COLUMBIA, Md. — A grieving mother searching for answers about how her son died at the hands of police has promised his loss will not be in vain.
Alex LaMorie, 25, died on March 1st after Howard County police officers opened fire on him as he experienced a suicidal health crisis. He had just moved into an inclusive housing community for disabled and autistic persons along Freetown Road.
If you need to talk to someone, call the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988 or text "HOME" to the Crisis Text Line at 741741.
His mother, Dr. Jill Harrington, recalls thinking LaMorie winning a lottery to live there was a blessing. As a special needs mother, she says she was closer with her adult son than most.
“There's this huge, huge void, and also there's just the real, the real sadness in the fact that he was only at Patuxent Commons for three days. There was a lot of hope to be in this wonderful, beautiful community,” she said.
LaMorie was on the autism spectrum and often had trouble fitting in, she says. But Harrington remembers he was always kind and generous, as exemplified the night before he died.
“We were bowling right before that. It was my birthday party, and he had like, literally like, just a little bit of money in his bank account, and he went around to the whole party and bought pitchers of soda for everybody,” she recalled.
The night of Saturday, February 28, LaMorie became the victim of an online extortion scam and began to spiral into what his mother calls “an existential catastrophic crisis”.
He called 911 for help, expressing thoughts of suicide and ultimately ended up losing his life at the hands of police. His address had not yet been flagged in the 911 system.
Body camera footage shows three Howard County officers drawing their guns and shooting at him 12 times as he walked towards them with a knife in hand that he refused to drop despite verbal commands to do so.
An estimated 30-50% of people killed by law enforcement are autistic or disabled, according to the Autism Justice Center.
"I don't want him to die in vain"
Earlier this week, the Maryland Attorney General’s office cleared the officers of wrongdoing, finding they were not the initial aggressors and attempted to de-escalate per department policy.
But Harrington questions if they did everything they possibly could before shooting, from their weapons to their words.
At the time, all patrol officers in Howard County were not required to carry tasers. The department has since purchased 200 tasers and is reviewing its Crisis Intervention Training.
Harrington commends the changes but questions how, in such a progressive community as Columbia, they weren’t already in place.
“It's very hard to digest that the only tool was a lethal tool. It's very hard. And that to me, quite frankly, should be an alarm bell to every citizen. Not just in Howard County, but every citizen in the state of Maryland," she said.
She’s vowed to change the law, which would require all police to have less lethal options at the ready, believing LaMorie would still be here if that was the case.
“Alex really was a person who always said over and over again that he wanted to live a life of purpose,"Harrington said. “I don’t want him to die in vain on the cold concrete.”
As a trained grief counselor, she’s found herself on the other side grappling with her son’s “violent, sudden” death.
“The knowing you're going to live without your loved one for the rest of your life hits you like a ton of bricks in the face," she said. "Knowing what parents go through and knowing what people who have been on this trajectory go through and I had to slow myself down and say, one day at a time, one breath at a time, one second at a time."
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