A year after Najee Seabrooks’ shooting at the hands of police, Paterson seeks answers

PATERSON — The final four hours and 52 minutes of Najee Seabrooks’ life started with a 911 call to the Paterson Police Department.

“I need help,” Seabrooks told an emergency dispatcher, his voice hushed and almost subdued, at 7:43 a.m. on March 3, 2023, as he asked for police to come to him, saying he thought someone waiting outside was looking to harm him. “I need help bad.”

From there, Seabrooks’ fate unfolded in a tragic and turbulent sequence of events as the emotionally disturbed young man engaged in a prolonged standoff with police. Eventually, Seabrooks charged through the doorway of the bathroom where he was hiding and lunged with a knife in his hand at cops standing behind protective riot shields.

The officers’ gunshots ended Seabrooks’ life, but the controversy about what happened that day still casts a cloud over Paterson at the first anniversary of his death. Time has brought few answers to the myriad questions that continue to haunt the city, its Police Department and the Seabrooks family:

• What could have been done differently to keep the 31-year-old father and community outreach worker from getting killed?

• What caused Seabrooks’ erratic behavior, which people who knew him said was out of character?

• Are New Jersey’s law enforcement practices for dealing with people in emotional distress sufficient to save lives?

In the aftermath, government officials have launched new programs aimed at helping people in mental health crises with strategies other than sending SWAT teams to them.

For example, the New Jersey Legislature passed a law this year — one partly named after Seabrooks — that allocated $12 million to create community crisis response teams run by private violence intervention groups in Paterson and five other cities.

New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin also expanded the state’s Arrive Together initiative to include Paterson, with a health care firm providing mental health clinicians to work with law enforcement officials.

In Paterson, 48 city cops in January went through what some department members are calling unprecedented crisis intervention training for 40 hours over five days.

“A lot of the changes have to come from the top, at the state level, not the municipal level,” said Jason Williams, a justice professor at Montclair State University.

In speaking about its response to the Seabrooks shooting, the Attorney General's Office has said it wants to tailor mental health crisis programs to the needs of individual communities.

“The department recognizes that in order to meet the vast and diverse needs of New Jersey’s communities, we must make investments in multiple strategies,” said an Attorney General's Office spokesperson. “There is no one-size-fits-all approach, particularly when it comes to mental health support and the safety of our communities. The resources being deployed in Paterson and beyond speak to our commitment to helping every New Jerseyan gain access to the trauma-informed services they need, when they need them, and keeping all New Jerseyans safe.”

Final hours spent in torment

The 12 police body-camera videos from the Seabrooks standoff, along with the seven audio recordings of his 911 calls, reveal a young man who spent his last hours in torment, suffering what family members said were hallucinations from something he had smoked. Several times, he told police he had a loaded gun that turned out not to exist. He talked about killing himself. He accused the cops of trying to make him seem crazy.

Over the course of the standoff, Seabrooks refused his sobbing mother’s pleas to come out, began cutting himself with knives, ignited a small fire inside the bathroom and didn’t give up when officers fired sponge-tipped, bullet-like projectiles at him.

People who knew Seabrooks said he seemed to be troubled in the weeks before the standoff. One of the things bothering him was that the mother of his daughter had moved the two of them to California, they said.

Seabrooks’ mother, Melissa Carter, said she has never watched any of the police videos, which were made public by the Attorney General's Office less than two weeks after his death.

“That was not my son that day in that house,” his mother said in an interview on Feb. 27. “I never saw Najee like that. That was the first time, and the last.”

Carter, wearing a red winter jacket, appears on the videos during the first hour of the standoff. Police allowed her to talk to her son through the bathroom door. Body-camera footage shows her asking Seabrooks for his keys, so she could move his car to prevent it from getting towed. He slid the keys under the door to her.

Then she repeatedly begged him to leave the bathroom. But her son wouldn’t come with her, so she walked away from the closed bathroom door.

