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A young homeless man was shot and killed by police during a mental health crisis

BY AMANDA HAGGARD

The Metro Nashville Police Department shot and killed a man living in a homeless encampment behind Mill Creek Towne Center Shopping Mall near Brentwood. Jacob Griffin’s mother had called 911 because her son was having a mental health crisis.

Griffin, 23, was shot by an MNPD SWAT officer after police tried to take Griffin into custody. Police say Griffin fired several shots from a pistol before they shot at him.

Griffin was taken to Vanderbilt University Medical Center on Saturday, May 1, where he died of his wounds. Griffin was a former employee of the Goodwill in the shopping center where several people gathered for a vigil before it was moved online because of severe weather.

At an online vigil for Griffin, street chaplain and co-founder of Open Table Nashville Lindsey Krinks called for better systems for handling mental health and policing.

“This didn’t have to happen,” Krinks said. “Your social status should not be a death sentence. Your race should not be a death sentence. Your mental health should not be a death sentence. But so often they are.”

In the video, Krinks says more can be done to ensure it doesn’t get to the point where families have to call the police, where things might potentially end in a fatality.

“We do not have the proper systems of care,” Krinks said. “True public safety is not the presence of police. It’s creating societies [and] communities where everyone has what they need.”

In a 911 call around 2 p.m. on May 1, Griffin’s mother can be heard telling dispatchers that Griffin was, “schizophrenic and for about the last hour has been texting me messages that he plans to kill me and other people, and I think it’s something that Davidson County needs to address.”

His mother says on the call that he is armed, but adds that he’s never been violent before.

“I really don’t want the police to kill him, but I don’t want him to kill anyone else either,” she said.

Police spokesperson Don Aaron told reporters that Griffin told officers that he had a gun, but would not surrender it. During the police interaction, officers say they deployed a taser before deploying a gun.

MNPD negotiators and SWAT officers were brought to the scene about an hour into police interaction with Griffin, which began around 3 p.m. Mobile Crisis staff from the Mental Health Co-Op came to the scene and signed emergency committal papers for Griffin at around 5:15 p.m. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation is investigating the shooting, which was captured on MNPD bodycam footage.

In the video, SWAT officers can be seen standing behind a ballistic shield while talking with Griffin, who can’t be seen on the video. Police say he was holding a pistol just a few feet away. Police say he shot a round from the pistol around 7:20 p.m. He was shot and killed by police shortly after.

“Jacob was a human being,” Open Table Nashville said in a statement. “He needed care. Housing. Employment. He and other Goodwill employees had been 'let go' months before because of a change in management at the store. He was hurting, struggling both mentally and emotionally.”

Open Table Nashville says friends who worked with Griffin called him a “teddy bear.”

“MNPD officers went to the camp after his mom asked them to check on him, and instead of being treated as a human being in need of care, he was treated as a threat to be neutralized,” they said. “When he refused to come out of his tent after hours of 'negotiating,' the officers devised a plan to extract him by using distraction devices, hard foam rounds, and a police dog that viciously attacked Jacob and pinned him to the ground. In the chaos of this violent ‘extraction,’ shots were fired and Jacob was killed.”