Family saw signs of mental illness in man shot by police
Shamar Ogman had been acting erratic, mother and aunt say
HARTFORD — Shamar Ogman, the rifle-wielding man fatally shot by a Hartford police officer late last month, hadn’t been acting himself since early 2020, his family told The Courant, and their concerns and court records of his recent encounters with police paint a picture of a man struggling to cope with anger, fear and his own thoughts before he was killed.
Ogman’s mother and aunt said he started acting paranoid and erratic, sometimes changing behavior mid-conversation and rambling about things that didn’t make sense. They had suspicions he was suffering from an undiagnosed mental illness. He told a police officer weeks before his death that he had mental issues that made it hard for him to manage his anger but that they were under control.
On the evening of Dec. 26, before Ogman, 30, was cornered by officers
in a parking lot near his home on Gilman Street, he texted his aunt that he was stressing — something he would often tell Angel Ogman-Hubbard when his mind was racing and he needed a listening ear.
She wrote back that she would have a break from her nursing job at 3 a.m., which was about six hours away. Within about 15 minutes, Ogman-Hubbard learned her nephew was dead.
In the 911 call that brought police to Gilman Street just before 9 p.m., his girlfriend can be heard saying she was minding her own business when “all of a sudden he just breaks out into rage” and began walking around with a gun in his hand.
He went outside, where the girlfriend’s brother tried to calm him down. Ogman dropped a handgun on the ground but kept hold of a rifle and ran from police when they arrived.
A preliminary investigative report from Ansonia/Milford State’s Attorney Margaret E. Kelley states Ogman was pointing his rifle at officers, and their body cameras captured them saying the same as they gave dozens of orders for Ogman to drop the gun. Ogman could be heard yelling “No!” “Shoot!” and “Shoot me!” minutes before Officer Ashley Martinez fired a fatal shot at him.
“If that does not scream mental health, suicide by cop, I don’t know what else is,” said Ogman-Hubbard, 37, of New Haven. “He wasn’t trying to get killed by the hands of the ones who are supposed to protect and serve. Here’s a moment of crisis and no one took the time to assess, ‘Is this a moment of crisis or is this a shoot to kill?’ ”
Now, the Ogman family says his death, under investigation by Kelley and state police, points to gaps in how the criminal justice system handles people in crisis, particularly those who are armed.
Systemic issues
A week before Ogman died, a top Connecticut prosecutor called attention to the prevalence of mental health issues in those killed by police.
In issuing his findings about an officer-involved shooting that occurred in Ansonia last January, Danbury State’s Attorney Stephen Sedensky III noted it was his third case with mental health factors.
While he said the use of deadly force was justified in the Ansonia case, the specifics prompted him to recommend that all 911 operators and dispatchers ask callers if there is any mental health background that responding officers should know about.
New Britain State’s Attorney Brian Preleski has twice made similar comments about emotional disturbances leading to deadly encounters with police. In 2016, Preleski cited a Treatment Advocacy Center report that found individuals with mental illness are 16 times more likely than others to be killed during a police encounter.
And just six months ago, he argued the death of a 57-year-old Waterbury man revealed systemic failures in how law enforcement respond to, investigate and try to prevent using deadly force during an emotional disturbance.
“These tragic incidents should compel us to give thoughtful consideration to what everyone involved might have done better,” Preleski wrote in his report justifying the fatal shooting.
Ogman’s mother, Barbara Chavis, tried just before Thanksgiving to get her son some help. She asked him on the phone if he had a primary care doctor who could refer him to a therapist — Ogman got so angry he hung up and never spoke to her again.
Things seemed to escalate in the weeks before his death. On Dec. 9, he allegedly hit an ex-girlfriend in the face at their workplace in Bloomfield and told a police officer that he had a history of mental issues and “suggested it causes him to inappropriately manage his anger sometimes.”
Ogman told the officer the issues were under control.
Then, on Dec. 15, he was pulled over in Meriden and admitted he tried to avoid the officer because he was afraid for his safety.
Chavis, 51, of Waterbury, questions whether there was anything police could have done differently when they were called to Ogman’s street the night he died — given her son more space, more time, called a social worker or even another family member to help de-escalate the confrontation.
“I can’t put in words how I feel, because my heart is broken,” she said. “And I’ll never get my son back.”
Crisis intervention
Police departments around the country have tried numerous times over recent decades to address this issue with specialized programs and training.
