Video from a Fairfax County police officer’s body camera, made public Thursday, shows an officer fatally shooting a man suffering a mental health crisis in his McLean home July 7 as the man charged at three officers, wielding a wine bottle like a club. The man’s parents reacted to the video by saying the killing “cannot be justified,” and noting their son was “5′ 6, slightly built, and holding just a bottle and a decorative mask.”
“We recognize that, at times, police officers face grave and unknown dangers in the line of duty, but that was not the case for that call at our home regarding our son,” the couple said.
Police Chief Kevin Davis said the shooting is still being investigated.
“Our officers were confronted with a very chaotic and dangerous situation,” Davis said in releasing the footage at a news conference. “I want to be careful not to offer any assessments or any opinions,” given the ongoing investigation. “But I think it’s clear to see from the video that that was a very active and chaotic incident.”
The deadly encounter began unfolding shortly after 8:30 p.m., when officers arrived in the 6900 block of Arbor Lane. There, in his parents’ spacious house, Jasper Aaron Lynch, 26, was behaving erratically in the throes of a mental health crisis, his sister told the officers after meeting them in front of the residence. Lynch’s parents were not home and no one else was in the house.
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After discussing Lynch’s condition for several minutes with the sister, the three officers opened the front doors and stepped into a large foyer area, the video shows. One or more of them called out “Aaron,” as Lynch was commonly known. Lynch suddenly appeared at the opposite end of the foyer, holding a large decorative tribal mask made of wood in one hand and a wine bottle in the other.
In a span of about 20 seconds, officers can be heard urging him at least eight times to “put it down.”
“Aaron, are you all right?” one said.
“Bud, it’s okay, you’re not in trouble,” said another.
The video shows Lynch yelling as he hurled the wooden mask at one of the officers. Then he charged toward the doorway where the officers were standing, raising the wine bottle by its neck with two hands in what Davis called “an aggressive act.” Two of the officers fired Tasers at him but Lynch kept coming, according to the video.
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“I think it’s safe to say they were several feet away,” Davis said of the officers. “And both Taser prongs have to hit in order for it to take effect. Again, our investigation will reveal if, in fact, those Tasers hit, if they took effect, and if they didn’t, why not.”
As Lynch, wielding the bottle, reached the front entrance, Officer Edward George, a 10-year member of the force, shot him four times. The video shows Lynch collapsing on the threshold and crawling a few feet before being subdued. Asked if it is possible that George mistook his gun for his Taser, the chief said, “There’s no preliminary investigative information that I’m aware of that suggests that that’s the case.”
Davis said George is on “administrative” working status, with no public contact, pending the outcome of two parallel inquiries, one to determine if the shooting was a crime, the other to ascertain if any department rules were violated. Efforts to reach George were not immediately successful.
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“We believe that the three police officers … could have, and should have, handled this far differently,” Lynch’s parents, Patrick and Kathy Lynch, said in a statement after the news conference. Describing their son as “scared” by his loss of mental control, they said, “To respond to Aaron’s mental health crisis by shooting him at all, let alone multiple times, cannot be justified.”
The couple added, “As parents, we mourn the heartbreaking loss of our son and are left with only memories and regret.”
Davis said he sympathizes with the family and declined to comment on the parents’ statement.
Davis said the tragic outcome was rare, given the volume of calls that Fairfax police receive about people in emotional or psychiatric distress. Of the 6,700 such calls that officers have responded to so far this year — an average of about 33 per day — they have used force, lethal and nonlethal, “less than one percent of the time,” the chief said.
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The department has embraced “a co-responder philosophy” in which a mental health clinician, when available, accompanies police officers on calls such as the one involving Lynch. Earlier that evening, between 7 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., officers and a clinician went to the Lynch home for an initial report of a mental health crisis. But when they arrived, Lynch had left the house, and officers couldn’t find him, police said.
When officers were called again, shortly after 8:30, the clinician — the only one working with police so far — was unavailable.
“This clinician had moved on to another location at the conclusion of his tour of duty to complete some administrative paperwork,” Davis said. He noted that the three officers who responded to the second call had all received advanced crisis-intervention training.
Davis said the department will soon begin phase two of the co-responder program, with two clinicians on the payroll instead of one. Months from now, in the fourth and final phase, the department plans to have 16 clinicians working with officers in the field, the chief said.
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