S.F. police killing of mentally ill man exposes reform challenges

Fifteen years after Vinh “Tony” Bui was diagnosed with schizophrenia, the sound of a slamming door at the San Francisco home he shared with family members triggered a rare psychotic episode. He lashed out, cutting one of his niece’s teenage friends on the back with an X-Acto knife.

His niece, Melina Herrera, called her mother, worried not only about her friend but her uncle. “Call the police,” her mother recalled telling the 15-year-old girl. “They’ll bring Tony to the hospital. They’ll know what to do.”

But within minutes of their arrival, officers killed the 46-year-old man, saying he came at them with the pen-like blade.

More than five years have passed since the December 2010 shooting in the Portola neighborhood, but Bui’s relatives say they still don’t understand why he died. And San Francisco police — like their counterparts around the country — are still struggling to deal with calls involving mentally ill people in crisis without resorting to firing their guns.

“You can see how it affected Melina,” said her aunt, Rose Bui, who along with other relatives agreed to talk about the case for the first time. “She loved her uncle very much. He held her in his arms when she was just born. And now she feels like it is her fault. She was the one who called the police.”

‘Policy and training failures’

As San Francisco considers reforming the way police use force in the wake of the December shooting of Mario Woods, a Bayview stabbing suspect whose family said had mental health issues, the killing of Tony Bui offers a look into the depth of the challenge.

Bui’s family said the situation could have been safely defused, but the officers said they had no choice but to fire. The officers were cleared of potential charges and discipline, but San Francisco’s civilian Office of Citizen Complaints found the shooting to be “the result of policy and training failures.” A lawsuit filed by the family is still being fought.

A Chronicle analysis found that more than 60 percent of all fatal shootings by San Francisco police since 2010 involved people who had histories of mental health problems or were acting erratically.

Officials say the police force has made big strides since the Bui shooting. The department follows what has been lauded as the best crisis-intervention team training model in the country, with plans to eventually train every officer and incoming recruit. More than a quarter of all officers are currently trained.

Challenge goes beyond police

The city’s Police Commission set a Wednesday deadline to come up with a draft proposal for a new use-of-force policy, which may include giving officers stun guns. But the challenge goes beyond police, and some mental health advocates caution there is only so much a city can ask of its officers.

“The police are the tip of the spear, simply the first point of contact, for a completely broken mental health delivery system,” said Gifford Boyce-Smith, board president of the San Francisco branch of the National Alliance on Mental Illness and a member of the police force’s crisis-intervention team oversight board.

He and other advocates say the city needs to expand its mobile crisis unit, which includes 27 mental health professionals who work with police. Last year, the team responded to 1,500 calls of children or adults in crisis, said Rachael Kagan, a spokeswoman for the city’s health agency.

No mental health workers accompanied the officers to Tony Bui’s home on the afternoon of Dec. 29, 2010.

According to documents from the lawsuit the family filed in 2011, Officers Austin Wilson and Timothy Ortiz said they could not remember whether mental health was mentioned when they responded, though dispatch had sent a message to the patrol car computer that Bui was “mentally challenged.”

Earlier call to police

Wilson had been hired a few months before the shooting after five years with Novato police, while Ortiz was hired in October 2009. Both men — who could not be reached for comment — still work for the San Francisco force. Neither the Police Department nor the City Attorney’s Office, which is representing officers in the civil case, would comment, citing the litigation.

The officers and a police inspector entered a home on Bacon Street that was a den of activity. Bui shared it with 12 others, including his parents, two sisters and their children, whom he helped raise. His niece, Melina, had about 15 of her school-age volleyball friends and cousins in the living room, a common occurrence for the outgoing girl. Bui, despite his aversion to loud noises, was used to the chatter and chaos of a full house.

The family had called police about Bui once before, 10 years earlier, said Melina’s mother, Lan Herrera. Bui had gone off his medication and broken a window. The officers who responded, Herrera recalled, calmly persuaded Bui to go with them to San Francisco General Hospital for psychiatric treatment.

