Residents mourn death, call for change

SANDPOINT  — A slight breeze caused the white ribbons tied around several trees to rustle in the cold as dozens of community members gathered Saturday in tribute of Jeanetta Riley.

Riley, 35, was shot to death by Sandpoint Police after reportedly advancing on officers while holding a knife and ignoring their commands to drop it on the night of July 8. She was reportedly driven to Bonner General Health by her husband to obtain treatment.

While he never knew Riley, Dan Mimmack said he was driven to organize the memorial to honor her and to begin a conversation so that such a tragedy will never happen again.

“My goal today is to raise awareness of the vulnerability that folks at risk face every day, sometimes indoors and sometimes outdoors,” he told the more than 75 people who gathered for the memorial at Sandpoint’s Farmin Park. “I was called to stand up for Jeanetta when it occurred to me that without some change in the way the mentally-challenged are handled, this could happen again. I could not sit by and allow that to happen.”

The community is special and its residents hold each human life as a treasure and any loss of life for any reason, for whatever circumstance, is something we should all mourn, Mimmack said.

Speaker Randy Stolz said he suffered his own challenges, caused by several serious concussions while working as a commercial fisherman on the Bering Sea. Like Mimmack, he said the community must commit itself to ensuring last summer’s tragic circumstances are never repeated.

As a community, there is an obligation to ensure Riley’s death isn’t repeated, said counselor Eric Ridgway of Human Connection.

“It is our imperfect society that has created the conditions in which someone who is desperately needing help is viewed as a threat, but instead of receiving assistance during their time of emotional turmoil and breakdown, they receive bullets,” he told the crowd.

Ridgway told those in attendance not to blame the officers, or to focus hatred or anger on them for the tragedy, saying they only followed the procedures they were trained to do by a system that is overly based in fear.

“Fear is a powerful human emotion and societies that are filled with fear often do not lead with compassion when responding to situations where great fear has been stirred up,” he added. “Appropriate training and genuine understanding can transform fear into compassion and, from there, we as a society can choose a very different response to individuals who are in the throes of a mental health crisis.”

Blame is a not a solution — not of those who have a mental illness or the law enforcement who respond to the calls, Ridgway said. Both sides are victims of a system that trains them based on fear instead of understanding.

“It is my desire that we embrace all of the families that struggle with mental illness within our community, and that we embrace all of the agencies and individuals that do their imperfect best, at a moment of crisis, to deal with mental breakdowns,” he said. “We all live together in this beautiful, but imperfect community, and we all need understanding and forgiveness.”

Instead of hatred or vengeance, he called for more training and understanding so that those who respond to mental health crises have the tools they need to better handle what they’re facing.

That hope was shared by Christina Balch, who suffered her own mental health crisis in August 2012, spurred by a series of family crises. When officers approached her with yelling and threats of arrest, she began screaming and struggling.

“I didn’t have a weapon, but they threw me down because I picked up my legs and said I can’t walk away from my kids,” she said. “They threw me down and kneed me. I wasn’t fighting them, I just didn’t want to walk away from my kids.”

With a different approach or a female officer, she said she would have calmed down and the situation would have ended much differently.

“Training,” she said of what should result from last summer’s shooting. “To become an officer you should have to take the Crisis Intervention Training class. It should be part of your education before you ever, ever, ever become an officer.”