Hartford police have a Crisis Intervention Team and a partnership with a mobile crisis team operated by the state. Police Chief Jason Thody says that program predates his 24 years with the department.
Thody is also updating all Hartford police protocols and procedures as he seeks accreditation for the department.
As part of the police accountability bill the Connecticut legislature passed last summer, all police departments must assess the feasibility and impact of using social workers and mobile crisis units to respond to calls for help. A new legislative Police Transparency and Accountability Task Force is studying the issue more broadly.
Hartford’s study has been completed and submitted to Thody for review, according to Lt. Aaron Boisvert. Already, the city has announced plan for a Civilian Crisis Response Team, which would send professionals instead of or alongside police on certain calls involving mental illness, emotional distress, trauma and addiction.
Mayor Luke Bronin announced the initiative over the summer at a time when cities around the country were looking for new ways to address violence and racism in policing.
A recent climate study of the Hartford Police Department also found that officers desire more instruction on how to respond to people with mental illness and disabilities, and more training and education on cultural understanding, bias and de-escalation.
It’s not clear, though, whether the team that Bronin envisions would have responded alongside police to Ogman’s street the night after Christmas.
An advisory board for the Civilian Crisis Response Team has been meeting for several months and will make recommendations for the setup of the program, including whether or not it should be a part of city government, and how people will identify calls that should be handled by the crisis response team.
Some calls for help may not involve serious criminal activity, such as reports of emotional disturbances or loitering. Others pose a much greater risk, like the 911 call that brought police to Gilman Street on Dec. 26 for a man walking around with a gun, not acting like himself.
‘Thinking somebody was after him’
On the surface, Ogman seemed to be doing well in his first two years of freedom after serving a decade in prison for armed robbery.
Ogman, who entered prison at 17 and left at 27, liked his job as a supervisor at a grocery store warehouse. A sharp dresser and a ladies man with a goofy side, he had a car, a close-knit family and four young daughters, one of whom he was living with on Gilman Street.
But Ogman was also haunted by two losses he experienced while locked up — his younger sister’s death in a car accident in 2015, and his 9-year-old daughter’s death from an asthma attack less than a year later.
Chavis wonders how much that had to do with the changes she and the rest of the family saw in Ogman starting in early 2020. He suddenly seemed less himself. Once a mama’s boy who always wanted to hug and sit next to Chavis, he stopped visiting her in Waterbury and screened her calls.
Other times, she’d wake up to missed calls from Ogman from the middle of the night. And his siblings and cousins told her he sounded paranoid.
“He was always looking out the window thinking somebody was after him,” Chavis said.
Ogman-Hubbard knew something of mental health from her work in the nursing field. Just before the pandemic, she found herself researching how to get Ogman help — like going to a probate court to seek court-ordered treatment or the appointment of a conservator to make medical decisions.
But those didn’t seem to be options for Ogman, who wasn’t considered a danger to himself or others, and then the courts moved most services online and the bar for what constituted an emergency seemed even higher.
Ogman’s arrest in Meriden on Dec. 15 hints at the erratic behavior his family had noticed.
The police report details the cat-and-mouse game he played with an officer in an unmarked car — the way Ogman kept kept hitting the brakes at green lights, and sticking his head out of his tinted window to stare at the officer when they passed each other. To avoid being followed, Ogman sped up, made a left onto another road and pulled in and out of a 7-Eleven parking lot.
After he was pulled over, he told one of the three officers on the scene that he was in fear for his safety from the moment he saw the unmarked car. He refused to roll down his window more than an inch and asked several times for a supervisor to come to the scene, which he was told wasn’t possible.
Officers removed Ogman from the car and arrested him after finding he had an active warrant for a probation violation and noticing a handgun on the floor of his passenger seat.
When Ogman called his aunt, he asked her not to get mad or upset.
“How about you just say, “OK, poopy, I love you and I got your back?” she recalls him asking. “And he told me he got arrested again, and I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ He said, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.”
Ogman-Hubbard hasn’t forgiven herself yet for not dropping her work to talk to her nephew the night he died. She wants the criminal justice system to shoulder some responsibility, as well, though she doesn’t expect it will.
“I could not be there for him in his darkest hour of life,” she said. “I’m grieving the loss of my nephew because I wasn’t there to protect him, and I know this shooting could have been prevented.”