A Father Asks, ‘Why Did They Have to Just Kill Him?’

NEW YORK — On a dresser in Saheed Vassell’s bedroom, his Bibles and religious study books were stacked in order of size, a Bible about 3 inches thick on the bottom, a miniature Bible with tiny print, compact enough to stick in his pocket, on the top.

Next to the Bibles, filled with passages he had memorized, Vassell had assembled two rows of toy cars. He also collected dozens of Size 9 sneakers, in different colors to match the clothes he would change several times a day, as well as random items — a fishing pole, an antique clock, a welding mask, pieces of iron. His bed was as he left it, meticulously made with a blanket, depicting two dolphins, folded just so. He had arranged the pillows by color and fluffiness.

A need for order and a childlike innocence were evident in the bedroom of Vassell, a 34-year-old whose family said he began to lose his mind after a New York City police officer shot and killed his good friend in 2008. Vassell, who had endeared himself to nearly every shopkeeper, barber and passer-by in his Crown Heights, Brooklyn, neighborhood, met the same fate Wednesday evening on the corner of Utica Avenue and Montgomery Street. His willowy frame took nine bullets from police pistols.

To his family and friends, he was a mentally ill man, struggling perhaps with post-traumatic syndrome or playfully acting out a game in his unhealthy mind, when he pointed a silver piece of metal at people and mimed pulling a trigger. To police officers who responded to 911 calls that evening, he appeared to be a dangerous man with a gun. The metal turned out to be a welding torch. Before his mental health deteriorated, Vassell had worked as a welder.

Saheed Vassell’s death is now part of a roster of fatal police shootings of mentally ill people, most of them black or Hispanic. His death has renewed calls from civil rights advocates and elected leaders to improve the city’s community policing program and its mental health services.

Vassell did not have a regular physician, his family said. The last time he had seen a doctor for his diagnosis of bipolar disorder was when he was hospitalized about two years earlier at Kings County Hospital Center, they said. He did not like taking his antipsychotic medications. Abilify agitated him; Risperdal made him drowsy, which he hated because he feared he would oversleep and miss the 7:30 a.m. service at a nearby Catholic church.

Two days after their son’s death, Lorna and Eric Vassell sat side-by-side on a sofa in their living room, as family members and friends spilled into the various rooms of their apartment, redolent of the rice and Jamaican stewed chicken bubbling on the kitchen stove. Tears stained Lorna Vassell’s face. Eric Vassell sometimes closed his eyes as if resting, as if trying not to cry. “He had a pair of eyes that would charm anyone,” Lorna Vassell, 58, said. She recalled how she had stood up in church a few days earlier to testify about her how well her son was doing lately. “I said, ‘Thank God, over two years, Saheed has not gone to the hospital,'” she said.

Eric Vassell, 63, said he has asked himself over and over what more he could have done to protect his mentally ill son. That day had seemed so normal, as normal as it could be for someone with bipolar disorder. “Why did they have to just kill him?” he asked.

Born in Jamaica, Saheed Vassell was 6 when he joined his family in Crown Heights, a community welcoming to West Indian immigrants. At the time, the area was racked by racial tension between black and Hasidic Jewish residents. Riots had erupted after a Lubavitcher driver struck and killed a black child and in retaliation a group of young black men fatally stabbed a rabbinical scholar.

Though black and Jewish relations improved over the years, relations between black residents and the police remained fraught. Crime was surging as Saheed Vassell entered his teenage years. Young men he knew were being shot by peers and, sometimes, by the police. His home was the only safe haven, a two-bedroom apartment cleverly divided with curtains to accommodate him and four siblings.

Saheed Vassell attended Wingate High School, where stabbings and shootings among teenagers periodically took place just outside. Like many of his peers, Vassell also had run-ins with the police. As a teenager, he was arrested in 1999 on charges of gang assault for allegedly taking part in a stabbing with two other youths, and later, in 2003, he was arrested on charges that he punched and bit a woman, police said. It was unclear whether he was ever convicted on either charge. Vassell dropped out of high school, trying to find his way as a custodian, a taxi driver and as a worker at a printing plant.

