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Shortly after 4 a.m. on June 27, a 911 call came from a 27-year-old man at a Bellevue apartment complex.
“My little brother is having a manic episode,” the man said, according to audio of the call released by the Metro Nashville Police Department. “He has tried to stab me with a knife. I don’t know where he is.”
The man said he was bleeding lightly from a cut he got defending himself and that his brother — later identified as 25-year-old Max Van Sickle — had threatened him by holding the knife to his neck. He also told the dispatcher that his brother had been huffing an unknown substance.
Around 13 minutes after police responded, Van Sickle was shot dead by one of the three MNPD officers who encountered him in a dark stairwell. Body-camera footage released by the department shows Van Sickle, shirtless and holding a knife, appear out of the darkness and come running down a set of stairs toward the officers. Officer Jonathan Scull can be heard yelling “Stop right now!” before firing four shots at him. MNPD spokesperson Don Aaron said in a video briefing that the officers rendered medical aid to Van Sickle, who was later pronounced dead at the scene.
The police killing of a man reportedly in the throes of a mental health crisis raises a number of questions. Among them is why officers didn’t use tasers to stop Van Sickle instead of a gun. Aaron said Officers George Poulos and Ben Mincer “had their tasers drawn but did not have the opportunity to use them.”
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But another question is why the call wasn’t handled by officers working in tandem with a mental health clinician as part of the MNPD’s Partners in Care (PIC) program. Started in 2021, the initiative expanded to countywide operation earlier this year. Through April, according to the MNPD, PIC units have responded to more than 27,000 calls for service, 6,015 of which police said were related to a mental health crisis. Officers working in these units receive 40 hours of crisis intervention training, while the master’s level clinicians they are paired with receive 16 hours of job-specific training, according to the department.
Among other things, the approach is meant to give a person experiencing a mental health crisis a chance at ending up in a mental facility rather than jail. Officers and mental health clinicians working in this unit respond to certain calls together, where the officers then stabilize the scene first and identify the “most appropriate care.” MNPD spokesperson Kris Mumford tells the Nashville Banner, “There will be no scenario where a clinician is allowed to make first contact with an individual who is reportedly armed.”
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One reason that such a unit didn’t respond to the Van Sickle call is that there were none on call at the time. PIC units operate five days a week but not 24 hours a day. The MNPD tells the Banner they operate from 6 a.m. to approximately 1 a.m. The Van Sickle call came in the middle of the five-hour gap. Asked why that gap exists, the MNPD says data on calls for service “does not presently support expansion during those hours.”
But Department of Emergency Communications spokesperson James Matthews says in a statement to the Banner that “this specific incident would not have been processed differently.”
What remains unclear is why this incident wouldn’t merit a response from a Partner in Care clinician. Matthews did not respond to the Banner’s requests for clarification in time for publication.
There is another option other than 911 available in crises like these. The Mental Health Cooperative runs a mobile crisis unit with a toll-free 24/7 phone line that offers over-the-phone guidance or on-scene crisis counselors. But, that unit works in partnership with police and the Partners in Care program, meaning a mental health crisis call could still result in police presence.
All three officers who responded to the scene last week are on administrative leave while the shooting is investigated by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and the Davidson County District Attorney’s office.
