Into the Water to Wash the Stones

On the Death of Sydney Wilson

Georgetown women’s basketball player Sydney Wilson was shot dead in September by a responding officer in Reston, Virginia, after she chased him down the hall of her apartment building and slashed him in the face with a knife.

The officer’s body-cam footage, released yesterday, shows Wilson, towering at 6’4”, open the door and instantly pounce on officer Peter Liu, a 14-year veteran of the force. She then charges toward him with her knife overhead as Liu repeatedly shouts at her to stop. He reaches the end of the hall and Wilson closes the gap, slashing him again. He fires several rounds, slips free, and fires more. Wilson drops dead.

A widely circulated screenshot from the footage showing Wilson in the middle of her frenzy—literally as she is being shot to death—is already a meme. On social media, she is being widely mocked as a moron who got what she had coming.

Come on, people.

I saw the video. The officer’s life was in immediate danger. But he was there to conduct a welfare check on Wilson after a mental health counselor called 911.

It is not rational to expect someone having a psychotic break to calmly respond when a cop points a gun and shouts, “Back up!”

From what I gather, Wilson was truly loved and loving. She supported charitable causes. She was certified in adult mental health first aid. She loved her mom and dad. And her grandparents. And they, of course, loved her.

I am not in any way justifying her behavior. But I have to wonder what was behind it. And I cannot help but feel a tightening sadness for her family, who are now forever broken and have to see people laughing like hyenas.

Is this the agreed-upon response when people in our society have a mental breakdown and become violent?

Yes, this was suicide by cop. Yes, we should all be thankful she did not rip officer Liu from his family. And yes, accusations of anti-black racism here are frankly pathetic.

But I find all the cackling rather disgusting and soulless.

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“Do you think the officer responded inappropriately?” one reader asked when I posted the above comment as a Note.

“No,” I said. “but I do think departments can be better prepared for situations like this.”

“What could they have done better?” the reader asked.

I answered:

There was a mental health professional that was called to join officer Liu but the person was on another assignment. Maybe wait for them to finish. Maybe hire more people like that to the team. Maybe if you know you’re responding to a mentally unstable person, have a stun gun or military mace aimed and ready. Maybe send two or three officers instead of one. Maybe call her family and have her Dad go in and calm her first.

It’s not my area of expertise, but one thing I can tell you from my own reporting on U.S. crime is that almost all these measures cost money and the Defund movement yanked a lot of money away from a lot of departments nationwide. And yes, crime spiked as a result and people died. Ironically, largely black and brown people. So you can imagine what I think about the Defund movement.

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As a father myself, I cannot stop thinking of the photos I found of her dad while scrolling through her Facebook page, researching for this post. His wide easy smile, her gushing and unguarded love, the pride in his eyes. It hurts to think what recent weeks were like for him. And for the Wilson family.

When I was a boy my best friend wasn’t another kid from school or the neighborhood block. It was Nina. My aunt Nina, who has the double bad luck of mental retardation and paranoid schizophrenia. But I never called her Aunt Nina. Just Nina, like a friend, as if the weight of anything formal might break whatever it was that connected us. She was the only adult who could reach me where I lived, the only one who would sit and color with me for hours at the kitchen table, who liked the same silly shows I liked, and played make-believe games with me in the backyard of my babushka’s house.

We were two weird souls who didn’t fit into the adult world but we shared our weirdness and made sense of things through each other.

When I was still very young, Nina would sometimes talk to herself about the people in her life, real or imaginary. Her boyfriend was an imaginary dancer named was Jay 5. I think she took this from a sci-fi show but I have never been able to figure out which. At some point, she began talking about me when I was not around. She talked about killing me. She talked about how she was going to do it, as if planning the sequence, and a knife was often involved.

My parents were alarmed, of course. My grandparents considered putting her in a home. Instead, my grandfather Josef, after whom I am named, began a kind of social training with her. I cannot tell you what this entailed but within months, she not only stopped her disturbing talk but was also able to keep a steady part-time job and began dating. In time, she had a real boyfriend. Jay 5 was heartbroken, I am sure.

When Grandpa died, no one—not even the fancy doctors—could replicate whatever system he had constructed, and my beloved Nina slipped back into her former self. Within a few short years, she was placed in a home where she now lives.

Why do I talk about this? Because I want you to know when I hear stories about people like Sydney Wilson—and I grant not all the facts are in, and I confess I have loved ones who are officers that have been harmed in the line of duty, so I am not cold to those considerations—yet still I feel a sadness. Not for what happened to her, though that too, but for what we have become when we see what happened and cannot hold two truths in mind at once.

Namely, that the officer did no wrong. But if she was truly mad, neither did she. For she was lost. He had no choice. But she had no ability to choose. If anything, blame the system that fails the vulnerable and leaves police spread too thin. But spare a thought for the broken. I am not saying we should open ourselves to danger. But it’s one thing to guard against it and quite another to feel nothing when it lands on someone else.