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Melissa's parents, Michael (left) and Terry (right) on the road where their daughter was killed by police in an April confrontation.

(Amy Yurkanin|ayurkanin@al.com)

Editor's note: This is the latest in an ongoing AL.com investigation into the mental health crisis in Alabama.

The day before she was shot by police, Melissa Boarts threw a party.

The 36-year-old nursing assistant had suffered from bipolar disorder for nearly two decades, but seemed happy at the Wetumpka park where family and friends celebrated her little girl's birthday. The April weather was warm enough for short sleeves and sandals, with a slight shivery breeze.

The next day, family members were sorting gifts between the two houses where the 2-year-old lived when Melissa's twin sister Melinda tossed off a comment that landed like a hand grenade.

"There were some toys that we didn't let her play with because we didn't want her to get hurt on them," Melinda said. "So that's what I said, but I think she took it way wrong. I mean, and that's how it started."

Those words uncorked a gush of anger - which happened sometimes with Melissa.

Melissa drove off, and about an hour later, she was killed by an Auburn police officer.

Criminal or patient?

Melissa's family struggles with guilt and uncertainty. No witnesses saw the confrontation between Melissa and the police and video from the incident won't be released until a grand jury rules on the evidence against the officers.

Auburn Police Chief Paul Register said Melissa charged at his officers with a weapon - a knife family members feared she would use against herself.

The absence of hard information about the circumstances of the shooting has created a void the Boarts have filled with questions. The biggest one is this: Did officers have training to recognize mental illness and treat their daughter as a patient, rather than a criminal?

Experts estimate about 10 percent of police calls involve a person with mental illness.

Chief Register said his officers recently received mental health training, but he didn't provide details about whether the class was mandatory or if the officers involved in the shooting attended. He would not comment further about the case until the grand jury rules later this month.

Advocates for the mentally ill say police chiefs and sheriffs have been slow to embrace training, leaving officers unequipped to safely handle confrontations with suicidal or unstable suspects.

Angry, but never violent

In addition to bipolar disorder, Melissa suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and seizures, illnesses that intensified after her brother's death in 1998 and caused wild mood swings, flashes of rage and impulsive behavior. She had one run-in with the law in 2010 when she ran with a bad crowd, her mother said. Yet even when she spun completely out of control, she never physically hurt anyone.

"You could say anything, something me and you would take as a joke, she would take seriously and get so mad," Melinda said. "And then she would get angry. Really angry."

"You could always talk her down," said her mother Terry.

A picture of Melissa Boarts, a suicidal woman who was shot and killed by police in April

But on that day in April, they never got the chance.

Without proper training, police officers are more likely to use tactics that can escalate aggression in a person suffering from severe mental illness, experts say, increasing the likelihood of injury or death. In Alabama, only four hours of the 13-week police academy curriculum is dedicated to emotional disturbance. Some states require up to 40 hours, but many, like Alabama, require far less.

"What I don't understand is with them knowing her mental condition and knowing we were right there, she wasn't no harm to anyone but herself," Terry said. "I was on the phone with them the entire time."

Ten out of 34 people shot and killed by police in Alabama since 2015 have reported mental illness, according to the Washington Post and Al.com. People with mental illness are 16 times more likely to be shot by police, according to the Treatment Advocacy Center.

A string of deadly confrontations

Last year, deputies in Lawrence County shot and killed Shane Watkins, a schizophrenic who stopped taking his medication in the weeks before his death. Like the Boarts family, his mother called for help from police and her son had committed no crime. She also told Al.com that he was turned away from treatment before his behavior spiraled out of control.

Family members said Watkins had never been violent. Deputies shot Watkins after he charged at them with a box cutter.

A 50-year-old man suffering a "mental episode" in Tuscaloosa was shot after he charged at an officer with a large spoon in 2015. The man, Jeffory Tevis, suffered from self-inflicted wounds and grappled with an officer before he was killed. A grand jury ruled that the officer who shot Tevis acted to protect the public.

Unpredictable and mentally ill suspects can also injure officers. John Lee Bullard attacked a Huntsville police officer in December, sending him to the hospital with a facial fracture, cuts and bruises.

Alabama recently added a week to its police academy, said Louis Zook, chief of staff for Alabama Peace Officers Standards & Training Commission. After that, agencies can add any additional training that officers need.

"It's still a struggle to get everything in there that you'd like," Zook said.

Law enforcement agencies in 47 states and the District of Columbia have created crisis intervention teams - specialized squads to handle mentally ill suspects and keep them out of the criminal justice system. Those officers receive 40 hours of training and the ability to partner directly with mental health service providers.

Alabama has no crisis intervention teams, and law enforcement officers can't detain people for psychiatric evaluation. Only probate judges and community mental health officers - which are in short supply across the state - can order a person into the hospital.

Susan Baty-Pierce of National Alliance on Mental Illness-Birmingham has worked for decades to increase cooperation between law enforcement and mental health agencies. It is simply too expensive for many agencies to pay for community mental health officers solely dedicated to handling mental illness calls, she said.