The 2010 call nearly ended without incident — or resolution. Wilson and Ortiz said the kids in the home seemed reluctant to say who was hurt and did not appear “in distress.” Ortiz radioed that the call had no merit, but then the girl who had been poked “shyly” showed them a puncture wound on her lower back, along with a blood stain on her shirt.

The officers “asked with urgency” the location of the man with the knife, and the teenagers pointed to a bathroom about 15 feet down a hall. Cindy Tran, another of Bui’s sisters, said in a deposition that she repeatedly tried to tell the officers about her brother’s schizophrenia. The officers, though, said they did not recall hearing about his mental illness.

Disagreement on danger

The officers said Tony Bui came out of the bathroom quickly, waving the blade “in an aggressive and menacing manner,” prompting them to draw their guns. Others described Bui as moving slowly with the knife at his side. The family said Bui suffered from tardive dyskinesias, a side effect from antipsychotic medication that caused him to make involuntary movements and walk in a slow, shuffling manner.

Ortiz and Wilson told him to drop the knife, but some of the teenagers said he did not appear to understand the commands. The officers backed up into the living room, where the teenagers were gathered. The family believes Bui, agitated by the loud voices, was trying to exit the front door, past the officers.

“My brother, he was in the bathroom, he was already calmed down,” Rose Bui said. “Everything was already calmed down, and then they came and they threw things out of order. They spoke really loud, and they pulled out their guns right away.”

When Tony Bui was about 6 to 8 feet away, Ortiz fired twice and Wilson fired once. Two bullets struck Bui, piercing his heart. The third went into the kitchen, where Tran stood.

“He was coming at us with a knife. OK? That can cut you or kill you,” Ortiz said in his deposition. “The mental illness, whatever, at that point I’m worried about my life, my partner’s life, and all the kids in the room. I’m a parent. OK? And he put himself in that situation, and he made us — or he made me shoot him. I didn’t go in there wanting to do anything like that.

“If you come at somebody with a weapon that could potentially kill you,” the officer said, “all training and everything else goes out the window. At that point it’s a safety and a life-threatening issue.”

Rose Bui said the police description of the shooting was difficult to accept. Even after his diagnosis, she said, her brother was still the sweet, attentive man who doted on his sick mother and cared for the children in his home. And at 5 feet 6 and 135 pounds, he was smaller than some of the teenagers in the room.

“They were scared,” she said of the officers. “But look at my brother ... could someone like that attack you?”

Officers seen as lacking plan

Because of budget cuts, neither officer had been given crisis intervention team training. Angela Chan, a former city police commissioner, said the Bui case sparked her push to not only reinstate the training, but put into practice the widely praised Memphis Model of crisis intervention, which the department now employs.

“I think the Bui case is a prime example of doing everything wrong in interacting with an individual with mental health issues,” she said. “With a crisis intervention team, you don’t rush in. You try to talk to that person, you find out what is bothering them, you talk to their family members.”

Most alarming, Chan said, was that the officers seemingly went in without a plan — they left their beanbag gun behind and went first for their guns rather than pepper spray or batons. One of the officers said he briefly considered trying to disarm Bui but worried about entering his partner’s line of fire.

Chan’s concerns were echoed in the report by the Office of Citizen Complaints.

“Although the evidence demonstrated that the named officers’ use of lethal force was objectively reasonable,” the report said, “the officers’ investigative and tactical errors jeopardized their own safety and those within the residence and also compromised the officers’ ability to consider alternatives to deadly force.”

Haunted by memories

In a recent interview at the family home, Chien Bui, Tony Bui’s father, said in Vietnamese that he hoped police would improve training, because he didn’t want any more families to suffer.

“He doesn’t know there were more,” Rose Bui said quietly. “Whenever somebody is killed like that, we try not to let him watch the news.”

Tony Bui’s loved ones put his photo up on their ancestral altar but rearranged the living room and made renovations in hopes of erasing the bad memories. Still, they say they are haunted by what happened, especially around the holidays and the anniversary of the shooting.

Bui’s mother, Ai Huynh, said her son comes to her in dreams with questions and tears in his eyes. “Why did they kill me, Mom?” he asks, but she has no answer.

Vivian Ho is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: vho@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @VivianHo