Last Year a U. of Chicago Police Officer Shot a Student Suffering a Mental-Health Crisis. Now Campus Activists Are Reigniting Calls for Change.

Tyler LaRiviere, Sun-Times

Student activists at the University of Chicago are calling on the Cook County state’s attorney to drop felony charges against a former student who was shot last year by a campus police officer.

Charles Soji Thomas, then a senior at Chicago, was experiencing a mental-health crisis when he charged at an officer of the university’s private police force in April 2018. Thomas, who was carrying a metal tent stake and was swearing at the police officers, was given repeated warnings before he was shot.

But Thomas’s family and friends say that when he first began experiencing symptoms of bipolar disorder and sought help from Chicago’s Student Counseling Services, he wasn’t given treatment. Instead, his father told students at an event on Tuesday, Thomas was given a piece of paper with a list of off-campus providers of mental-health care.

“A piece of paper is not help,” said Wendell Thomas, the student’s father. “Not to a student far away from home, struggling with a mental-health crisis.”

Just one month after seeking help, as Charles Thomas worked to put the final touches on his senior thesis, he had what his father described as a “manic and delusional” episode — the first he had ever experienced.

Officers from the University of Chicago Police Department were called to an alleyway near the student’s apartment, where they found him smashing windows with a metal stake. The harrowing encounter was captured on a body-worn camera.

Thomas is shown moving toward Officer Nicholas Twardak, who hollers: “I need you to drop that weapon. Drop that weapon.” Thomas then begins running at Twardak. The officer screams: “Don’t come at me! Don’t come at me!” Then he fires a single shot, striking Thomas in the shoulder. The student falls and the metal stake clangs across the alley.

Thomas survived and recovered from his injuries, but the consequences of that night were only beginning to unfold. After he was released from the hospital, Thomas was charged with eight felonies — five for criminal property damage and three more for aggravated assault of a peace officer.

The shooting — and the felony charges that followed — quickly became a rallying cry for Chicago activists, bringing to a boiling point long-simmering grievances.

Three days after Thomas was shot, hundreds of students and Hyde Park residents marched on the campus, demanding that the university disarm its police officers and instead invest in mental-health resources for students. Many were furious that Thomas had been charged after the responding officer clearly stated in the body-cam video that the student was “a mental.”

An Appeal to Chicago’s President

Now, #CareNotCops, a student campaign formed in the wake of the shooting, is urging Chicago’s president, Robert Zimmer, to voice support for Thomas and ask that the charges against him be dropped so that he can return home.

In a December 3 op-ed for The Chicago Maroon, the group lambasted Chicago for “underfunded and insufficient” mental-health resources, pointing to long wait times at the student counseling center, a “toxic” campus culture, and the university’s policy on mandated mental-health leaves of absence. Stanford University recently settled a class-action lawsuit by easing its policies on involuntary leaves of absence.

In a statement to The Chronicle, Gerald McSwiggan, Chicago’s assistant director for public affairs, said “the University of Chicago community’s thoughts have been with all of the individuals involved and their families.” But he redirected questions about the felony charges to the Cook County state’s attorney’s office, noting that the university has no control over the case.

#CareNotCops has also reignited efforts to disarm — or even disband — UCPD, one of the largest private police forces in the country, with a broad jurisdiction that includes more than 65,000 residents on the South Side of Chicago. The department has been routinely criticized for a lack of transparency, and for what critics describe as disproportionately heavy policing that targets South Side residents and black Chicago students.

The university has stated that Twardak had at least 40 hours of crisis-intervention training, which teaches officers to de-escalate situations involving mental-health crises. In the recording of the shooting, someone can be heard shouting “Tase him!” Until this fall, however, UCPD officers were not equipped with Taser stun guns. The department has maintained that its officers followed protocol in their use of lethal force.

But some believe that “protocol” is at the heart of the problem. Guy Emerson Mount, an assistant professor at Auburn University, taught at Chicago while Thomas was a student. Mount said he wasn’t at all surprised to hear that a university officer had pulled the trigger on a student of color.

“As President Zimmer himself said, this was not a failure in the system,” Mount said. “It was, in his words, ‘protocol’ — the University of Chicago doing exactly what it has been doing to black people since 1856.”

In September, Thomas experienced another mental-health episode and went missing for two weeks, violating the terms of his house arrest. He eventually turned up in Indiana, was subdued with a Taser, arrested by sheriff’s deputies, and sent back to Chicago. His aunt, Sayori Baldwin, says that Thomas has been spending at least 20 hours a day in a cell at Chicago’s Cook County Jail, where he is being held without bail while awaiting trial.

Still, Thomas has been advocating for campus and community reform from confinement, video-calling student-activist gatherings during his period of house arrest, and more recently, writing letters from jail. In a statement read aloud by a speaker at Tuesday’s event, he described grappling with the aftermath of his encounter with the university police.

“Injustice carried such weight that it created a disconnect for me,” Thomas wrote. “In a way, I found myself making excuses, trying to explain that while I was shot, it was just a routine shooting in America. And maybe it was a sad story of gun violence, but not of injustice.”

It wasn’t until the shooting of Myles Frazier, a black man killed by two officers of the Chicago Police Department during a mental-health episode in May, that Thomas says he noticed the pattern. Frazier’s father had called the police for help, and Frazier, who had barricaded himself inside a home, fired five shots during tense negotiations with police officers, who eventually rushed inside. The similarities between Frazier’s shooting and his own, Thomas wrote, were “heartbreaking”: Black. Twenty-two years old. Psychotic episode. Bipolar disorder.

Multiple Failures Charged

Nearly two years after Charles Thomas was shot, students continue to rally behind him and his family. Since October, about 200 people have donated to a GoFundMe page started by Eleanor Carpenter, a close friend and former crew teammate of Thomas’s.

The fund-raiser has collected more than $11,000 for Thomas’s parents, who Carpenter says have experienced “enormous” financial pressure from mounting medical bills, legal fees, and frequent flights between Chicago and their hometown of Los Angeles.

Thomas’s friends and family describe what they see as multiple failures by the university: a failure to provide a struggling student with adequate mental-health care, a failure by campus police officers to de-escalate the situation before resorting to lethal force, and a failure to have mercy on one of its own students by not trying to prevent his felony prosecution.

And Thomas’s parents, having relocated to Chicago, taken extended leaves of absence from work, and navigated the twists and turns of a complicated legal system, say that enough is enough. Their son — once a thriving student at Chicago who dreamed of graduate school and studying abroad in Morocco — just wants to get out of jail and resume his life.

Wendell and Kathy Thomas just want their son to come home.

Lauren Fisher is an editorial intern at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @lauren__fisher, or email her at lfisher@chronicle.com.