Dante Kittrell’s mother can’t stop seeing her son being shot to death
Content warning: This story mentions suicide and mental illness. If you or someone you know is in a mental health crisis or thinking of suicide, please call 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or text IN to 741741 to talk with a counselor.
SOUTH BEND — Dante Kittrell was going for a walk, he told his mother.
He would often get frustrated and stride off down Sheridan Street, which runs through a neighborhood near the airport where Marcia Kittrell bought a modest yellow-brick home three decades ago. That was normal for Dante, his mother and her neighbors knew.
But something was odd that day, July 29, 2022. When Dante, who had turned 51 two weeks before, came upstairs from his room in the basement — Marcia meant it to feel like his own little apartment — he had shaved all the hair off of his head.
Dante had done this before, too. He would get overwhelmed and crave some immediate transformation. His mom didn’t understand why. But Marcia knew her son lived with a serious mental illness. She knew he’d been suicidal in the past. He was receiving treatment, but she wondered whether he was off his medication.
When he was upset, Marcia used to block her son’s path out the door to try to talk with him. But Dante, tall and lithe, would pick her up and move her out of the way. Marcia, now 76, learned to be patient with him, to let him go.
Sometimes he’d return soon. Sometimes he wouldn’t be back until dusk. But when the front door swung open and Dante stepped into his mother’s cozy living room, he would be calm. If he’d been rude, he would say, “Mama — I’m sorry.”
On that last day, he told her not to worry. He was just going for a little walk.
As he neared the sidewalk, Marcia leaned out the door and said, “Dante, don’t act foolish,” in the halfjoking way she often would. “All right, mama,” she remembers him saying.
For the last year, Marcia has been stuck replaying what she witnessed next.
Dante surrounded by a half-dozen police cars, in a field whose southern edge is 200 feet from Marcia’s home. A SWAT truck rolling up to the scene. The 18 South Bend Police Department officers who responded, none of whom let her past them to speak with her son. The crack of assault rifles shattering the air. Dante collapsing to the ground, in turn bringing Marcia to her knees.
“I’m just stuck in that place across the street,” said Marcia, who’s been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome and has gone to therapy weekly since November. “I can’t get past that moment. Because I never saw my son after that moment when he hit the ground.”
‘I said I’m dying’
Soon after Dante walked out of her door for the last time, Marcia’s phone rang. It was Dante’s older brother, Clarence Kittrell Jr.
“He said, ‘Mama, where’s Dante?’” Clarence, 56, told The Tribune that he and Dante had talked over the phone a few minutes before. Dante said he was hearing voices.
Days before, Marcia told The Tribune, Dante had said his late father was talking to him. Dante believed his dad was coming to get him.
His brother, an ordained minister and military veteran, prayed with Dante and assured him that he was safe. But Dante said he thought it would be the last time they spoke. If he died, Dante told Clarence, he wanted his brother to lead the funeral service.
“He broke down and he started crying,” Clarence said, “telling me that he loved me.”
The two hung up. Clarence called Dante back a few times. Dante wouldn’t answer.
The call to police came at 11:36 a.m. An administrator at Coquillard Elementary School, which is a quarter-mile north of Marcia’s home on Sheridan Street, said an armed man near the school playground was threatening to kill himself. Kids would arrive soon to pick up food as part of a summer lunch program.
From the time the first officer arrived, Dante paced in the field for about 45 minutes. He kept his right hand in his pocket, where police believed he held a gun. He tried to persuade officers, many of whom pointed rifles at him, to shoot. Early on, they asked him if he wanted to speak to his mother or brother or pastor. He rejected each suggestion.
“Ma’am — ma’am,” Dante, his deep voice suddenly calm, said to a crisis negotiator who was pleading with him to talk it out. “I know what I’m doing. I said I’m dying.”
At 12:29 p.m., Dante pulled out what police believed was a handgun. It was actually a detailed replica, they later learned. A minute passed. The negotiator backed off. When Dante appeared to point the gun at officers, four of them fired about a dozen shots in three seconds. They hit Dante in the head, the torso and the hip.
The St. Joseph County prosecutor’s office said the deadly use of force was justified as a last resort. Police have defended their de-escalation attempts and released hours of footage from the day, saying that hundreds of mental health calls end uneventfully each year, but don’t get attention.
But community activists were outraged. To them, Dante was another Black man gunned down by a group of mostly white police officers, 11 of whom came in an armored truck. He was a man walking through his neighborhood, crying out for help. He was a son who needed to hear his mother’s voice.
The Rev. J.B. Williams heard Marcia scream and watched her crumple to her knees. A Black pastor at Abundant Faith Family Ministries, he was called there by a friend of Dante’s who feared police were about to kill him.
It pains Williams to consider how Dante might have looked to officers who didn’t grow up and live in neighborhoods like those on the west side.
“Just a troublemaker,” Williams told The Tribune. “Not really contributing anything to society. Just trouble. And so what the heck — we’ve been called out here because he’s a threat to society, from the police’s perspective.”