“Every day is a struggle for me,” Carter said. “It’s hard to face the reality that he’s not here.”

Platkin’s office has not yet concluded its investigation into whether the police shooting of Seabrooks was justified. No information has been released from toxicology reports regarding Seabrooks.

Most of the city cops who were in the apartment during the Seabrooks response have returned to regular duties, but some remain on paid administrative leave pending the outcome of the attorney general's probe, law enforcement sources said.

Meanwhile, one of New Jersey’s most prominent law firms has issued a formal legal notice saying it is working on a lawsuit against the city of Paterson on behalf of the Seabrooks estate. State law sets a two-year deadline for filing civil litigation.

“First, we have to get the AG’s evaluation whether the use of force in this case was appropriate,” said Brian Higgins, a former Bergen County police chief who teaches at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan.

“If they determine it was not appropriate, the question is what’s being done to change things,” Higgins continued. “If the use of force was appropriate, it still resulted in somebody’s death. So maybe there still need to be some changes.”

Attorney general's control of Paterson police nears one-year mark

One colossal change took place 24 days after Seabrooks’ death. In the aftermath of multiple downtown protests and near-violent confrontations between cops and activists, Platkin seized control of the Paterson Police Department last March 27, a move that caught the mayor and other city officials off-guard — and one that many believe was triggered by Seabrooks' death.

Mayor Andre Sayegh — long a staunch supporter of Gov. Phil Murphy — is one of the people behind a lawsuit attempting to overturn the attorney general’s takeover of the city police force. Sayegh did not respond when asked to be interviewed for this story.

Platkin has said he started his search for someone to put in charge of the Paterson Police Department during the fall of 2022, saying the problems that plagued the city predated Seabrooks' death.

In September 2022, Sayegh fired the man he personally tapped to be Paterson’s chief, Ibrahim Baycora, accusing his appointee of being incompetent and not responsive to the city’s crime problem.

At virtually the same time Seabrooks was killed, Paterson’s new police chief, Engelbert Ribeiro, was taking the oath of office in ceremony about a quarter-mile away. Ribeiro ended up being ousted and reassigned to a training job in Trenton as part of the state takeover.

“As we mark the first anniversary of Mr. Seabrooks’ death,” Platkin said, “I join the Paterson community as they remember an individual who was committed to his community and to supporting others. Working together with the Paterson community, we have accomplished much in the last year, but we know there is more left to do.”

Paterson Press recently asked city and state law enforcement officials what changes — if any — have been made in the way the city Police Department handles 911 calls from people in emotional distress.

A department spokesperson said Officer in Charge Isa Abbassi ordered a complete evaluation of those policies and procedures. The spokesperson said the department made “significant improvements to the guidance, equipment, training and supervision available to maximize the likelihood of peaceful and positive outcomes.”

These were the improvements cited by the Police Department:

• Mandating the response of a supervisor to every scene of person in crisis who may be a danger to themselves or others.

• Revised notification protocols to ensure appropriate resource support to field units.

• Enhanced and expanded hostage negotiation and crisis intervention training for members of the department.

• Equipping members on patrol with less lethal options to increase alternatives to deadly force, such as OC spray, commonly known as pepper spray.

• Increasing mental health awareness of Paterson Police Department members through in-service training and briefings.

• Participation in the Arrive Together program, as well as exploring a customized co-response model of crisis intervention for Paterson through the Connect and Protect grant obtained by the city.

What about mental health crises?

At protests last year, activists asserted that Seabrooks’ call for help should have been answered by mental health professionals, not by armed law enforcement officers.

But there doesn’t seem to be any precedent for counselors to respond face-to-face to people with weapons going through emotional distress without the protection of cops. Several times, Paterson police called St. Joseph’s University’s Medical Center’s crisis team about armed individuals last year, and hospital workers said they could not go to the scene, according to audio recordings and police reports.

