Deadly Force:
Searching for facts in Jeremiah Chass' death at the hands of Sonoma
County deputies
By Peter Byrne
On March 12, Jeremiah
Chass, a 16-year-old teenage boy, was shot and killed in the driveway of his
Sebastopol home by Sonoma County deputy sheriffs. The sudden violence of his
death has not only traumatized the Chass family, but the local community as
well. Close to a thousand people attended a Sebastopol memorial for Chass on
March 17. Mixed with expressions of grief by young and old alike was a resolve
to find out exactly what had happened. The morning after Chass' death, his
parents, Mark and Yvette Chass, asked two close friends to visit them. In
person, the shocked couple told Beth Pisani and her husband, Marc Ripley, about
the circumstances surrounding their son's killing. Pisani and Ripley have a
six-year-old son, Tyler, who is close friends with and a classmate to the Chass'
youngest son. Pisani says she has received Yvette Chass' blessing to talk on the
record about the tragic event. The Chass' account as told to Pisani and Ripley
differs from inconsistent narratives released by the Santa Rosa Police
Department and Sonoma County Sheriff-Coroner Bill Cogbill. Pressing questions
about whether or not deadly force was used unnecessarily remain unanswered
because law-enforcement officials have so far refused to release 911 tapes of
the event. Like many other people, Pisani and Ripley are concerned that
important facts and analysis are missing from both official and press accounts.
According to Pisani and Ripley, on the morning of Monday, March 12, Jeremiah
Chass suffered a psychotic breakdown after a period of declining mental health.
His frightened parents called Sonoma County emergency services for help in
restraining him. Deputy Sheriff John Misita arrived on the scene at 8:43am,
followed a few minutes later by another deputy, John Ryan. What the two white
deputies saw upon arrival was a white couple (Yvette and Mark) and a white child
(their six-year-old son Isaiah Chass) and a severely agitated black man
(Jeremiah) with a jackknife. Instead of backing off and verbally de-escalating
the situation as first responders are trained to do, the deputies attacked,
reportedly using pepper spray, a baton and fists.It appears that the paranoiac,
frightened Jeremiah kicked at least one deputy in the face, drawing blood. What
is not disputed is that the deputies shot him multiple times. Pisani says, "When
I talked to Mark early in the morning on the day after it happened, when he
called to see if we could take Isaiah to be with Tyler for a while, I asked him,
through my tears, if excessive force had been used. He replied, 'Yes, no
question.' "I talked to Yvette on Thursday about speaking to the Bohemian,"
Pisani continues. "Reiterating conversations we had before about racism in our
county, and our personal experience with it, Yvette said, 'The truth has to come
out.' I asked her if she thought that racism influenced what happened. She said,
'Yes.' Yvette says that she forgives the deputies. She is a very spiritual
person."
The Chass' attorney,
Eric Safire, underscored that Pisani and Ripley do not speak for his clients,
who remain in seclusion, and declined to comment for this article.
Jeremiah Chass was known as a peaceful, loving, philosophical, articulate
teenager. He was a vegan. He enjoyed the study of physics and mathematics. Along
with his mother, he had a strong spiritual practice, which included meditation
and chanting. His simple, meticulously organized bedroom was adorned with prayer
flags and a poster of Mahatma Gandhi. Born to a Caucasian mother and an
African-American father who died when he was a small child, Jeremiah was a fan
of Ladysmith Black Mambazo. He had recently chatted with a member of the a
cappella chorus from South Africa after a concert. The group's music inspired
him to save money by performing odd jobs for neighbors so that he could travel
to South Africa after he graduated from high school. Marc Ripley, a general
contractor, admired Jeremiah, who occasionally worked for him. "I was impressed
with his maturity," Ripley says. "The way he held himself. We had many
philosophical discussions. He smiled a lot; he was happy, he was very present."
Being close to Jeremiah, Ripley was able to see that the youngster had changed
over the past few months. Ripley says that Jeremiah seemed to be retreating from
reality, disassociating from the present even when surrounded by the adoring
children he coached in soccer.
Last Presidents Day weekend, Pisani and her mother's group, including Yvette,
made an overnight trip with their respective first-graders to Monterey to visit
the aquarium and lounge on the beach. Jeremiah accompanied them. "On the drive
down, Jeremiah meditated most of the time. He quietly held his hands in his lap,
thinking," Pisani remembers. When one of the moms asked him what he was
pondering, Jeremiah replied that he was working to integrate his scientific and
spiritual sides, developing an equation of unity, acceptance, love and peace.
During the last few months, Ripley and Pisani say, Jeremiah ate and drank very
little and lost a lot of weight. They attributed it, in part, to his asceticism
and principled, minimalist approach to living in a materialist society. "He was
self-disciplined, on a spiritual path of purity," says Pisani, who is a
registered nurse, adding that both she and Yvette, who works as an occupational
therapist, were increasingly concerned about Jeremiah's well-being. "Yvette
reached out to friends, brainstorming about what is normal behavior for
teenagers and what is not. At the same time, she had a lot of faith in him and
who he was. They had deep conversations about what he was thinking. They were
very connected." On Sunday, March 11, Pisani and Ripley saw Jeremiah at Tyler's
soccer game. "His parents were checking in with him during the game, patting him
on the back, chatting with him," says Pisani. Jeremiah had decided to allow the
team to "self-coach." He had appointed one child as team captain, and he
purposefully stayed out of the game. "I looked over at him and he was not
agitated, but absent," Ripley recalls.
