Man gets sentence in bridge holdup
Upon advocacy from CIT, 23-year-old will serve house arrest
Members of Anne Arundel County’s crisis intervention team filled a Queen Anne’s County courtroom in September, sitting patiently through hours of court hearings until it was their time to testify on behalf of a Maryland man who held up the Chesapeake Bay Bridge for hours while experiencing a mental health crisis in May.
Judge Lynn Knight sentenced the 23-year-old man, who The Capital is not naming because of the nature of the case, to three years in prison, suspending all but three months of house arrest, a decision four CIT members in blue collared shirts urged Knight to consider. The team consists of police officers and county mental health counselors. They respond to calls of mental health crises and continuously check in with people after an incident, including picking a person up, driving them to court, and testifying on their behalf.
“(Jail) can be another traumatic incident,” said Lt. Steve Thomas, who commands the police department’s CIT unit, said Thursday. “In jail, you’re not going to get the same mental health treatment that we are able to provide with community interventions.”
The team’s contact with the man started when Thomas and crisis response director Jen Corbin were called to Route 50 on Kent Island on May 8 to negotiate with him during a police standoff. Starting around 3:45 a.m., police were called and began to follow the man, who was driving his gold Toyota Camry erratically. The man entered the eastbound span of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge at 20 mph. He swerved between lanes and drove through construction cones at the end of the bridge to make a U-turn.
The man then crossed the bridge again on the westbound
span when an officer noticed the man had a knife. Police deployed stop sticks to pop his tires, but he continued to drive and turn around again to drive onto the eastbound span of the bridge with three flat tires. The man stopped near Castle Marina Road on Kent Island and a four-hour police negotiation began.
During the negotiation, the man held a knife and an airsoft gun, but never raised the weapons toward the police. He was shot with a beanbag shotgun and Tased, according to charging documents. Crisis intervention negotiators eventually talked the man into surrendering. Police ordered an emergency petition to admit the man to a hospital for evaluation. He spent a total of 21 days in various inpatient clinics, including Pascal Crisis Stabilization Center in Crownsville.
During the negotiation time, the Bay Bridge and parts of Route 50 were closed until 12 p.m. on a Saturday, creating significant traffic backup and “very real consequences for the community,” Michael Cuches, the Queen Anne’s County’s deputy state’s attorney, said at sentencing. Cuches described the incident as “a shining example of outstanding police work,” for deescalating the man.
The man was charged with disorderly conduct and concealing a dangerous weapon stemming from the police chase. He did not have a prior criminal record.
Prosecutors sought a sentence of two months in jail and two months in home detention. But the three police officers and one mental health counselor that brought the man to the hearing explained to the judge that incarceration can quickly cause a person in treatment for a mental health illness to relapse.
Tamara Stofa, a Queen Anne’s County public defender, was stuck in the May 8 traffic jam on Route 50 herself. At the sentencing on Sept. 24, Stofa described the man’s health challenges as a natural punishment and asked the judge not to incarcerate the man as a deterrence for other people who stop traffic on the Bay Bridge.
“I don’t know if we will ever be able to deter people if they’re that mentally ill,” Stofa said.
Officers and counselors in CIT will continue to monitor the man, whose family lives in Prince George’s County, and bring him to mental health appointments, as they do with more than 100 existing clients every week. The man has been cooperative and engaged in treatment. If he wasn’t actively working to become healthy, the CIT team would notify the state’s attorney’s office, they testified.
“My issue is he needs help and will only get it because my team is willing,” Corbin, the director of crisis response, said during sentencing. “I don’t believe he’ll get that (help) from Prince George’s County or Queen Anne’s County.”
Anne Arundel County’s crisis response team is internationally recognized for treating the cause of county residents’ mental health issues, rather than just the symptoms by traditional criminal justice means. The team clears out around 10 warrants a month when people arrive at “Safe Stations” across the county, public places that residents can go to get help with addiction or mental health crises.
“In all the cases, we link them to the public defender, we help them do the public defender paperwork, we walk that paperwork to the commissioner’s office to get the certification, and then we work with the public defender and state’s attorney to get the warrant recalled,” Thomas said Thursday. “Because of the crisis that they’re under, they lose their family supports. We become that support for them,” he continued.