Friends of man shot by police suspect ‘suicide by cop’
For a man walking toward his inevitable death, Deveonte Johnson moves calmly, with seeming determination.
He grips a semi-automatic pistol at his right side and walks steadily toward two police officers in a south Oklahoma City parking lot. The police point firearms at Johnson and five times command him to drop the weapon.
“If you come around that corner, dude — ” one officer cautions in a commanding voice. Seconds later, as John- son continues, appearing unfazed, officer Clayton Sargeant follows through on his warning with three deadly bullets. Johnson was pronounced dead at the scene.
The 17 seconds captured by Sargeant’s body-camera offer a grim snapshot of a young man’s June 25 shoot- ing death. Friends say Johnson’s final moments of apparent calm belied a tortured past that included years of struggle with mental health, poverty and homelessness.
Those factors may have helped lead him to the parking lot of an
abandoned business near Robinson and SW 15 on that Sunday afternoon. Michael Payton, who lived with Johnson, 24, for a year, said it also may explain his friend’s refusal to drop his gun.
“It sounded like he just didn’t want to be here no more,” Payton said. “That was his way of dealing with it without killing himself.”
Cases in which a person appears to intentionally provoke police to shoot and kill them account for about a third of all police shootings, said Howard Kurtz, associate professor of criminology at Southwestern Oklahoma State University.
Many of those cases, known as “suicide by cop,” involve people suffering from mental illness, authorities say.
Police are traditionally trained to forcefully take control of a dangerous situation. But that can make it especially difficult to deal with individuals with mental health issues because they do not always respond accordingly, said Kurtz. Any clash between the two can be volatile and dangerous.
And mental health cases are not always easy to spot, he said.
“You don’t know what you’ve got — you don’t know if you’ve got a normal person who’s just really angry and has a gun,” Kurtz said. “There’s no way to know when you walk up on that case, what the background of that person is.”
Suicide by cop is a “slippery” term. Barring the presence of a suicide note or other clear indicators, it is nearly impossible to know an individual’s intentions. In this case, Johnson appears suicidal based on the video footage alone, Kurtz said.
“I mean, he was told not to come around the car, he did it anyway — with the gun,” Kurtz said. “That makes it seem like he wanted the guy to shoot him.”
These are traumatic events for the officers involved as well, he said.
“This is devastating to that officer,” Kurtz said. “No one wants to have to pull their gun, no one wants to have to shoot someone. Every officer realizes that every time you pull your gun and every time you pull your trigger, it could be the end of your career if you’re not correct in what you’re doing.”
Sargeant was placed
on routine administrative leave and has since returned to restricted duty. The case has been turned over to the Oklahoma County district attorney’s office and then will undergo police department administrative review.
With access to better mental health care options, all of this — the death of a young man, the grief of his family and friends and an officer’s split-second, life-altering decision — could have been prevented, Kurtz said.
“If this gentleman had access to that — somewhere to go, someone that could reach out to him — maybe this wouldn’t have happened,” Kurtz said.
To Payton, Johnson wasn’t the type to talk about his feelings or struggles. He was a steady friend always with a goofy smile. When they hung out, they would
make music or come up with little games to play with Johnson’s nieces and nephews.
But looking back, Payton said he thinks his friend may have been coping with serious mental health struggles he never opened up about.
“It was like maybe he just didn’t feel like nobody could help him,” Payton said. “For him to do that, something had to be going on.”
If Payton had known his friend needed serious help, he would have made more of an effort to be there for him, he said. Now, he understands the vital importance of checking in on his loved ones.
“We got to try to be more careful and try to talk to people more — make sure everybody is okay,” Payton said. “Call and check in on people and be like, ‘Hey, is there something going on with you? You want to talk?’”