If a police chief or sheriff has to choose between hiring a sworn officer or deputy or a social worker, they will hire the law enforcement personnel, she said. Specially trained law enforcement officers who can also perform regular police duties might be a better solution.

In the early nineties, Baty-Pierce belonged to a task force to bring the crisis intervention model to Birmingham, but the plan fell apart over funding for crisis beds.

Even without crisis intervention designation, officers should still learn to de-escalate confrontations with mentally ill suspects, said attorney Jimmy Walsh, president of the National Alliance on Mental Illness of Alabama.

"One of the reasons crisis intervention training is important is that if someone is manic, if they are out of control, who else can you call?" Walsh said. "There's no mechanism except the state. The state hauls the people around. They get them to the hospital. If you can't count on the state, you can't do anything about it."

The rest area

From the interstate, Melissa thumbed messages of anger and despair. She threatened to cut her wrists and asked if Melinda would take care of the baby.

"It was not the first time she had taken off in her car like that," Melinda said. "But this time seemed worse. I don't know what it was. It just seemed different because she had a knife."

Melissa's parents fastened the girl in a car seat and tried to catch their troubled daughter. Melinda relayed her twin's location based on a GPS tracker the family had secretly stuck to her car. Traffic snarled the interstate, and Michael and Terry slowed to a crawl. When GPS showed Melissa stopped at a rest area, they thought she might have stopped to cut her wrists, panicked and called 911.

They didn't know it at the time, but the same rest area had been the scene of a suicide attempt just three weeks earlier. That tense standoff between a woman armed with a gun and state troopers ended peacefully.

"The issue when police and mentally ill intersect, there are a lot of opportunities for things to go wrong, and for things to go right," said Joy Aull, a former law enforcement officer who conducts mental health training at the University of South Alabama.

A troubled woman with a gun

On March 10, rest area employee Mary Crockett noticed something odd near a dirt walkway designed for pets. A middle-aged woman with short blonde hair paced back and forth. Crockett watched her hanging around for hours. Most visitors don't stay long at a place like that, so Crockett and another employee hopped on a Gator and puttered over.

The woman was Georgia Tumbleweed McNabb of Auburn.

As Crockett approached, she noticed McNabb's hair wasn't just short; it was ragged and hacked close to the scalp - a do-it-yourself job possibly inflicted with household scissors.

"Do you need help?" Crockett asked.

"No, I just want to kill myself," McNabb said, according to Crockett. "My only child got murdered a few weeks ago and my husband told me to cut my hair and now he don't want me."

As she ranted, she pressed on the pocket of her jeans and Crockett saw the outline of a gun.

The employees fled back to the office and called 911. State troopers arrived within five minutes, followed by officers from the Macon County Sheriff's Department. Police cars swarmed the rest area and officers ushered visitors out through the entrance ramp, then shut down the interstate, said Terry Colley, another employee.

SWAT Team snipers held positions on top of the small brick bathroom building, rifles trained on McNabb, Colley said. A helicopter buzzed overhead. McNabb crouched in the dirt at the base of a towering pine and pressed the gun to her temple.

The woman kept the gun pointed at her head for hours, Crockett said. Sometimes she would emerge from the shadow of the tree with her finger on the trigger.

"It was awful," Crockett said. "I thought she was going to do it."

Negotiation vs. confrontation

Staff members huddled inside the building where the snipers crouched, in a wood-paneled entryway hung with highway maps. McNabb fired her gun twice, pulling it away from her head and pointing it into the air, Colley said.

"She was really trying to get them to shoot her," Colley said. "But I think they knew that's what she wanted, so they didn't fire."

The officers on the scene held their fire and waited. For all the firepower on the scene, most of the work happened over the phone, Colley said, which highly-trained crisis negotiators tossed to McNabb.

"They were really patient with her," Colley said.

The time ticked by. One hour. Two. Then three. McNabb asked for more water and talked to negotiators.

Late in the afternoon, several SWAT officers lined up behind a ballistic shield and approached McNabb. As an officer popped out on one side to distract her, another reached around the other side and grabbed her, Colley said.

From inside the building, Crockett heard a gunshot and ran out the back door. She said she saw McNabb on the ground, surrounded by officers. She must be dead, Crockett thought, but she was wrong. The gunshot was the last one McNabb fired into the air before going into police custody. The troubled woman shuffled into an ambulance and rode away from the scene.

Crockett said the whole experience has given her nightmares. She never worried about her own well-being, but believed she would witness McNabb's suicide.

"It took a toll on me," she said. "I'm just glad that it ended the way it did."

Gaps in training trouble advocates

Most officers don't receive the psychology and suicide training crisis negotiators get during special classes. Jimmy Walsh of NAMI Alabama said many sheriffs and police chiefs simply don't understand the need for extra education about mental illness. His organization has held several voluntary, free 40-hour training sessions about mental illness for police officers. The last session in Birmingham drew only two participants, he said.

Unless state agencies begin requiring more training, Walsh said he doesn't think the situation will change.

"It's never going to happen until senior people buy in and they are required to do it," Walsh said.

Demopolis Police Chief Tommie Reese, who is also president of the Alabama Association of Chiefs of Police, said training is fine, but it won't solve the larger problem, which is a lack of resources for treating those with mental illness.

