In the weeks before he died, 32-year-old Daniel Reid stopped taking his medication.

His mother, Jackie Hambrick, isn't quite sure when, but she thinks it happened two or three weeks before he was fatally shot by Jefferson County sheriff's deputies. There were five drugs, and Hambrick can still reel off the names: Risperdal, Vistaril and Prozac for delusions and moods. Trazodone for sleeping.

"And Topamax that was supposed to help with the weight," Hambrick said. "You could just watch him gain, gain, gain and it was so sad. And I know that that worried him. When he was killed he was over 300 pounds, when he was normally like 220."

Her son complained about other side effects too.

"He said, 'Mom, it makes me feel stupid,'" Hambrick said.

In the days before his death, Reid's delusions returned with force. He began talking about witches and murder. Hambrick left home to stay with her daughter, and together they went to probate court to request involuntary treatment for her ailing son, a process that can take weeks. A day later, Reid was killed.

A life cut short

Reid struggled with depression and anxiety since adolescence, Hambrick said, but his delusions didn't emerge until his early 30s. Hambrick holds on to the good memories and still gives thanks for the years before his first hospitalization.

When his delusions first struck in early 2017, Hambrick didn't know what to do. She had noticed that he'd become more isolated, but didn't register the depth of the problem until he called her into the living room and began unspooling wild stories about murder and conspiracy.

"May the fifth, they're coming after me, mom," he said. "And you've got to take off that day. You've got to be here at the house that day because they're coming to get me."

He warned his two older sisters as well, and one of them talked him into attending a family meeting at UAB, Hambrick said. Once they arrived, his sisters walked him to the emergency room and sought admission for psychiatric evaluation. They remained by his side for 14 hours while he waited, writhing with anxiety.

"And he was very calm," Hambrick said. "I mean, we loved him. We would have done anything to help him."

Reid remained in the hospital for two weeks, and emerged with a diagnosis of delusional disorder - a condition that filled his mind with terrifying thoughts and proved difficult to treat. He was stable and calm for months until he decided to go off the drugs.

During the lull between his hospitalization and his death, he returned to some of the hobbies that brought him joy, including carpentry. One day, a couple months before he died, he hung a simple blue cross on the porch - right above the spot where he would be confronted and tased.

"I think it was so prophetic. You know?" Hambrick said. "So prophetic that he did that and all this happened right here."

Off kilter and in trouble

Law enforcement officers often interact with mentally ill people when they need help. If Reid had lived long enough for a bed to open at a local psychiatric facility, a deputy probably would have picked him up and taken him there.

But in Alabama, agencies just recently adopted special training to help officers respond to calls involving mentally ill suspects. In the past two years, more law enforcement departments have begun signing up for crisis intervention training that helps officers understand mental illness and reduce conflict in high-stress situations, said Jimmy Walsh, past president of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI).

Despite the uptick in training, the rate of officer-involved shootings of people with mental illness is much higher than the rate for people without mental illness. According to a database maintained by the Washington Post, five out of 25 officer-involved shootings in Alabama last year killed a person with mental illness - including Reid.

Jefferson County sheriff's deputies receive twice the required amount of training, according to Chief Deputy Randy Christian.

"[Alabama] requires four hours of mental health training for all law enforcement officers," Christian wrote in an email. "Our personnel are trained beyond that. They receive eight hours of training that includes dealing with mental health issues along with autism issues."

A welfare check turns deadly

Hambrick was at work in Homewood when she received a call from the woman who lived in a small house on her property in Clay. Reid had pulled up some plants outside her house and was yanking on cables. The tenant had called her brother for protection, and he and Reid began shouting at each other.

Unsure what to do, Hambrick called the sheriff's department.

"I called and explained the whole thing about not taking medicine, very mentally ill," Hambrick said.

The man on the other end of the phone suggested sending deputies out to do a welfare check on Reid and the neighbor.

