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By The Washington Post 
12h ago
Tim elfrink
Utah – When Golda Barton dialed 911 on Friday, she was hoping emergency services could help hospitalize her 13-year-old son, who has Asperger’s syndrome and was having a mental breakdown.
Instead, Linden Cameron was repeatedly shot by a Salt Lake City police officer after he escaped, leaving the boy in serious condition with injuries to his intestines, bladder, shoulders and ankles. Barton says he was unarmed and police said they did not find a weapon at the scene.
“He’s a little boy. Why didn’t you confront him?” Barton said in an emotional interview with KUTV on Sunday. “He’s a baby. He has mental problems.”
Barton said he has received few responses from police. The mayor of Salt Lake City promised Sunday that an investigation into the incident would be swift.
“Regardless of the circumstances, what happened Friday night is a tragedy, and I hope this investigation will be handled swiftly and transparently for the good of all involved,” said Mayor Erin Mendenhall, Democrat, in a statement to the Salt Lake Tribune.
Local autism advocates also condemned the shooting and called for changes in the way police respond to mental health crises.
“The police were called in because help was needed, but instead more damage was done when SLPD officers expected a 13-year-old boy experiencing a mental health episode to act calmer and more collected than adult-trained officers,” Neurodiverse Utah said in a statement.
Across the country, police have seriously injured and killed dozens of people with mental illness when called to help by family members or bystanders, including in recent high-profile cases like that of Daniel Prude, a 29-year-old black man who died of suffocation after Rochester. New York police put a hood over his head during a mental health episode in March. The problem is so acute that some cities have chosen to dispatch non-police crisis units to respond to mental health emergencies.
That’s the kind of help Barton said he hoped to find when he called a hotline around 10 p.m. Friday.
His son is a typical 13-year-old, he wrote on a GoFundMe page for his medical bills: a boy who loves “video games, ATVs, and longboards” and “is always looking for ways to help people.”
But he has also long struggled with severe separation anxiety when she leaves him alone, he told KUTV, and Friday was his first day back to work in nearly a year. He called 911 when he suffered a mental breakdown, he said.
“You call them, and they are supposed to go out and be able to alleviate a situation using as little force as possible,” he told KUTV.
When police arrived, he said he told them that Cameron was not armed and that they just needed to take him to a hospital.
“I told him, ‘He’s unarmed, he doesn’t have anything, he just gets mad and starts yelling and screaming,'” he said. “He is a child to whom he tries to attract attention, he does not know how to regulate.”
Police told him to stay outside while they entered his home, he said. Just five minutes later, she said she heard them ordering her son to drop to the ground, followed by a barrage of gunfire.
In a briefing with reporters that night, a police spokesman suggested that officers believed the boy might have a gun. Salt Lake City Police Sgt. Keith Horrocks said officers came to the home after reports of “a minor who was having a mental episode, a psychotic episode, who had threatened some people with a gun.”
Horrocks said Cameron fled the home on foot and was shot by an officer. No weapon was found at the scene. Salt Lake City police turned the case over to outside investigators, and Horrocks promised to conduct a full briefing on the findings within 10 days.
“Our investigators will obviously be looking at images from body cameras,” he said.
Barton said that after the shooting, his son was handcuffed and police could not tell him if he was dead. She said she still doesn’t understand why they would shoot her.
“Why didn’t they hit him? Why did they shoot him with a rubber bullet?” he asked on KUTV. “You are great police officers with enormous amounts of resources. Come on. Give me a break.”
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