"Yvette believes that for Jeremiah the line between his two worlds [the
spiritual and the physical] was becoming less defined," says Pisani.
After the soccer game, Jeremiah went home with his parents. That was the last
time that his friends saw him alive.
According to Pisani and
Ripley, Yvette started making telephone calls to mental health specialists after
the game on Sunday. She gathered information from five different healthcare
professionals. Given Jeremiah's increasingly bizarre behavior, she was advised
to admit him to emergency care if she felt it was an unsafe situation. She made
the decision to wait until Monday morning. She stayed with him all night. He
woke up once in an agitated state. She sat with him and calmed him down. In the
morning, he showered and dressed. Yvette told him she was taking him to see a
doctor. He did not want to get into the family minivan. He did not seem to
recognize his parents. His usually fluid speech emerged as broken, disconnected.
He began talking about irrelevant things. He talked about army boots. He asked
for ice cream (a friend of his had recently told him he needed to eat more dairy
products to gain weight). He went back into the house to get an It's-It. When he
came back out of the house, he was clutching a Leatherman (a small multipurpose
tool with folding pliers, screwdriver, can opener and several jack knives). He
had a two-inch blade open as he advanced toward the minivan in which Isaiah sat,
waiting in the front seat. Yvette was scared. She got in the driver's side to
use the power locks--too late. When Jeremiah got into the front, Isaiah leapt
into the back seat. Jeremiah followed and sat on his brother; he did not hold
him at knife-point. According to the informed narrative of Pisani and Ripley,
Jeremiah sat on Isaiah and yelled out a death threat. He did not seem to know
his brother's name. Isaiah told him, "You do not want to kill me, Bud." Mark
Chass began madly clicking through the phone book on his cell phone, looking for
preprogrammed emergency service numbers. He dialed what he thought was the fire
department, asking for manpower and medics to help him subdue Jeremiah. Yvette
began singing and chanting to Jeremiah--meditation chants that they often did
together with their spiritual group--trying to bring him back to reality, to
connect with him, to show him who she was.
When Deputy Misita arrived, Mark was struggling with all his strength to hold
his son down inside the minivan. Mark had pinned Jeremiah's Leatherman-holding
hand to the seat. According to Pisani and Ripley's account, Misita waded right
in and tackled Jeremiah. He may have used pepper spray on the teenager, but the
Chasses did not mention the use of that weapon. Struggling, Jeremiah probably
kicked the deputy in the face, causing bloodshed. When the second deputy
arrived, Yvette motioned him to stay back. He reportedly said, "No, that's my
partner!" and moved in with his baton. In the confusion, Isaiah had escaped from
the minivan and was screaming in meltdown. Yvette took him into the house. Still
struggling with his son in the minivan, Mark heard a shot.
Mark told Pisani and
Ripley that he turned to a deputy and said, "Is that a pellet gun?" Then he
turned toward Jeremiah and saw his chest was open with blood gushing and his
eyes rolling back inside his head. A preliminary autopsy press release notes
that Jeremiah was shot in his chest, right arm, right leg and left knee,
suffering what the Sheriff's department terms "lethal injuries" to his heart,
left lung and arteries. The release does not report on non-lethal injuries
Jeremiah may have incurred during the altercation. The final autopsy report
being prepared under the supervision of Sheriff-Coroner Cogbill is not scheduled
to be released for 90 days.
This is not the first time that Deputy Misita has had a questionable encounter
with a mentally distressed person. The deputy's nose and thumb were broken near
Two Rock in June 2005 after he had a physical tangle with a man whose mother had
called to have his mental state evaluated. According to the sheriff's report on
the incident, Misita pepper-sprayed the subject because "he reached for his
pocket." As with Jeremiah, it was reported that the pepper spray had "no
effect," and that it was "unfortunate [that] Deputy Misita was not equipped with
a TASER." Nor did Misita have his TASER--which law-enforcement protocol requires
to be used in these situations--with him when he confronted Jeremiah. At 9am,
paramedics who had apparently been parked at the bottom of the driveway during
the fracas pronounced Jeremiah dead. Santa Rosa police arrived to take charge of
the "violent crime" scene. The Chass' nightmare was just beginning. Mark, Yvette
and Isaiah were transported to the Santa Rosa police station without being told
by officers that they had the options of not going to the station and not being
questioned. The police took the Chass' cell phones. At the station, they were
held for several hours and interrogated. The police asked if they could
interview six-year-old Isaiah. Mark refused. While the shocked, grieving family
was being interrogated, police investigators swept through their house, removing
computers, medical record files, soccer game schedules and the individual doses
of daily vitamins for each family member that sat in a row on a kitchen counter.
The day after Jeremiah was killed, the Chasses asked Pisani and Ripley to take
Isaiah to be with Tyler for a few hours. Looking to make some sense of the
tragedy, Pisani says that as she was driving the two children to her home,
Isaiah told his friend what had happened to his brother in excruciating detail.
"Jeremiah is not going to be jumping on the trampoline with us anymore," Isaiah
concluded. "Why not?" Tyler asked. "Because he is dead," Isaiah responded. "No,
he is not dead," Tyler said. "His soul is still with us, as his spirit." "So now
he is flying free with God," Isaiah mused. "I believe good people go to heaven,"
Tyler said. "Bad people just die."