NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — Zachary Sellars said his family has called Mobile Crisis Services before, but this time was different.
"Alright, so here's the video of the Sumner County sergeant walking in," said Sellars, pointing to a home video on his phone.
He claims responding law enforcement repeatedly punched his brother Jonathan, who he said suffers from paranoid schizophrenia.
"Whether it be somebody experiencing a crisis themselves, it could be a family member, it could be another mental health professional. The calls could come in from a wide range of folks," said Chief Business Development Officer with Volunteer Behavioral Health Care System, Sejal West. The organization is one of several Mobile Crisis Services providers.
West said the goal of Mobile Crisis Services is to provide early intervention and recovery resources.
"So, there are 24/7 hotlines, and those folks are trained, and they determine whether or not a face-to-face clinical assessment is needed," she said.
While that sometimes means sending a trained mental health professional, that's not always the case.
"There are times when law enforcement would go without the mental health professional," West said. "When it's appropriate and it's safe, the practice is to come together. But there are times when it's not."
It's unclear if any trained mental health professionals responded to the call. It's also unclear if the responding deputies had crisis intervention training (CIT), even though the Sumner County Sheriff's Office does take part in it.
"In CIT, the officers are trained in understanding mental illness, mental health," West said.
"I think, absolutely, someone that has been trained with mental health could have kept him calm and talked him into going to the hospital by not forcing him and throwing him on the ground and making it a violent scene," said Zachary.
Jeff Fladen is the Executive Director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness in Tennessee.
"We're very involved in CIT training and we lead it around the state," Fladen said.
"We have found though that with CIT trained officers, when we look at mental health crises, the percentage of cases with use of force drops," said Fladen.
But he said more counties in Tennessee actually do not offer CIT training compared to those that do.
"We've been working in the last four, five years to bring CIT to every community in Tennessee and help them get up and running because the police have really gotten a bad deal, in my opinion — where they are expected to deal with mental health crisis without really having the training to do so," said Fladen.
Jonathan's family said that training could have prevented the alleged beating from happening.
"When it comes to mental health, I think they need to understand there's a difference of a violent call versus a mental call," said Zachary. "That's completely different, and they need to understand that you can't treat every call as a complete violent call in this world."
Both the Sumner County Sheriff and the Tennessee Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse are investigating the incident.