In between those jobs, he found time for romance, wooing Sherlan Smith when he first met her on the street not too far from his apartment. In those days, he smoked Kool cigarettes. “He saw me and he came to say hi, but the first thing he said to me was, like, ‘You’re so cool, you’re cool like cigarettes,'” said Smith, 37.

Smith thought he was dapper and clever. Though they later separated, they had a son together named Tyshawn, whom Vassell called “T.”

Vassell first told his parents he wanted to be an electrician and then set out to become a welder. He completed his certification at Apex Technical School in the city, and found work, making as much as $600 a week.

In August 2008, Vassell lost his closest friend, a steady presence in his life. Ortanzso Bovell had been like another brother to him since elementary school. Vassell and Bovell, known as Marlon, were only months apart in age. They lived in buildings 250 feet apart. They bonded as boys exploring the neighborhood and spending hours playing Nintendo games.

When Bovell was 25, he died after a police lieutenant shot him in the back as he fled in a car the police said was stolen. The lieutenant said his gun discharged as he fell, and the police ruled the shooting accidental. But last year, after a long legal battle, a jury found that the lieutenant had intentionally shot Bovell and awarded his family $2.5 million.

Bovell’s death was a blow to Vassell’s psyche, his family said. He began talking incessantly and muttering to himself. His family reached out to authorities, and he was taken to a mental hospital and placed on a 72-hour hold, the first of multiple episodes and psychotic breaks that would lead to run-ins with the police and confrontations with his family. “After that, he was not the same person,” Lorna Vassell said. Over the next 10 years, he was hospitalized several times and prescribed antipsychotic medications to treat bipolar disorder, which he often did not take, his parents said. The illness debilitated him. He could not hold a job, and he became dependent on the family despite being among the oldest of their children. “We were taking care of him, doing everything for him,” his mother said.

On the street, he continued to have trouble with authorities, receiving more than 120 summonses and being arrested at least 20 times, according to the police. Officers were called in several times to help emergency medical technicians take him to a psychiatric hospital.

Though Saheed Vassell would often take his son, Tyshawn, for long walks to try to impart life lessons, father and son often reversed roles. The 15-year-old son would buy his father a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich at Dunkin’ Donuts before he went to school.

Every Sunday, Saheed Vassell attended morning Mass at St. Matthew Roman Catholic Church. He would usually show up before 7:30 a.m. and would sometimes be seen at the 9 a.m. service. He would enter, cross himself and then walk the aisles of the church, bobbing his head and never stopping to sit in the pews.

“He would go to the Mother Mary statue, kiss his hand and place his hand on the statues,” said Althea Pierre, a 60-year-old parishioner. “He just came in, did his signs, walked around and walked out.”

It was part of the routine of a man who melted into the fabric of the neighborhood, as ubiquitous as street signs. People knew they were on Utica Avenue, a main drag of Crown Heights, if they saw Saheed Vassell. He would walk up and down the six-block stretch between Eastern Parkway and Empire Boulevard, reciting Scripture to himself. “He knew the Bible back to front,” a neighbor, Claudia Ellis, 61, said.

He would frequent a deli, ordering a $1 Budweiser can or a turkey sandwich with extra vinegar. He would ask customers to pay for him, and they almost always did. On a daily basis, he helped people with their groceries. He helped elderly people descend subway steps. Most afternoons, he would sweep up the hair at Kev’s Unique Barber Shop.

He also drank heavily at times, friends said, and was known to break into a dance on the street. “He saw his friend die and he started to drink,” said Hector Robinson, 39, who hung out with Vassell at the barbershop. “He was never the same again.”

His mother and father said that until his death, they had no idea how great an effect their son had on the neighborhood.

“I will not sit here and tell you who my son was,” Eric Vassell said “I did not know even who he was. There’s a story. His story — ”

“ — is on the street,” Lorna Vassell interjected.