For years before Dante’s death, activists like Williams had been pushing for police to include mental health experts in similar emergency calls. People like Dante are most dangerous to themselves, activists argue, and demand a highly sensitive response.
City officials, including South Bend Mayor James Mueller, called it an “impossible situation.” They said Dante was “determined to end his life that day.”
But Dante’s family and activists who’d pleaded for change confronted the harrowing belief that, if bureaucracy had moved faster, Dante’s death might have been prevented.
“With someone who’s crying out to the police department, ‘I need for you to kill me,’” Dante’s brother told The Tribune, “how can you do it?”
‘Why would God take Daddy from him?’
Dante’s life featured a Before and an After, his family says.
When Dante was young, the family lived in a charming old home on Allen Street, on the near west side. Marcia had moved up from Paducah, Ky., with her husband, Clarence Kittrell Sr., who held a manufacturing job at Bendix Corp. for nearly two decades.
The youngest of three children, Dante seemed to move through the world with a light heart. He would dress up as Batman and play in the basement with his brother, who played Superman, and their older sister, Karana, who was Wonder Woman. He liked to joke around and could be mischievous. Marcia once watched from the porch as a neighbor grabbed and held Dante, who had decided to try to ride his Big Wheel tricycle up a tree.
For Marcia’s husband, worldly concerns faded when there was a Notre Dame football game to watch. Dante and his brother learned to partake in their father’s love; throughout his life, Clarence Jr. could count on calls and texts from Dante asking whether he’d just seen that touchdown or if he could believe that catch.
One day, Marcia was lying in bed with her husband when she awoke to a sound that she groggily figured was his snoring. But she noticed he had stopped breathing.
At 43, Clarence Sr. died of a heart attack, Marcia said. Her daughter called 911 and an ambulance came. Marcia hardly had time to be shocked because she had to sit on top of Dante, who was 15, to restrain him. He was trying to run after his father. No, not my daddy, Dante would repeat.
“He didn’t understand,” his brother said. “He just kept saying to me at that time, why would God take Daddy from him?”
Dante’s siblings, who were already young adults by then, said the trauma plagued their little brother. Clarence Jr. came to play the role of a father. He joined the military and was usually away from South Bend, but Dante would often call to share what was happening in his life.
Karana, now 57, stayed in town for a while, and she soon had a husband and a child. Dante would seem fine when he came over to look after her daughter, and Karana’s husband helped by playing the role of a big brother.
But their mother would share that Dante didn’t want to go to school anymore. Her happy-go-lucky little boy was now hanging around bad crowds, she’d say. His moods were volatile, and he would fly into fits at home. Karana would try to preserve Marcia’s patience by picking Dante up and bringing him to her home, where she and her husband would calm him down.
Around that time, though, Dante started telling Karana: I got these voices in my head.
‘You guys will blow me away’
For years after his father died, Dante’s struggles at Adams High School and with neighborhood kids led him to attempt suicide multiple times.
The first few attempts were drug overdoses. But the closest Dante came to death by suicide involves a scenario uncannily similar to the standoff that would claim his life 32 years later.
Police Chief Scott Ruszkowski says the exact date was Sept. 26, 1990. He knows, he said, because he was one of several officers who responded that day. Dante was 19, Ruzskowski 26.
Police arrived at the Kittrells’ home on Allen Street that day to find Marcia on the porch, case reports show. Holed up in the basement, Dante told his family he was going to shoot himself. Moments later, a friend who had been downstairs with him walked outside and told police Dante had a loaded gun.
Dante soon walked upstairs and stood behind the screened front door with a revolver in his right hand. An officer using a P.A. system tried to coax him to put the gun down and come out of the house.
“I ain’t coming out,” Dante said, according to one officer’s report. “You guys will blow me away.”
But if officers approached the house, Dante said, he would shoot himself, according to the reports.
Karana told police Dante had come home upset, the reports show. He felt like some of his peers on the west side were out to get him. And he was recently disciplined by his mother after he threatened a teacher. He had feared the teacher was going to flunk him.
Dante soon exited the officers’ view. About 15 seconds later, they heard a gunshot. Then Dante yelled, “I’m hurt.”
Once Dante threw the gun so officers could see it through the front door, they went inside and called an ambulance. The doctors saved his life that time, Marcia said.
Dante talked about the incident three decades later, in his last hour alive, surrounded by a new generation of South Bend police officers in the field outside Coquillard school. Taking off his shirt, he revealed a wound on his stomach that marked the bullet hole.
“He always said he wanted to be with his father,” Marcia said. “Always, he wanted to be with his daddy. After his daddy died, he wanted to be with his daddy. He didn’t want to live.”
Dante was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia, his mother said. He started receiving treatment at the Madison Center in 1989.
A chronic brain disorder affecting about 1% of people in the U.S., schizophrenia can cause delusions, hallucinations and disorganized thinking or speech. Symptoms typically appear when men are in their late teens and early 20s.