"I said, 'Well, that sounds like maybe it'll calm things down,' and that's when they showed up," Hambrick said.

After her son's death, Hambrick thought a lot about that conversation.

"I wished I had never called the police," she said. "I've lost my son, and what a horrible death."

No place to take them

Officials have closed almost all the state-run psychiatric facilities, and patients often live and receive treatment in the community, making it more likely they will cross paths with law enforcement.

"When everything started downsizing with the mental health system, we have all these people in the community and there never was any training for officers on how to deal with people in crisis," said Linda Wright.

Wright runs training programs for police officers at Auburn University at Montgomery. Like Walsh, she has noticed an increase in attendance for mental illness programs. That program runs three-and-a-half days, and she said it may not be necessary for every officer - just those interested in working more closely with mentally ill people. Even with increased training, officers may struggle to find psychiatric resources, which are in short supply in Alabama.

"We can train officers all day and night but if there's no place to take them when they are in crisis, it's not going to work very well," Wright said.

Jimmy Walsh said it used to be difficult to fill training programs organized for police by NAMI, but that changed in 2017.

"We have way more requests for seats than we can put forward," he said.

The final moments

Two deputies arrived, and the neighbor and her brother went back into the house. Reid hit himself in the head and told deputies he had been attacked during the dispute, according to a letter from the Jefferson County District Attorney's Office that summarized investigation findings. Knowing he suffered from mental illness, deputies decided to make an arrest for false reporting and take him to jail for treatment, the letter said.

Hambrick warned them he wouldn't go willingly. When asked if there was a gun in the house, she said yes.

"And we did have a gun," Hambrick said. "I didn't even know where it was. I'd never seen Daniel have it in his hand. I'd never seen Daniel use it, shoot it. It was just ... I knew we had one."

The deputies received the information about Reid's mental illness and the gun in the house. He was standing on the porch when they tried to arrest him. He turned to enter the house and both deputies fired their tasers. Reid fell inside the house and began pulling the electrodes out of his body, according to the DA letter.

Reid grabbed a taser from one of the deputies and continued to fight and kick. The other deputy fired her weapon three times, and the last bullet tore through Reid's lungs and major blood vessels, killing him just inside the entrance of the home, according to an autopsy report.

The deputies' tasers and guns were collected from the scene, but no gun was ever collected from Reid's home, according to the letter. Hambrick said investigators never found the firearm she thought was stashed in the house.

Officers from the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency investigated the shooting. Interim Jefferson County District Attorney Danny Carr determined that officers acted in self defense and did not file charges, according to a letter dated Nov. 7, 2017.

A house full of blood and memories

Hambrick spent the first few nights after the shooting with her daughter, but eventually she returned home. Her son's blood still stained the front door and the floor of the living room.

Since then, she has spent a lot of time wondering if things could have ended differently if deputies hadn't tried to arrest her son, but instead waited for Reid to calm down.

"The thing about all of this is that everybody knew what they were walking in to," Hambrick said. "It was not like we don't know what we're facing."

That's one of the strategies officers learn in Crisis Intervention Training, Walsh said. As long as no one is in immediate danger, officers should talk to suspects, not confront them, he said.

"The message is calm down, keep space and buy time," he said.

Hambrick said the shooting happened within 10 minutes after deputies first spoke to Reid and the neighbors. Wright said training can help officers avoid danger and can also protect people with mental illness.

"These kinds of incidents take time," Wright said. "It's not just you go up and slap handcuffs on them and end it."

Speaking out

Hambrick has begun speaking out about her experience. She recently told her story at a statewide mental health summit in Montgomery. She spent months replaying that day in her mind, and wondering how it could have gone differently. Hambrick hopes that by speaking out she can use her son's death to push for changes.

"He might as well have been in Iraq, the way he was killed," Hambrick said.

Her son wasn't trying to hurt anybody, she said. Reid was just sick.

"He was trying to get inside," she said. "This was his safe place. His home, his room was his safe place."

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