‘Assure Kyle he did nothing wrong’: Edina sued after police subdue man in mental health crisis
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Kyle Moore was carrying his Bible, a bouquet of flowers for his mother and a jar of jam for his grandmother when he got off the bus on Oct. 6, 2019, outside Southdale Center mall in Edina, a suburb of Minneapolis.
Moore, 27 at the time, had been diagnosed with anxiety and PTSD, and was unnerved by two men asking aggressively to use his phone at the bus stop. As he walked away, he called 911 and told the dispatcher in a polite tone that he wanted law enforcement to know about the possible threat, but that his mom was on the way to meet him.
That call for help, from a young man who had struggled with mental health issues and was considering checking himself into the hospital, but didn’t pose a threat to anyone, kicked off an incident that changed the trajectory of Moore and his family’s life.
Less than an hour later, Moore found himself chased by Edina officers at the Macy’s store at the mall, tackled to the ground, shot three times with a stun gun and injected with ketamine — a powerful dissociative anesthetic that’s sometimes used as a sedative.
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By all accounts — including those of the police officers — Moore didn’t break any laws or threaten anyone before he was chased.
Moore’s mother, Lisa Moore, arrived at the mall to find her son beneath a pile of blue uniforms, up to 10 officers in full gear at some points, for about 13 minutes and 35 seconds — about four minutes longer than former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin would kneel on George Floyd’s neck, killing him, less than a year later.
Moore had a seizure in the ambulance that the family was told was caused by the ketamine and Tasers. Doctors told his family that his limbs had been damaged and may need to be amputated. They put Moore in a medically induced coma for treatment.
The young man the Moores knew, someone who had struggled with mental health challenges like an estimated 58 million Americans, was changed by what happened that day.
Four years after the incident, Moore filed a lawsuit in federal court arguing that his constitutional rights were violated by Edina police. His family wants closure for an incident that’s haunted their son, affected his long-term health and eroded their trust in law enforcement and public officials.
“I didn’t get to say it that day, but I am saying it now: That wasn’t OK. What happened to my son was horrific,” Lisa Moore said. “I just want to tell the officers, on that particular day, they failed. They failed my son miserably.”
“They broke his spirit,” said his father, Bob Moore.
The doctors were able to save Moore’s limbs and brought him out of the coma after a day or so. Since then, he’s told his family he’s been in pain every day, and mentions a litany of health concerns the family believes are due to how he was treated, including chronic back and neck pain, circulatory issues and damage to his kidneys, as well as more extreme post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety.
In the lawsuit, Moore’s attorney describes a litany of health concerns caused by Moore’s restraint, including “acute hypoxic respiratory failure, atelectasis, aspiration pneumonitis, acute toxic metabolic encephalopathy and acute kidney injury.”
A spokesperson for the city of Edina denied all requests for comment from the city’s police chief, city attorney or medical director for Edina Fire and EMS.
For some mental health advocates, the incident is emblematic of the challenges that people who suffer from mental health illnesses have in safely accessing emergency services. It points to a lack of accountability from elected officials and appointed leaders in one of the state's wealthiest communities.
Trainers who specialize in de-escalation tactics question why police took such an aggressive tact with someone who wasn’t reported as a threat, but in fact had called the police to ask for their help and protection.
‘I’m stable. I just don’t feel safe’
Lisa Moore was shopping at the Costco in Eden Prairie when Kyle Moore called her that day worried about the two men at Southdale who’d asked to use his phone. She told him to call 911 if he needed help.
That's what he did. Transcripts show Kyle Moore telling the 911 dispatcher that he was OK and just wanted them to know about a possible threat.
“Is there a unit you can send down that I can talk to, so I can feel safe right now. I don’t feel safe,” Moore told the 911 dispatcher. “I’m on meds today, I’m stable, I just don’t feel safe right now.”
He hung up the phone after he told the dispatcher his mom was calling him.
The 911 center contacted Edina officer Jason Behr, passing on the information that Moore had called from Southdale, didn’t feel safe and wanted someone to talk to, and that he’d taken a new medication but felt stable and his mother was on the way.
According to his report, Behr said he looked up Moore’s name and found that he had a history of mental health issues.
Behr found Moore at an entrance of Fairview Southdale Hospital across the street from the mall, where Moore asked him to sit down and talk. Moore told Behr, according to the report, that his mother was coming to pick him up.
Behr wrote that Moore told him he wanted to go to treatment, but he didn’t want to be committed (court records show that Moore had been previously committed for mental health issues in 2013). Behr told Moore that doctors would figure out the best plan for him.
Behr said Moore started reciting the Lord’s Prayer and then called his mother, who told him she’d be there within 30 minutes. When Behr went to his squad to check on another call, squad camera footage showed Moore, dressed in a dark hoodie and baseball cap, walking across the street and not responding as Behr shouted his name.
Behr didn’t pursue Moore at that point, instead going to a call with a higher priority.
He wrote in his report that he then received a phone call from Moore’s mother, who got his number from dispatch, and who he said told him that Moore was experiencing a mental health crisis, but that she would be there soon.
Lisa Moore remembers telling Behr: “Kyle is a good kid, he struggles with PTSD, don’t go looking for him, I’m confident I will connect with him.” Lisa Moore remembers the officer telling her to “assure Kyle he did nothing wrong.” Behr wrote in his report that he told Lisa Moore to tell her son “that he wasn’t in trouble.”