Though schizophrenia is caused by a blend of genetic and environmental factors, some research suggests the death of a parent or an immediate family member can increase the risk of a child developing a major mental disorder.
‘He said this was his safe place’
Within a few years, Marcia sold her beloved home and bought the house on Sheridan Street.
In the three decades between Dante’s attempted suicide and his death, he married twice. He worked as a handyman, savvy with tools like his father had been. He would walk over to neighbors’ houses and ask if they needed the lawn mown or the snow shoveled or the leaves raked. He would obsess over video games. He would go to big barbecues and send home photos.
Throughout, he would struggle to fit in, his family said. He longed to be independent despite his mental illness, to prove to his mother and himself that he could manage. So he would try to live on his own for months at a time, Marcia said, but soon enough, he would struggle and come back to Sheridan Street.
Eight years ago, Karana moved to Houston. Dante would call her and say he was going to move south to live near her and her kids, his nieces and nephews. But the inspiration would always fade, and when Karana followed up, Dante would say he’d been joking.
“As long as mama was living in South Bend,” Karana said, “he was never going to leave South Bend.”
Nearly 20 years ago, Marcia adopted three foster children, Jeremiah, Nicollete and Anna. Dante suddenly had three siblings who were young enough to be his children, and they would tell him they didn’t want him to leave.
Jeremiah, who’s now 22 and works at ABC57, told The Tribune about the joy of discovering strange similarities between him and Dante.
They had the same sleeping patterns, the same appetites, the same silly sense of humor. They liked the same video games and the same TV shows. Two weeks before Dante died, the two of them went to see the new “Jurassic World Dominion” movie together. Dante, whose comedic timing always seemed impeccable to Jeremiah, made him crack up as the trailers for upcoming films rolled.
As Jeremiah spoke, Marcia smiled while on the couch next to him. She sat with each hand clasping the opposite forearm, hugging herself.
A few moments before, when she recounted what she saw the day Dante died, her breath quickened and her eyes widened as she remembered calling out to him: “Dante, this is Mama!”
But he didn’t hear her. She had walked as fast as she could to the wide field less than a quarter-mile from where she sat, but her son didn’t know it.
“He said this was his safe place,” Marcia said of the home, her voice barely audible. “But I wasn’t able to keep him safe. This time, I couldn’t keep him safe.”
‘Not another mother’
When fall came, the leaves from the big oak trees that loom over Marcia’s home fell into the lawn and stayed there. No Dante to rake. When winter came, the snow piled up in her driveway. No Dante to shovel.
Jeremiah was back at college, so she had to find someone else to help.
Any time she looks out her living room window or walks to her car, she can see the field over a small hill. She’s taken to driving south to leave her neighborhood. When muscle memory brings her to the northern end of Sheridan Street, she grips the steering wheel with trembling hands and tries to look straight ahead while driving past.
“Not another mother” has been the refrain Marcia repeats to herself. It helps her to muster the courage to talk about Dante. She’s been hospitalized twice with stress-induced stomach problems, she says. She has nightmares in which she sees her son hit the ground.
She’s gone to therapy almost every week for PTSD. She’s set to start a new regimen called eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy, which is said to alleviate distress from traumatic memories.
But Marcia, who’s lived in South Bend since 1966, tells Dante’s story because she and her family long for police to improve their response to people with mental illness.
Advocates invoked her experience to prove how urgently St. Joseph County needs a behavioral crisis center, which will open in Epworth Hospital this winter after South Bend agreed to fund its construction and early operations. A mobile crisis team has become more robust and aims to help people 24/7, while county dispatchers have adjusted their policy to include mental health experts in more calls.
The family is working with Niles attorney Sean Drew, who last year said he’ll ask the FBI to investigate the killing and is considering a civil rights lawsuit against South Bend police.
More than anything, Marcia wants peace. A Christian who’s leaned into her congregation at Olivet African Methodist Episcopal Church, Marcia said she has no choice but to forgive the school administrator who called the police. She has no choice but to forgive the officers who killed her son.
The first weekend of August, the whole family is meeting in Texas to see Karana’s youngest daughter get married. Marcia loves her grandchildren, but part of her doesn’t want to go.
“I don’t want to leave Dante,” she said.
But her kids will make her, and she’s grateful for that. Her sons Clarence and Jeremiah will help her go to see Dante’s headstone, too. She wanted to go on his birthday this year, July 15, but she couldn’t bring herself to the cemetery.
After he died, Marcia didn’t see Dante at the hospital or at his funeral; a mortician recommended she keep the casket closed.
Remnants of him are in the house: A vase of wilting red roses from his casket. An untouched bedroom in the basement. A smiling photo of Dante, dressed in a black pinstriped suit and a gold dress shirt.
“He existed,” Marcia said, sighing as she cast her eyes out the living-room window.
“Even with all of his problems, he was a person. He was not just … a number. He was a person.”
Email South Bend Tribune city reporter Jordan Smith at JTsmith@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter: @jordantsmith09