Sydney Wilson's death can be both unavoidable and tragic

Sometimes it’s ok to remember someone at their best.

I watched the video as a perplexed spectator, as if I were sitting on the bleacher seats — what are you waiting for? Fucking shoot already!

I watched it without knowing any of its surrounding context. I saw Sydney Wilson open the door, say “how are you”, and then immediately slash at officer Peter Liu’s head with a large kitchen knife. Peter retreats and takes out his gun, yells at Sydney to back up, but she continues to advance on him knife in hand. Peter does not fire his gun until Sydney is just about to slash him a second time. Peter fires two shots and then awkwardly sort-of grappled her as she continues trying to stab him, and then fires three more shots before she finally slumps over.

Knowing nothing else about Peter except this encounter, I can comfortably say he’s a hero policeman who should serve as an inspiration for his profession. I’ve spent many many years criticizing American cops for being too quick on the trigger, but I only saw the opposite from Peter. The video showed him facing a textbook account of justifiable use of force — you have someone with a deadly weapon, who is near enough to use it against you, and (crucially) who has already demonstrated their willingness to use it against you.

Cops should expect some level of risk in their job, because the only way to achieve zero injuries would be if cops approached every call like a Time Crisis arcade session. So I initially interpreted Peter’s hesitation perhaps as an illustrative example that cops were finally starting to calm down, perhaps an overcorrection but near the right ballpark at least. Then I found out that Peter was dispatched because Sydney’s mental health counselor told police she was in an “agitated state” and asked for a wellness check:

Body-camera footage released Monday shows Liu arriving at the door of the apartment at the end of a long, barren hallway. He knocks, waits, and then Wilson opens the door.

Liu says, “Hi ma’am, I’m Officer Liu.” Wilson, dressed in a white robe, looks at him, whispers “hi” twice, and then closes the door.

Liu knocks three more times before saying, “Miss Wilson, can you talk to me real quick?”

He knocks again, waits, and says, “Sydney? Can you please talk to me? I just want to check on you, make sure you’re okay, that’s all,” the footage shows.

The door stays shut. The footage shows him knocking again, telling her “you’re not in trouble,” and asking multiple times for her to open the door.

About three minutes after their first interaction, Wilson opens the door again. This time, the footage shows, she says, “how are you” and then raises a knife in her right hand. She lunges toward Liu’s face.

Peter Liu did everything right. Maybe we can argue that the police department should double their staffing so that they can always dispatch two officers to wellness checks, but those are distractions from the pertinent moment. By the time Peter Liu arrived in front of Sydney Wilson’s apartment, he did everything right after that.

I don’t know all the facts and I’m making assumptions. I’m assuming that Sydney did not spend her life waiting for a random opportunity to stab a cop to death. Mental health counselors tend to be extremely averse about involving the police with any of their patients, so I’m assuming that Sydney’s outburst of violence was the result of a debilitating mental illness. These types of illness tend to fully manifest around the mid-20s, so I’m assuming that 33-year-old Sydney has had many other concerning episodes previously.

The real gut punch for me was reading Sydney’s Facebook boast from earlier this year:

I'm proud of this! I became certified in Adult Mental Health First Aid after 8 hours of necessary training

I’ve been there before with a loved one who suffered from infrequent but severe bipolar manic episodes. She was keenly aware of how destructive her condition could be, and she accordingly took protective safeguards. I remember attending a Mental Health First Aid class with her, how seriously she took notes, and how we both framed our certificates of completion.

I also remember that all this took place just a few weeks before another manic episode irreparably unraveled her life. So much good that did.

Let’s not forget everyone involved here. Sydney’s counselor absolutely did the right thing by calling the cops, but fuck I can’t bear to imagine how guilt-ridden they must be right now. That guilt is something I’ve also shouldered before.

I might be reaching here, but I imagine Peter Liu hesitated to pull the trigger because he earnestly believed that the ethos of his job was to protect people. I believe he fully lived up to this principle, and yet he’s going to be vilified regardless.

Mental illness is rarely an omnipresent condition; Sydney had parents who raised her, siblings who grew up with her, and friends who adored her. It’s profoundly shameful to ever be outed as a “crazy one” and I assume (tumblr activists notwithstanding) that Sydney did not put her diagnoses on her bio, so it’s very likely many in her life had absolutely no idea what she struggled with. Imagine the whiplash they must be experiencing right now, seeing the woman they thought they knew depart this existence, her memory overshadowed by an intense national ridicule that happens to serve as her de facto obituary. They can’t even mourn without themselves becoming the target of ridicule.

Her friends and family inadvertently but inevitably saw the detailed video footage of her getting shot multiple times, and now have to live with the rest of the country only knowing her as a crazed homicidal maniac. But, it’s also crucial not to gentrify mental illness by papering over the harsh realities and inconvenient truths that come with it, and it’s just undeniably true that Sydney Wilson was indeed a crazed homicidal maniac in her final moments on this Earth. It’s very likely that her homicidal impulses at the time could’ve been tragically diverted towards helpless neighbor(s) instead of the responding gendarme. It serves no one to deny any of this.

Something else I’m familiar with is the double grief that accompanies severe mental illness. The loved one I mentioned — it was depressing bearing witness to how bad her life was falling apart (everything from getting fired to getting raped), but perhaps worse was mourning the loss of someone who was still alive, because her mania transformed her into someone completely unrecognizable to me.

David Josef Volodzko

put it really well in his post:

Namely, that the officer did no wrong. But if she was truly mad, neither did she. For she was lost. He had no choice. But she had no ability to choose.

That double-grief is what makes severe mental illness tragedies so hopelessly tragic and acutely gut-wrenching. I imagine Sydney’s friends are experiencing something similar; they’re mourning her actual death, but they’re also mourning the variant of death that comes from seeing someone they love become an unrecognizable monster.