Miami-Dade Police shot a man with mental illness and exposed the flaws in our system | Opinion

The story of Gamaly Hollis and her son Richard, a young man with mental illness killed by Miami-Dade Police in 2022, will leave you with a nagging feeling. Could their lives have had a different outcome, with Richard still alive and Gamaly avoiding a rare sentence for violating a protective order requested by the officer who killed her son?

This family tragedy was documented in painful detail in the Herald’s four-part investigative series “Guilty of Grief” published last week.

The fate of mother and son is a product of an entire system that too often leaves the family of those suffering with mental illness to fend for themselves and can lead to frequent encounters with police that sometimes turn deadly.

Ideally, Richard Hollis’ cycle in and out of psychiatric institutions over the years should have resulted in long-term care; police should have better ways to respond to calls involving people with mental illness, and officers on the day of the shooting should have used deescalation techniques to deal with a defiant Richard before they broke into the family’s West Kendall apartment and one of them shot Richard, who was holding two knives, as his mother watched in horror.

Officer Jaime Pino was cleared of any wrongdoing. But a police-involved shooting that’s justified under the law isn’t necessarily one that should have happened.

Miami-Dade is among the police departments that have implemented a program called Crisis Intervention Training, the Herald reported. Pino’s personnel file, though, shows it’s been 19 years since he took a 16-hour training course titled “Managing Encounters w/Mentally Ill.”

The 2022 shooting happened after a 911 call from a neighbor who heard mother and son arguing, followed by her pleas for help. When Miami-Dade police arrived, Richard Hollis shouted expletives at officers outside the apartment. An officer responded in kind: “F–k you, too” and “Come on, show me what you got, big man,” the Herald reported.

Prosecutors later described that as “banter,” overlooking the way that might have inflamed an already tense situation.

Law enforcement officers should be the last resort in dealing with people during a mental crisis, but it is often their first point of contact with authorities. It’s no wonder that people with untreated mental illness are 16 times more likely to die during an encounter with police than others, according to the Treatment Advocacy Center.

This is an issue that deserves the attention of Sheriff-elect Rosanna “Rosie” Cordero-Stutz, the first elected sheriff in Miami-Dade in six decades. Cordero-Stutz told the Herald Editorial Board in September that her election platform included improving the way police handle mental crisis calls and implementing a de-escalation training program. She lauded a pilot program in Miami-Dade that dispatches mental health counselors along with officers.

“We’ve seen wonderful results in that. Why? Because the crisis gets handled in a moment,” she said.

Could Richard Hollis still be alive if the 911 call had been answered with the help of one of those pilot units?

And then, there’s the aftermath of his death for his mother. She showed up in her car at the scene of an arrest where Pino was present, and yelled “murderer” and “you killed my son.” Pino responded: “Yeah, I did” and “Maybe if you did a better job there wouldn’t be a problem.” Pino later received a “discourtesy” reprimand in his personnel file, the Herald reported. Gamaly Hollis was arrested for not cooperating when told to get out of her car.

The officer eventually obtained a protective order against her; she had written accusatory posts on social media that could be interpreted as a threat, among other things. She later received a 364-day jail sentence for making another Facebook post. That sentence made her part of a tiny minority of people in South Florida who received a maximum sentence for violating a protective order since 2017, according to a Herald analysis of records. And everyone else in that small group had a prior history of violence or other violations, except her.

Could the twin tragedies in this case — Richard Hollis and his mother — have been avoided through deescalation and better systems to deal with people suffering from mental illness and grieving relatives? It’s impossible to know but it’s entirely possible for Miami-Dade to do better.

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This story was originally published November 19, 2024 at 4:49 PM.