One deadly night

LITTLE ROCK — “Send me some units! Send me some units!” a young woman’s voice shrieked over Little Rock police radios. “He’s got my stick!”

The call for help came at 8:03 p.m. on the bitterly cold night of Dec. 9.

Trying to determine the woman’s location, a dispatcher asked, “What’s your 20?”

The city’s radio system ordinarily would display the officer’s identification number that could be checked against a duty roster, but a lightning strike had disabled some functions.

At the Fun Wash on South University Avenue, officers Vincent Lucio and Brad Boyce listened intently to the crackling radio in their patrol car.

“6200 Colonel Glenn,” the breathless woman finally responded.

Lucio jumped at hearing the address and barked at Boyce, who as a rookie was at the wheel.

“Go over there! Chateau!” Lucio demanded.

Blue lights flashing, they raced to the nearby Big Country Chateau apartments.

Just a little more than two minutes later, a 67-year-old man would lay dying of two shots in the chest fired by a police service pistol.

Hours later, detectives would learn that the man, Eugene Ellison, was the fa- ther of two veteran police officers — senior narcotics officer Troy Ellison and former officer Spencer Ellison.

That fact and other circumstances of the case have strained the Police Department’s solidarity. The tension only grew in May after the prosecuting attorney’s office ruled the shooting justifiable.

Police Chief Stuart Thomas will convene a deadly force review panel this week that he says will likely recommend changes in policies and procedures based on lessons learned in the case.

The Ellison family filed a civil-rights complaint with the FBI and has vowed to file a civil lawsuit soon.

Shortly after the shooting, two camps formed within the police ranks.

One camp saw an officer who resorted to deadly force only after struggling to subdue a furious, possibly mentally ill man.

The officers, both women, said they believed they were engaged in a fight to the death.

The other camp believed the man, who’d been bothering no one, died needlessly after being provoked in his home. Officers in that camp were offended when the department’s spokesman publicly defended the women the day after the shooting and released the man’s private medical information.

But questions and second-guessing would come later. That December night, dozens of officers listening to the police frequency had the same fear. More than 30 officers who heard the panicked voice raced toward 6200 Colonel Glenn.

By chance, Lucio had been at the southwest police precinct earlier that day and had talked to a brunette detective named Tabitha McCrillis. Mc-Crillis, 27, had mentioned in passing that she was leaving to work off-duty as a security officer at Big Country Chateau.

That night, speeding into the apartments’ parking lot, Lucio and Boyce rushed to reach McCrillis in the dark complex of about a dozen twostory buildings.

“I don’t know where they are!” Lucio said as they ran into a central courtyard.

From the shadows, they heard McCrillis scream, “Here, here, here!”

They spotted McCrillis on a second-floor balcony outside the open door of Apartment 213. She fought to catch her breath. Wild strands of hair fell loosely from her ponytail.

“He tried to get our sticks,” McCrillis stammered. Her police-issued baton lay nearby on the walkway.

Lucio looked inside the apartment. He saw a large man in his mid-60s with clenched fists raised. The man faced officer Donna Lesher, who was cornered in the apartment’s cramped entryway.

“The guy wasn’t moving, and you could see it in his face. He, he was like, he was mad,” Lucio told investigators later that night.

Lucio and Boyce deduced that the off-duty officers, both flushed and agitated, had tangled with the man.

But the two men didn’t know what had happened earlier between Lesher and McCrillis and the apartment’s occupant.

Later that night, the women told investigators they had checked on the man in his apartment because his door was open, and it was cold. He was shaking, and his apartment was in disarray, they said. A glass coffee table was broken.

They asked him if he was OK. He calmly told them yes, McCrillis told detectives later. They asked him if he was alone. He placidly told them he was, she said.

But they weren’t comfortable leaving, the women said later.

“His attitude made me think that maybe somebody else was in the apartment and that he maybe just assaulted them,” McCrillis explained later.

The off-duty officers asked the as-yet unidentified man again if he was OK.

This time the man responded hotly, “What do you think is wrong with me?”