"I think what we need is to have more social workers to come out and really work with people in the community," Reese said. "I think law enforcement has been tasked to do many things it wasn't set out to do, and helping with the mentally ill is one of those things."

Aull's mental health training programs help officers better understand the mindset of a mentally ill person and adapt to it. Officers who complete the program report higher levels of comfort with suicidal or delusional people, she said. But the training falls apart if officers can't tap into mental health resources.

"I can do all the training in the world, if there's nowhere in the community for that person to go, the training breaks down," Aull said.

One family, two tragedies

Melissa's relatives pass around the blame for her death like cards in a brutal game of Go Fish.

"I have so many regrets for calling the cops that night," Terry said. "I told them over and over and over she had a pocketknife and she's threatening to cut her wrists."

"It's probably my fault because I put the GPS on the car and told them where to

Melissa's twin sister Melinda Boarts looks for the spot where a neighbor found her sister's blood on the morning after the shooting.

go," Melinda said.

"I was the one who told you to call the police in the first place," said Michael, a retired prison guard.

They thought they were doing the right thing by tracking Melissa and calling police, based on their experiences with son Michael Jr. The family lost him to mental illness almost 20 years ago when he committed suicide. Melinda and Melissa were 18 years old - seniors in high school.

Her son's suicide blindsided Terry. She knew Michael Jr. was upset about his favorite uncle, who was struggling to survive after open-heart surgery. They all thought he was going to die.

Terry said her son was overwhelmed by the prospect of such a loss. He got in his car and said he was going to the store, and never came home.

"It was just like he disappeared off the face of the earth," Terry said.

Michael Jr. said something to Melissa before he left - a hint she unraveled only after his death.

"That's why she took it so hard," Melinda said. "She wasn't able to make room for it. Not like I moved on, but you've got to just like, make room for it."

A troubled life ends tragically

Melissa's mental illness set in slowly. She started having seizures at age 15, and they got worse after her brother's death, her mother said. As a young adult, she needed shoulder surgery from the violent shaking that gripped her body and dislocated the joint. While recovering at her parents' house, she suffered a major seizure that almost killed her and forever altered the pattern of her thoughts, Terry said.

Although she worked as a nursing assistant, and took care of herself, her demons never left. In 2010, the year Melissa turned 30, she walked into a Rite-Aid drug store in Montgomery with a knife and demanded money.

Terry said her daughter couldn't even remember the robbery after she committed it. A judge in the case ordered a psychiatric evaluation, but Melissa did not qualify for mental health court due to the violent nature of the crime. Still, she received a relatively light sentence of three years' probation and put the case behind her.

Melissa's parents urged her to get help and decided to do whatever they could to prevent another family tragedy. So when Terry and Michael gave an old car to Melissa, Melinda convinced them to install a secret GPS tracker.

The darkness in her life seemed to lift a little when a relative gave birth to a baby girl she couldn't care for. Melissa agreed to take the child, although she never applied for custody due to her criminal history and mental illness.

"Nobody wanted that baby," Terry said. "When that baby left the hospital, she left with Melissa."

A dirt road, a final showdown

Her breakdown in April was the first big one she'd had in years, but it didn't come out of the blue. Melissa told her mom she'd been feeling a little depressed. She made an appointment with a doctor in May, but her mother urged her to move it up.

"Oh, I'll be fine until May," she told Terry.

Her journey ended not long after her family believes she turned around to come home. Auburn police started following her car soon after she left the rest area headed north on I-85. She turned around before she reached the city and headed back in the direction of Montgomery.

With the police on her tail, she exited onto Alabama 81 toward Notasulga, drove about five miles and turned right again toward the heart of Tuskegee National Forest. In front of her, a collapsed bridge blocked her path, so she swerved onto a dead end dirt road and kept driving.

A Notasulga police car blocked the entrance and stopped Michael and Terry from following their daughter. They never heard gunshots and waited there for hours, until an officer told them that one female fatality had occurred. They assumed Melissa had crashed her car and died. The baby cried for food, so they took her home and called Melinda to the scene.

Finally, officers told Melinda how her sister died.

"Your sister approached our officers in a threatening manner and they had to open fire," they told her.

The autopsy report revealed that the fatal shot entered near Melissa's heart. The cuts to her wrists were superficial.

Terry and Michael believe they could have calmed their daughter if they had been allowed down that desolate road.

"I don't think she died right away," Terry said. "It upsets me because at least they could have let us hold her hand while she died."

Still searching for answers

Four months after Melissa was killed, Melinda, her fiance and her parents trekked down the dirt road where she died.

"No one would even notice the sound of a gun shot out here," Michael said.

Terry found crime scene tape hanging from a tree near a rocky wash. She stretched out the dusty, faded plastic like a banner and cut it off to carry in the next police protest.

The family may never know what happened in the final moments of Melissa's life. Instead, they are stuck thinking about how a single choice could have changed the ending.

"If I hadn't called 911, she would still be alive today," Terry said. "We were thinking, if she was threatening to cut her wrists, she needed help, she needed medical attention. There needs to be someone else to call."