The Herndon man who was shot by a Fairfax County police officer last week was known by police to be severely mentally ill, and he was wielding a plastic replica of a pistol when he was shot at close range in the chest and stomach, police and family members said.
Ian C. Smith, 25, remains in critical condition at Inova Fairfax Hospital, where he has undergone four operations to repair the damage from two .45-caliber bullets. He was shot Friday morning in the basement of the home he shares with his parents and younger sister on Fallon Drive after a three-hour standoff with Fairfax tactical officers overseen by a police major with extensive experience dealing with the mentally ill.
But Smith's family said the officers reacted rashly by even entering the basement.
"The cop had no reason to do what he did," said Brenda Smith, Ian Smith's mother. "He isn't a murderer out on the street. He was a kid down in his basement having a psychotic attack."
Police said Smith emerged from behind a bathroom door, lunged at two officers and began pulling the trigger of his plastic BB gun. The officer did not know it wasn't a real gun, police said. "It's tragic. My heart goes out to them," said Maj. Shawn Barrett, head of the Fairfax criminal investigations bureau, who did not oversee the situation that day but is the lead investigator.
But he said the gun Smith was holding was "a very realistic-looking replica of a semiautomatic pistol" that did not have a brightly colored tip, which would have indicated that the gun was fake.
Barrett said Smith "pulled that weapon out and pointed it point blank at the officers and was pulling the trigger. At that point, the officer just responds when it's him or the other person. The [tactical] officer reverts to his training. They did everything they could."
Smith's relatives were ordered by police to leave the house as soon as officers arrived, late on Feb. 4. They wondered why, with the house empty and no one else in danger, the two tactical officers entered the house and confronted Smith so soon.
Police spokeswoman Mary Ann Jennings said that negotiators had not made contact with Smith in some time and that they thought he might have been asleep. So Maj. Thomas Ryan, supervising the operation, ordered two tactical officers, one with a dog, to go inside quietly in hopes of taking Smith into custody without violence, police said.
The name of the officer who fired the shots was not released. Fairfax police typically do not identify officers involved in shootings. The shooting of Smith was the second in recent months to involve a mentally ill man. On Nov. 13, another unidentified officer shot and killed David A. Masters, 52, as Masters rolled away from a traffic stop on Route 1.
The officers in the Masters case did not know he had bipolar disorder. But Fairfax police had been regular visitors to Smith's home to deal with his paranoid schizophrenia, his family and police said.
Smith was 17 when he began having hallucinations, said his father, Alan Smith. He graduated from Westfield High School, but when he tried to enter college in Richmond, he had a psychotic episode and was hospitalized for the first of many times, his father said.
In recent years, Smith would make threatening comments or rant excessively until his parents would call for help. His father said that when officers came, Smith would immediately calm down, apologize, take his medication and return quietly to his bedroom in the basement.
But on the night of Feb. 4, the circumstances were slightly different. Smith walked into the house and showed his sister Hayley, 21, the handle of a pistol, she said. She didn't know whether it was real. She told her mother about it as Smith went to his bedroom.
Brenda and Hayley Smith debated whether to call the Mobile Crisis Unit at Fairfax's Woodburn mental health clinic. Brenda Smith said she made the call, thinking the unit would take her son to a mental hospital. She said the clinic told her to call police as well, and she did.
The mention of a possible weapon was a new variable for police, Barrett said. Patrol officers arrived at 11:30 p.m., and rather than speaking first to Smith, they ordered Brenda and Hayley Smith out of the house, the Smiths said.
Barrett said that the patrol officers tried to get Smith to come out of the basement but that he refused. So tactical officers and negotiators were summoned, headed by Ryan, who had launched crisis intervention training for Fairfax officers to deal with the mentally ill and has worked extensively with the mental health community.
Barrett said police also were told that Smith was a "chronic drug user" and often used PCP, a hallucinogen. His parents denied that, saying they told police that trace amounts of PCP were found in a blood test last year but that their son had never tested positive in his mental hospitalizations and had never been found with any drugs.
Police told the Smiths that they tossed a remote camera into the basement and could see Smith, in his pajamas, unarmed. But Barrett said Smith moved out of the camera's view.
Brenda Smith said that her son often brought BB guns home and that she or her husband always threw them out. What he pointed at the officers "must have been a new one," she said. The confrontation and shooting happened about 3 a.m., police said.
Police had obtained an emergency custody order, and Smith's family thought he would be taken to a mental ward for treatment. Brenda Smith said police should not "shoot to kill somebody when they're supposed to take them to a hospital. They do that too often."
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