“When he got mouthy with me I ... I walked in and asked him what his problem was, and that’s when he got mad,” McCrillis told investigators.

The 6-foot-1, 214-pound man flew into a rage, yelling at the women, “Get the f* out of my house!”

The women said later that he hit them both with closed fists and pulled Lesher to the ground in a chokehold.

He pulled McCrillis’ baton out of her hand and used it against Lesher, they told investigators. He pushed Lesher, 37, against the balcony railing.

The women said they thought he could kill them. They feared for their lives.

The man outweighed them and stood 7 inches taller than both.

The women said they fought him — with pepper spray in his face, with baton blows on his arms and legs, with elbows in his groin — but they were losing the fight.

“Get on the ground!” Lesher shouted to the man shortly after Lucio and Boyce arrived. The man refused. “I ain’t getting on no ...” The four officers barked a chorus of the same command — “Get on the ground!” — while Lucio pulled Lesher out of the corner of the apartment entryway and onto the balcony.

“Move back, move back! You move back!” Lucio yelled.

With all four officers now outside the apartment, Lesher gulped for air.

“He’s getting his cane now!” McCrillis yelled.

Lesher agreed.

“He’s getting his cane ... I’m fixing to shoot him,” she said. “Donna?” McCrillis tried to get her off-duty partner’s attention.

But the man was advancing, holding a wooden derbyhandled cane like a baseball bat. McCrillis stepped into the apartment and squirted pepper spray at the man.

“It seemed to p* him off even more,” Boyce recalled later that night.

The man shifted his weight from one leg to the other, like a boxer.

Boyce pulled his gun out of its holster. McCrillis pulled hers.

None of the officers had met Ellison before. They knew nothing of his history. A Vietnam War veteran who had lived peacefully in his apartment for 13 years, he had already paid his rent for January.

The officers didn’t know that he’d battled mental illness for years. He had been admitted to the State Hospital more than half a dozen times as he struggled to get a handle on the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia.

Ellison had two violent run-ins with Little Rock officers in the 1980s. In 1984, he struck an officer in the head with a steel club during an attempt to serve him with a warrant at his home.

But he’d found solace in God. For years, he spent most days reading the King James Bible, taking breaks to smoke his favorite Dutch Masters cigars on his balcony.

He had a medical condition that caused a tremor and forced him to use a cane.

On that cold night in December 2010, the officers said, Ellison was anything but peaceful or feeble.

He raised the cane and tried to strike the officers, Boyce said.

Lesher pointed her unholstered gun toward the approaching man.

“You better put it down!” Lesher screamed before squeezing the trigger.

BAM!

“Put it down!”

BAM!

Both shots hit the man in the chest, and he fell to the carpet, dropping his cane.

“F*!” McCrillis moaned. “Donna!”

“Shots fired. Shots fired!” McCrillis shouted into her radio.

“He’s not gonna come at us with no weapon,” Lesher said, breathless and coughing.

“You OK?” McCrillis gently asked Lesher.

“Are you OK?” she repeated more urgently.

“Yeah. I’m good. Call my husband please,” Lesher responded. “Call my husband. Y’all get him under control and call my husband.”

Huddled on the cold balcony with a man bleeding to death nearby, Lesher and Mc-Crillis struggled to grasp what had just happened.

The women had survived a struggle with a man who seemed intent on hurting them. Finally safe, they stopped being cops. They dissolved. Lesher used a cell phone to do what many women would do. She called her husband.

“Hi. I need you. Yeah. I just shot somebody,” her voice cracked.

Nearby, McCrillis began sobbing.

Lesher’s husband isn’t a run-of-the-mill spouse. Sgt. James Lesher supervises the homicide division.

For any other homicide, Sgt. Lesher would assign detectives and supervise their investigation. He would be the man in charge inside the police tape.

This time, though, he played the role of husband, turning over his normal duties to Lt. Glenn King and Sgt. Mike Durham.

Sgt. Lesher drove to the scene on Dec. 9, but stayed outside the yellow tape.

