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A Police Story: Skill, Restraint, and Deadly Force

By Michael Hopping
Senior Writer, Asheville
mike.hopping@worldnet.att.net

On the morning of March 15th, Billy Ray Surrett lost his job. The day went downhill after that. He began drinking. By mid-afternoon, he’d allegedly fired several .410 shotgun rounds—one into a car occupied by his wife, Heather Surrett—and smashed the windshield with his fist. Then he retreated into his mobile home on Bear Creek Road in Leicester, thinking he’d killed her. Fortunately, he was wrong. She hadn’t been hit and went to Asheville to file charges. (This wasn’t Surrett’s first brush with the law. There were also reports that he had a history of major mental illness.) Events were about to take another potentially deadly turn.

Aware of last year’s fatal shootings of suspects by local law enforcement officers, Surrett’s brother, sister, and a female family friend named Sims sped to Bear Creek Road, hoping to defuse the situation before BCSD arrived. Sims entered the trailer, where she found Surrett suicidal and unwilling to give up his gun. Outside, deputies with rifles surrounded the residence. A hostage negotiator established telephone communications. Surrett allegedly shot at deputies several times during the tense three-way standoff that ensued. Lt. Dale DenOuden was slightly wounded in the head by a pellet of birdshot.

When Surrett finally relinquished his shotgun and walked out to an uneventful arrest, nobody was happier to see him unhurt than the two arresting officers, Captain Wayne Welch and Sheriff Van Duncan. Duncan’s voice busted its buttons with pride when he later told me, “Our deputies showed a tremendous amount of skill and restraint. I’m very pleased.” DenOuden, who leads of one of the department’s two Response (SWAT) Teams, had a more aw shucks response: “It went really well.”

Prior to his election as sheriff, Duncan talked about creating Crisis Intervention Teams (CIT) to handle life-threatening confrontations, particularly when mental illness or substance abuse is involved. These teams would differ from the SWAT approach by adding a hostage negotiator to the mix. The negotiator would attempt to establish contact with a suspect, whether or not there are hostages, and seek a peaceful solution. CITs have yet to materialize in departmental policy. But Duncan considers the Surrett case an example of what he’d like to see. “We were able to handle this situation like a Crisis Intervention Team would handle it,” he said. “We had the chance to gather information first and knew what we were facing. Second, we had deputies who were well-trained, including some Response Team members. Third, we had a hostage negotiator.”

The Sheriff’s Perspective

In fact, the negotiator and the four officers who established the perimeter around Surrett’s home were exceptionally well-trained for their roles. Joining DenOuden on the front line were the leader of the department’s other Response Team, the department’s firearms instructor, and an officer with more than two years experience in Iraq. Each carried an assault rifle accurate well beyond 200 yards. Surrett’s .410, they knew, had a fraction of that effective range.
The initial plan was to contain Surrett in the trailer, outside his firing range but inside theirs, while telephone negotiations proceeded. But the presence of extra people altered the equation. Sims, fearful that the deputies intended to kill her friend, was in and out of the mobile home. The brother and sister maintained positions between officers and the trailer.

“Family members being there meant we had to be closer than we wanted to be in case he came out shooting and they needed immediate aid,” DenOuden said. He and another deputy advanced to a well house about fifty yards from the mobile home and took cover. Sims and the others refused instructions to get out of the way. “They kept calling us killers and said we wanted to shoot him,” DenOuden told me. “The family members said they wanted it to end peacefully. I said we did too. Then he started shooting at the deputies out the back window.” DenOuden was wounded at the well house.

I asked DenOuden whether the family’s presence might have influenced the decision to hold fire when deputies had a clear shot at a man who was shooting at them. “No,” he said, mainly because of the short effective range of .410 birdshot. “He shot me, but we didn’t shoot back,” he reiterated.
Telephone negotiations and Sims’ in-person efforts were touch and go. About an hour and forty-five minutes passed before Surrett surrendered. “He was very upset and emotional,” Welch recalled. “It was more mood swings than just from drinking. I kept telling him we didn’t want him to get hurt. The female in the trailer with him did a good job of helping talk him out.”

Surrett’s intoxication and emotional instability led the sheriff’s department to take him to Mission Hospital for a mental health / substance abuse commitment evaluation. (The criteria for involuntary hospitalization include the presence of a mental illness or substance abuse problem and dangerousness to self or others.) Duncan and Welch were taken aback by the hospital’s decision not to commit. “I was surprised when I heard he hadn’t been committed,” said Welch. “I thought he needed help, or I would have had him taken straight to jail on the warrants we had on him.” Following his release from the emergency room, Surrett did go to the Buncombe County Detention Facility. He remains there, charged with two counts of attempted murder.

Another View

Dissatisfied with press coverage of the incident, Ms. Sims wrote a long letter to the Asheville Citizen-Times and WLOS TV. In it she gives her perspective on Mr. Surrett and the events of that March evening. Her account is a gripping testament to the level of distrust present in some parts of this community as well as the panic associated with trying to help a suicidal man as he’s being surrounded by officers with guns. It is published in its entirety elsewhere in this issue.

The Aftermath

Factors leading to the medical decision not to commit Surrett are unknown, due to the confidentiality of medical records. However, representatives of Mission Hospital and Broughton State Hospital in Morganton were able to speak generally about the realities of public inpatient care for involuntary cases such as this might have been. Mental health reform in North Carolina has resulted in more rather than less pressure on state hospital beds. Cuts in the number of those beds available to acutely ill and dangerous patients may be stressing the inpatient system dangerously close to its own breaking point.

Jon Berry, Chief Financial Officer and media spokesman for Broughton, confirmed press accounts of overcrowding at his hospital and sister institutions. Recently, he said, the NC Division of Health and Human Services implemented an admission diversion protocol for state hospitals. It kicks in when the patient census reaches 110% of maximum capacity. In other words, when Broughton has 10% more patients than officially approved beds to put them in, the state says the hospital can close its doors to admissions. But desperately ill and dangerous people continue to flow into emergency rooms throughout the region.

To find beds for them, Berry told me, calls first go out to the other state hospitals. If an open bed is found, the patient is transported there. When all state hospitals are closed to admission, the state has backup contracts with psychiatric units at Grace Hospital in Morganton and Frye Regional Medical Center in Hickory. But these facilities may also be full or unwilling to admit a patient suspected of having a problem the unit can’t handle. (High violence potential, for example, may torpedo community hospital admission.) If nothing is available statewide, the referring emergency room is told to hold the patient and call Broughton again after eight hours.

Speaking on behalf of Mission, Janet Moore said that there were already occasional Broughton transfer delays before the state hospital bed cuts and implementation of the diversion protocol. So far, the longest Mission Emergency Department wait for a committed—and by definition unwilling—patient has been approximately 24 hours.

Meanwhile, mental health services in the Buncombe County Detention Facility have expanded in recent years, thanks to cooperation between the sheriff’s office and local health agencies. A jail mental health worker told me that she’s based there fulltime. A psychiatrist is also on-site for a few hours each week. Evaluations and treatment are routinely available for inmates with severe mental illness or substance abuse issues. At any given time, 40-60 of the jail’s 440 inmates are likely to be receiving these services. Inmates whose mental health or substance problems place them at especially high risk for re-arrest may also be eligible for “wraparound” community-based treatment and housing assistance after leaving jail.

The Crisis Intervention Team

Back at the sheriff’s department, plans to implement the CIT approach to deadly force confrontations are ongoing. Chief Deputy Don Reavis offered this status report: “Right now we’ve got about five people who are interested in being trained in hostage negotiation. We’re just looking for the best school that meets our needs.”

May their search be brief and successful.

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