“We recognize that, from time to time, police officers face serious and unknown dangers in the course of their duties, but that was not the case with that call to our home regarding our son,” the couple said. Police Chief Kevin Davis said the shooting remains under investigation. “Our officers were faced with a very chaotic and dangerous situation,” Davis said, releasing the video at a news conference. “I want to be careful not to offer assessments or opinions,” given the ongoing investigation. “But I think it’s clear from the video that it was a very active and chaotic incident.” The video shows a Fairfax County police officer shooting and killing Jasper Aaron Lynch, 26, on July 7. Lynch was experiencing a mental health crisis. (Video: Fairfax County Police Department) The deadly encounter began to unfold shortly after 8:30 p.m., when officers arrived in the 6900 block of Arbor Lane. There, in his parents’ spacious home, Jasper Aaron Lynch, 26, was behaving erratically in the midst of a mental health crisis, his sister told officers after meeting them outside the residence. Lynch’s parents weren’t home and no one else was home. After discussing Lynch’s condition for several minutes with the sister, the three officers opened the front doors and entered a large foyer area, the video shows. One or more of them called out “Aaron,” as Lynch was commonly known. Lynch suddenly appeared at the opposite end of the foyer, holding a large decorative wooden tribal mask in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other. Over the course of about 20 seconds, officers can be heard urging him to “put it down” at least eight times. “Aaron, are you okay?” said one. “Bud, it’s okay, you’re not in trouble,” said another. The video shows Lynch yelling as he throws the wooden mask at one of the officers. He then walked toward the door where the officers were standing, lifting the wine bottle from his neck with both hands in what Davis called an “aggressive action.” According to the video, two of the officers fired Tasers, but Lynch kept coming. “I think it’s safe to say they were several feet away,” Davis said of the officers. “And they have to hit both prongs of the Taser for it to take effect. Again, our investigation will reveal whether, in fact, those Tasers hit, whether they went into effect, and if they didn’t, why not.” As Lynch, holding the bottle, reached the front entrance, Officer Edward George, a 10-year member of the force, shot him four times. The video shows Lynch collapsing in the doorway and crawling a few feet before being subdued. Asked if it was possible George mistook his gun for his Taser, the chief said, “There’s no preliminary investigative information that I’m aware of that suggests that’s the case.” Davis said George is on “administrative” work status, with no public contact, pending the outcome of two parallel investigations, one to determine whether the shooting was a crime and the other to determine whether department rules were violated. Efforts to reach George were not immediately successful. “We believe that the three officers … could, and should, have handled this very differently,” Lynch’s parents, Patrick and Kathy Lynch, said in a statement after the news conference. Describing their son as “terrified” by his loss of mental control, they said: “Responding to Aaron’s mental health crisis by shooting him at all, let alone multiple times, cannot be justified.” The couple added: “As parents, we are grieving the heartbreaking loss of our son and are left with only memories and sadness.” Davis said he sympathizes with the family and declined to comment on the parents’ statement. Davis said the tragic outcome was rare given the volume of calls Fairfax police receive about people in emotional or psychiatric distress. Of the 6,700 such calls officers have responded to so far this year — an average of about 33 a day — they have used force, lethal and nonlethal, “less than one percent of the time,” the chief said. The department has embraced “a co-responder philosophy” in which a mental health clinician, when available, accompanies officers on calls like the one involving Lynch. Earlier that afternoon, between 7 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., officers and a clinician went to Lynch’s home for an initial report of a mental health crisis. But when they arrived, Lynch had left the home and officers could not find him, police said. When officers were called again shortly after 8:30 a.m., the clinician — the only one cooperating with police so far — was unavailable. “This clinician had moved to another location at the end of his tour to complete some administrative paperwork,” Davis said. He noted that the three officers who responded to the second call had all received advanced crisis intervention training. Davis said the department will soon begin the second phase of the co-response program, with two clinicians on the payroll instead of one. Months from now, in the fourth and final phase, the department plans to have 16 clinicians working with officers in the field, the chief said.
