A student was sent home today after four campus police officers responded to a call about an uncooperative student at the mental health services office, after the student’s professor realized they could not deal with the disruptive situation on their own.
“We had a student who had some sort of, we’ll just say, mental episode. The instructor escorted him to student health to try to get them some help, but they were very animated, very agitated, so very disruptive. They called us to see if we could come help,” officer Kevin Stinson said.
Stinson and the student talked about the best outcome for him even though the student wanted to resume getting ready for his next class, but Stinson did not want the student to disrupt other students.
“He was so agitated that I was like, ‘I don’t want you to go to the library and have that happen again.’ So we decided, ‘why don’t you take the day off and get some fresh air, you know, get some cool water and come back tomorrow with a new attitude,’” Stinson said.
Before sending the student home, campus police called their mental evaluation team and the student was assessed for a 5150, but did not meet the criteria to be considered a danger to themselves or others.
The student was offered mental health services even though he did not meet the criteria, but declined.
The student did not want to interact with the police, but calmed down once he realized Stinson was not part of the Los Angeles Police Department.
“He looked at me again and said ‘Oh, you’re not LAPD. You’re okay with me,’ so he calmed down on his own. We talked to him in a humane way and so he felt at ease, but he was just very animated. His whole demeanor was loud and he was all over the place with his statements, and we just listened,” Stinson said.
Although the cause of the incident was not clear, police chronicled the events in the student’s statement to identify the cause.
“He claimed that he was on the metro or the blue line earlier today, and had some sort of incident that triggered him. He wasn’t clear about it because he was saying a lot of things about demons and what not. … He came to class and when he got to class instead of focusing on the lesson, he kept going back to ‘Oh man, I was on the metro and something happened,’” Stinson said.
Police spent around 30 minutes responding to the call.
