers showed up at his house to forcefully remove him, he retreated upstairs and found his remaining gun, and put it to his head, holding himself hostage for his own freedom.

Carla desperately tried to talk to him and comfort/hug him, however, the cops refused to let her. They dragged her to the neighbors' house and allowed her to talk to him on the phone, briefly - however, since she refused to lie to him to placate him, they stopped letting her talk to him. A total of 39 officers had come to the house. They also brought several of their comm vehicles. This was a huge event for them. Because this man ~had a gun~, he was "dangerous", yet they refused to acknowledge that the only danger was to himself. Obviously Carla and Jim knew this, which is why they wanted to try to talk to him. But the cops cruelly intervened.

Eventually the standoff exceeded 5 hours. The neighbor, wisely, suggested that maybe they let Don sleep it off, and see how he's doing in the morning. A big nope from our boys in blue. Instead they shot tear gas into this man's precious home, forcing him to come out. He went out the back door and put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger. And then he was gone.

I sincerely believe (and Carla seems to as well) that if the cops hadn't escalated things to such an extreme, that it's possible Don might have had another chance. He didn't want to die. He was afraid and out of control. The police attacked him in his own home. He was scared of dying in a sanitarium. Now he was afraid that one of the 39 cops and half the station's worth of equipment surrounding his house would kill him. So he took his own life, instead of letting them take it from him.

For Don, I want us to imagine a better future, where people who are in mental crisis are not treated like criminals. Where we don't have a police force that is first trained to primarily protect their own lives while they "serve and protect" us.That they attacked this man in his own home while he was struggling to protect himself, from himself, makes me feel sick and livid. And this could happen to any of us. Don was a successful white man in a wealthy town, a pilot, with high military accolades. Cops become victims to mob mentality just as quickly as the rest of us. And their training on how to handle a variety of situations is so poor, that the maximum amount of critical thinking they can handle is "this man has a gun which = bad for me/us, we gotta get this under control immediately."

Today I weep for all who, like Don, have been extrajudiciously hanged by thoughtless cops for being unable to cope with our sick society. I believe the most recent statistic I saw was that 1 out of 4 people who are killed by cops have mental illness. Obviously yes Don took his own life, however, I sincerely do not believe he would have that evening if the police hadn't attacked him first. They bear the brunt of the blame for this one, in my honest opinion.

Thanks for reading.