He was allowed, briefly, to act as his wife’s “companion officer,” someone designated to assist and transport officers involved in shootings.

Donna and James Lesher drove alone to police headquarters after the shooting and before she was questioned by investigators.

When the couple arrived, however, a new companion officer was assigned.

“I think everyone recognized that there was a potential conflict there,” Thomas said recently.

“Given the nature of Sgt. Lesher’s position within the department, he was immediately disengaged from the investigation.”

By then the police building was buzzing with activity and crowded with officers who normally wouldn’t be there. Added to the mix were witnesses and various lawyers representing officers.

Two or three hours after the shooting, detective J.C. White called his longtime friend Troy Ellison to see if Ellison by chance knew the dead man’s relatives. White was stunned when Troy said Eugene was his father.

Word spread quickly.

But Lesher, McCrillis, Lucio and Boyce didn’t find out until after their interviews with detectives that the dead man was a fellow officer’s father.

Because of the crowd at police headquarters that night, supervisors decided not to show interviews of Lesher and McCrillis on a television that’s routinely placed in the detective division when interviews in other investigations take place.

Some officers objected to that, concerned that supervisors were giving the women special consideration.

But Thomas stands by the decision to not use the televisions that night.

“You have a lot of people there who really don’t have business having access to information until the supervisors conducting the investigation can isolate it, confirm it and move forward,” he said.

Thomas emphasized that interviews of officers involved in shootings are recorded and that multiple detectives, the officers’ lieutenant, a companion officer and the officers’ legal representative are present.

The day after the shooting, new questions and criticism surfaced. Some city leaders wanted to know if an independent agency, such as the Arkansas State Police, would conduct a more impartial investigation.

About a week after the shooting, Thomas explored inviting outside investigators, but state police leaders said too much time had passed.

Also in the aftermath, former Pulaski County Coroner Garland Camper was quoted by various media outlets as saying he saw no signs of pepper spray on Ellison’s body.

Detectives requested additional testing for pepper spray and found evidence of the chemicals on the clothing Lesher wore that night.

Ellison’s face was not swabbed for pepper spray by the state pathologist who conducted the autopsy, but swabs of the man’s hands and neck did not show traces of the spray.

Tests of his clothing and glasses also did not indicate the presence of the chemicals.

Police say laboratory analysis indicates that the spray was used. Camper said recently that he never questioned the veracity of the officers’ claims of using the spray. He said only that he and others didn’t detect the spray on Ellison’s body.

“I stand by my original statement that we saw no signs of it and that no one indicated to us that it had been used,” Camper said.

Camper, without specifying a reason, stepped down from his post in April after Pulaski County Judge Buddy Villines asked him to resign.

Arkansas Crime Laboratory Director Kermit Channell said that often too many factors are at play to definitively determine if and how pepper spray is used.

“How much pepper spray was in the canister, what was going on between the officer and the victim during the melee of events ... you can’t rely on the presence or absence of pepper spray during these events.”

Thomas said he expects the deadly force review panel to address several aspects of the Ellison shooting.

Specifically, he said, the panel will look at revising the companion officer protocols to avoid conflicts; changing procedures for testing for pepper spray after such altercations; and possibly bolstering training to include scenarios where officers must subdue violent people in confined spaces.

The panel will also look at what Thomas calls the “avoidability” factor to see if officers need more training on how to assess whether someone is mentally ill or emotionally unstable. The panel may determine that more instruction is needed on how to approach a troubled person.

Some questions, however, will remain in such cases.

“You have to take a look at ... whether the officers had sufficient time and opportunity to diagnose and disengage,” Thomas said. “The unfortunate reality of this situation is that we will never adequately or sufficiently be able to identify what initiated Mr. Ellison’s response.”

Editor’s note: Direct quotes were taken from audio recordings and transcripts from lapel microphones on the uniforms of officers Lucio and Boyce the night of the shooting and from statements given by Lucio, Boyce, McCrillis and Lesher later that night. Other details were drawn from the police investigative file, the state medical examiner’s autopsy report, court records and interviews with Ellison’s family.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 07/03/2011

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