In December, Platkin issued his Arrive Together plan for Paterson, one that involved clinicians from a nonprofit health care provider, CBH Care. Officials said it would be a three-pronged program including cops giving out mental health care referrals, cops going with counselors to do outreach work at the Paterson bus terminal and a CBH Care clinician sharing best practices and gathering information about Paterson’s emergency dispatch system.

Seabrooks' mother said she has heard about various new mental health programs and the state Legislature’s new law partly named for her son.

“They’re supposed to be changing things, but I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Carter said. “When it comes to mental health, they have got to get people the right type of health. Police officers just make everything worse. They need some type of special counselors, so this doesn’t happen to somebody else.”

Paterson Black Lives Matter leader Zellie Thomas said Platkin’s comments after Seabrooks’ death gave activists hope the city would get a program with counselors working crisis cases without cops.

“We know what we wanted, but the AG’s Office did their own thing,” Thomas said.

Along with Thomas, Corey Teague and Teddie Martinez were among the most outspoken city activists who condemned the police for killing Seabrooks.

The change in leadership at police headquarters has brought new roles for Teague, who is now an unpaid adviser to Abbassi, and Martinez, who was hired by the Attorney General's Office as a liaison between community residents and city cops.

“If the old guard was still in there,” Teague said, referring to the pre-state-takeover days, “there’s no way they would have had me in that capacity.”

Teague and Martinez acknowledged that some activists have been critical of their current positions.

“It’s sending a mixed message to the community,” Teague said. “It’s not helping.”

Martinez said the rift in recent years between cops and activists has made things worse, not better, in the city. He said Paterson needs communication, not just accusations, asserting that he sees himself as a bridge builder.

A year ago, Martinez was one of Seabrooks’ mentors at the Paterson Healing Collective, a violence intervention group. Martinez and others from the Healing Collective were at the apartment the day Seabrooks was killed but were denied access to him by police. He said if he had been a police liaison back then, he might have been allowed to talk to Seabrooks.

“I might have been able to save his life,” Martinez said.

Martinez was fired from the Healing Collective last October amid a clash with that group’s director, Liza Chowdhury. The organization is getting $1.6 million in additional grant funding from the Attorney General's Office for its intervention programs.

Chowdhury did not respond to a message seeking her comments on the anniversary of Seabrooks’ death.

Najee Seabrooks case full coverage: From the Paterson police shooting to Platkin takeover

'He still ended up dead'

Meanwhile, Seabrooks' mother said her 5-year-old granddaughter, Sofia, visited from California during the holidays at the end of the year.

“She says she wants to go visit heaven to see him,” Carter said of her granddaughter.

Carter recalled speaking with the police officers while she waited in the hallway during her son’s bathroom standoff.

“I said to them, ‘Don’t kill my son,’” Carter remembered. “They told me, ‘No, we’re here to help him.’ But somehow, he still ended up dead.”

Higgins, the retired Bergen police chief who had commanded a SWAT team for several teams, said the Seabrooks case highlights “an age-old question for tactical situations.”

“What use of force is appropriate when you have someone threatening to kill themselves?” Higgins said. “It doesn’t seem like lethal use of force is appropriate in those situations. It almost seems counterproductive when you’re trying to save someone’s life.”

One tactic Higgins said he used over the years when someone was barricaded in a room was to attach a rope to the door handle. That way, he said, police could keep the person confined and wait the situation out.

In the Seabrooks case, the Paterson emergency response team couldn’t simply leave him in the apartment, with him talking about hurting himself, Higgins said. On top of that, he said, the fire started by Seabrooks in the bathroom posed a danger to the rest of the building.

“After looking at everything, I don’t know if the police had any other options,” Higgins said. “But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to figure out other options now, so this doesn’t happen again.”

Joe Malinconico is editor of Paterson Press. Email: editor@patersonpress.com

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Najee Seabrooks shooting: Paterson seeks answers 1 year later