20-Year-Old Autistic Man Shot by Police Outside of Middle School

Before we get started, I just want readers to know right off the bat that I am fucking livid about this story.

This past Tuesday, 20-year-old Joel Malin was shot and killed by a school resource officer outside of Evergreen Middle School in Spokane Valley, Washington. As mentioned in the headline, Malin was autistic and, according to the family’s attorney, had the mental capacity of a 13-year-old. He is said to have previously attended the school.

Why he was at the school is still unknown. However, his mother instructed him that if he needed to go to a place for help, he could go to the school and feel safe there. In a normal world that would have been sage advice. Except we haven’t lived in a normal world for over 25 years. Or should I say, a normal country?

But instead, he walked into a “lethal threat” assessment that lasted about as long as it takes to read this sentence.

Central Valley School District Sheriff John Nowels wants you to know his deputy “was confronted with a lethal threat, and it compelled him to use lethal force.” Was he, though? Because the evidence for that lethal threat, as far as I can tell, consists entirely of a 911 call from someone describing a 6-foot-6 man in a green trench coat carrying a “black and silver Glock 19.”

That’s an oddly specific make and model for a caller watching a stranger cross a football field from a distance. People who actually know guns can eyeball a silhouette and call it a rifle or a handgun. Very few of them are saying “Glock 19” with that kind of confidence unless they’ve got the thing in hand themselves.

That raises the obvious question nobody seems eager to answer. Who was this caller, and how did they know that? The family’s attorney says what turned up at the scene was a toy BB gun. The sheriff’s office has said nothing to confirm or deny that Malin was armed at all, which is a hell of a gap between “lethal threat” and “we genuinely don’t know yet.”

Then there’s the call itself, which may have come from Malin calling on himself. If that’s true, this wasn’t a man stalking a school with intent to do harm. This was someone who dialed for help in the exact spot his mother had always told him he could go to.

There was only a five-minute window between the call coming in and the deputy encountering Malin walking in the bus lane. Five minutes to process a secondhand description of a “suspicious” man adjusting his waistband, decide he’s an active threat, and pull the trigger eight times. Eight rounds is a decision made well past the point where de-escalation was even on the table, if it was ever on the table at all. Malin’s attorney doesn’t think it was, and neither do I.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. School resource officers are not trained to be counselors, crisis negotiators, or diagnosticians standing in a bus lane with four seconds to read a stranger’s intentions correctly. They’re trained to neutralize threats, and when your only tool is a gun and your only training is “assume the worst,” a big man moving erratically toward a school is going to get treated like Columbine every single time. It doesn’t matter whether he’s an active shooter or just a scared kid who felt safest walking toward the building he grew up in.

This isn’t a one-off failure of one deputy having a bad day. This is what happens when a society spends 25 years arming every school hallway instead of funding the mental health infrastructure that might have met Malin somewhere other than at the business end of a service pistol.

Fifteen buses evacuated the students. Two hundred and twenty kids were too shaken to show up to class the next day. A bomb squad detonated a bag that turned out to hold nothing. All of that, for a threat that increasingly looks like it was never there.

The family’s attorney says she doesn’t think any attempt at de-escalation was made, and she’s going digging to find out. I hope she does. Somebody should, because right now the only story anyone in uniform has offered is that a scared kid possibly with a toy gun and a green trench coat looked dangerous enough to kill for. That story gets shakier every time a new detail leaks out.

We built a country where “better safe than sorry” gets applied to an autistic 20-year-old walking near his old middle school and somehow never to the actual gun laws that made a Glock 19 sound like a plausible thing for any given stranger to be carrying in the first place.

Priorities.

I’ll be following this story closely, and I’ll try to post updates as soon as they’re available.

(Source)