A Brentwood mother called 911 to get help for her son. Hours later, police shot him and he died

Karen Griffin agonized over the impossible choice.

After consulting with her family, she decided to pick up the phone Saturday afternoon and dial 911. In a steady, measured voice, she asked for help.

Her oldest son, Jacob, was in crisis. Schizophrenia had hijacked his brilliant mind. The "gentle giant" of the family was overcome with paranoia and false beliefs.

“He lost the ability to navigate his own mind,” Griffin said in an interview with The Tennessean.

Earlier in the day, he sent her a series of text messages threatening to kill her and others. He had a gun, and sent her pictures of ammunition.

"I was very concerned that he might hurt other people," Griffin said. "I wanted to prevent that.”

So she turned to the police. When she called 911 2:30 p.m., she knew the risks, reiterating to the dispatcher that she didn't want the officers to kill her son.

She said she was hopeful officers could get Jacob the medication and treatment he desperately needed to function and, perhaps, thrive.

Instead, her worst fears came true.

Jacob Alexander Griffin died Saturday night after a long and tense standoff with the Nashville police department's SWAT team. Police spokesman Don Aaron said an officer shot the 23-year-old after he fired his gun twice.

No officer was hurt. Jacob was pronounced dead soon afterward at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

'The consequence of asking for help was losing my son'

Days after her son's death, Karen Griffin and her family are faced with overwhelming grief. She is haunted by her call, and the devastation that followed.

"That's my burden forever now," she said.

“I will have to live the rest of my life knowing that my son died alone and afraid and that I was one mile away when they killed him," she said. “And it’s because I asked for help. The consequence of asking for help was losing my son.”

As she looks toward a future without Jacob, Griffin is determined to build a legacy for him. During a 30-minute interview, she pressed for changes to mental health treatment and training that might improve outcomes for other people like Jacob.

“I was very, very fearful (the police) would hurt him but I had no one else to call," she said. “That’s what I would like to see change.”

Metro Police Cmdr. Scott Byrd, who oversees the Training Academy, said he reviewed some body camera footage from the Saturday shooting and said it appeared officers followed proper department protocol. He pointed to their efforts to convince Jacob to drop his gun.

"Our personnel are being placed in challenging positions. And they are responding in a manner consistent with what it is that we instruct them to do," Byrd said. "We can't expect our officers not to respond when they're presented with a firearm that's being discharged."

Griffin said the information released by the authorities suggested police negotiators didn't understand how to interact with someone diagnosed with schizophrenia. She said it was “completely, spectacularly unrealistic” to send in SWAT officers to "negotiate" with Jacob.

It is impossible to effectively negotiate with someone so detached from reality, she said.

Snippets of body camera video released by the police department showed officers with long guns speaking with Jacob in the wooded homeless encampment where he was living. The officers called him "buddy" and encouraged him to drop his gun and walk toward them.

A crisis team from the Nashville Mental Health Cooperative were on the scene, but none of them spoke to Jacob before he died. Aaron said the officers were trying to get Jacob to drop his weapon so he could come talk to the counselors.

In the body camera video, Jacob pleaded with the officers to "get off my property." The stand-off with SWAT officers lasted nearly four hours.

“At the end of that siege, he was probably just ready to lay down and go to sleep,” Griffin said of her son.

At about 7:30 p.m., as darkness fell, the SWAT officers developed a plan to take Jacob into custody using police dogs, loud flash-bang devices and other tools.

Aaron said Jacob fired his gun as the officers approached. An officer responded, firing one round.

Griffin said creating that "monumentally chaotic scene" only served to make matters worse, exacerbating Jacob's already fractured mental state.

She said officers were “waiting for an unreasonable person to change into a reasonable person when that was never going to happen," she said. “Nothing is going to change in this country until the cops stop killing people who are not reasonable."

Even in the midst of her overwhelming loss, Griffin believed that kind of change was possible. She pointed to the country's monumental strides confronting drunk driving with tailored law enforcement or child abductions with the AMBER alert system.

“There’s a long list of incredibly difficult intractable problems that America has made great strides trying to improve," she said.

The scourge of mental illness, she said, should be next.

About one in 20 adults in the United States has a serious mental illness that significantly interferes with their lives,  according to 2019 data from the National Institute of Mental Health. Of that group, about one in three does not receive medical treatment.

Nashville Mayor John Cooper highlighted multiple efforts to better treat mental illness locally during his State of Metro address last month, including $1 million for counseling and a "more robust" response to "mental health crises."

Police Chief John Drake this year said he wanted to pair officers with counselors as they respond to mental health calls. A pilot phase for that model is expected to launch in part of the city next month, Aaron said.

Griffin said she knows police officers have hard, dangerous jobs. But she said there has to be an alternative to heavily armed officers responding to mental health crises.

Many local leaders agreed in the aftermath of the shooting.

Community Oversight Board chair Andrés Martínez said the city's "inability to adequately respond to a person experiencing a mental health crisis has led to another tragic death."

Martínez called on city leaders to increase funding for treatment and crisis intervention.

"The status quo has proven deadly once again," Martínez said.

'He was a beautiful soul'

Griffin made painstaking efforts to help her son as he battled mental illness for five years.

For most of his life, Jacob was a whip-smart young man with seemingly boundless potential. Griffin said he had "off the charts" math skills and participated in an elite coding program as a student at Ravenwood High School.

In the obituary she wrote for him, Griffin recalled how he could build computers out of spare parts, and how he could take clocks apart and make minute changes to help them work better.

“Jacob was the smartest, cleverest person I ever knew," she said with a mother's pride. “He had one of the quickest minds I ever encountered, and yet it betrayed him every day.”

His behavior began to change in the middle of his junior year. He was diagnosed as schizophrenic at 18.

Griffin said the family got him psychiatric care and counseling.

“We tried very, very, very hard to help Jacob,” she said.

“We approached it with love and patience and kindness and forgiveness and never gave up,” she added. “At no time did his family ever abandon him.”

As the illness progressed, though, it was a struggle to convince him to keep a job, seek proper health care and even to bathe. He moved out and insisted on living at the homeless encampment where was shot, on the southern edge of Davidson County.

Despite the horrific nature of his death, and the despair that followed, Griffin said she would remember her son as a "gentle giant" who loved his younger brother and sister, and cradled the family cat Einstein in his arms.

Flickers of the boy she raised shone through one of the last times she remembers seeing him. They ran into each other at the grocery store checkout line — he wrapped her in a long, warm hug.

"He was a beautiful soul," she said.

She laughed remembering the way he cut through the water on a jet ski during a family trip to the ocean. He zoomed back and forth until the jet ski ran out of fuel.

Despite the torment he faced toward the end of his life, Griffin said she always thought she'd see him emerge on the other side of his illness with the same boundless energy.

“I never lost hope, ever,” she said. “I held on to hope until the very moment that chaplain showed up at my door.”

Reach Adam Tamburin at 615-726-5986 and atamburin@tennessean.com. Follow him on Twitter @tamburintweets.