After responding to the other call, Behr wrote that he drove to the mall and spotted Moore near an entrance. Behr wrote in a report that Moore made eye contact with him then ran through the doors of the mall.
Behr and another officer pursued Moore on foot as he walked at a “hurried pace” through the mall. Behr said in his report that Moore knocked over displays in the Macy’s store, which the family disputes and no video evidence shows.
Video from Macy’s obtained by MPR News shows Moore walking backward with his hands up as the two officers converged on him, pointing what appears to be tasers at Moore.
Surveillance video shows Moore bumping into a display, causing purses to sway, but not knocking it over, looking startled and then starting to run. Behr’s report states that he didn’t take his taser out until Moore started running. Behr alleges that Moore threw the jar of jam and hit his hand.
Behr was X-rayed at HCMC and had “significant swelling” but no broken bones, according to his police report. The family and Moore’s attorney dispute that, saying that Moore dropped the jar as he was chased. It’s not possible to tell whether the jar was thrown or dropped from the videos. Officers tackle Moore a few feet away about six seconds after he bumped into the display.
Another video from a different angle shows the two officers wrestling Moore to the ground and banging into display tables. More officers quickly joined and fought to restrain Moore’s limbs — his family said he was then 5 feet, 10 inches tall and less than 200 pounds.
Behr reported that Moore was kicking, punching, reciting the Lord’s Prayer and “speaking to someone who wasn’t there.” He tased Moore three times on the ground, saying it had no effect.
More officers arrived, helping to hold Moore down.
During the struggle, Behr said Moore spit on the officers, who fit him with a spit mask and leg restraints. Moore’s family and attorney said that he was panicking and choking on his own blood from injuries, not purposely spitting.
By the tenth minute, Moore’s body is barely visible under the scrum of blue uniforms.
Kyle Moore chose not to interview on the record with MPR News, but said he wants his story told.
There’s no audio of most of the interaction because Edina police didn’t wear body cameras at the time. But Lisa Moore, Kyle’s mother, arrived at the mall as Kyle was being restrained and heard her son reciting the Lord’s Prayer.
“I heard his voice. I looked to my left, and I couldn’t see Kyle, all I could see was a pile of officers on top of somebody. So I just ran that way,” Lisa Moore said. “And I remember Kyle saying to me, ‘Mom, you’re here, you made it.’ And I said, “I’m here, Kyle.’ And I remember telling them, ‘Get off. Get off.’”
She said an officer shooed her away. Lisa Moore watched as another officer put a hobble on her son’s legs. Others were leaning on his neck and all his limbs. She said she could hear him coughing and choking for what seemed like forever.
“He got real quiet, and I remember thinking, ‘Why aren’t they getting up?” Lisa Moore said. “I finally got words out, and I said, ‘His hands are gray. Is he dead?’ And nobody was talking to me.”
Firefighter paramedics from the Edina Fire Department arrived and, at the direction of police officers according to one of the police reports, involuntarily knocked him out with the anesthetic ketamine.
Paramedics in recent years have faced criticism for administering ketamine at police officer requests, sometimes leading to deaths. An investigation by the Associated Press found that at least 94 people died after being given sedatives while being restrained by police between 2012 and 2021.
At Macy’s, a woman put her arm around Lisa Moore and comforted her. She said she saw her son sitting by the mall entrance reading his Bible and waiting for his mom, and that he hadn’t done anything wrong.
Lisa Moore remembers officers picking up her son’s limp body and loading him onto the gurney as she watched from the aisle of Macy’s.
“Our lives were forever changed on that day. And as a mom, I wish I could have done more to make it stop. I don’t care if he’s in his 20s, he’s my son and you never stop being a mom,” Lisa Moore said. “And I wish I could have physically shoved all of them off, I wish I could have found my voice. I was frozen.”
Moore’s family was especially upset by an image captured in a store surveillance video, which shows two officers fist bumping as his body is loaded onto a gurney.
‘The city just wanted this to go away’
More than four years after the incident, Moore filed a lawsuit in federal court arguing that his constitutional rights were violated.
Moore’s attorney argues in the lawsuit that the officers’ use of force was “objectively unreasonable,” caused physical harm to Moore and violated his constitutional rights. They allege that the officers’ use of force was contrary to their training and that Moore’s arrest was made without proper legal authority.
A spokesperson for the city of Edina denied all requests for comment from the city’s police chief or city attorney. The spokesperson, Jennifer Bennerotte, said the city “strongly disputes” Moore’s claims.
Attorneys representing the city of Edina, the officers and cities of Richfield and Bloomington, wrote in their response to the lawsuit that officers were not guilty “of any negligent, illegal, improper or unconstitutional conduct.”
The defendants deny causing Moore any harm and disagree that their actions were contrary to their training. They assert that Moore’s “injuries were due to and caused by his own conduct,” and that the officers and city have qualified immunity from the lawsuit under state law.
Edina’s attorneys asked the judge to award Moore nothing “for his pretended claim,” that Moore pay all their attorney fees and costs and that the lawsuit be dismissed.
Moore’s attorney, Ed Shaw, said that they only filed the lawsuit after the failure by both the city of Edina or the state Board of Peace Officer Standards and Training, which oversees officer licensing and training, to take any action or offer apologies.
“At least these people should have been fired and their licenses pulled. I wouldn’t want them as an officer in my community. I don’t think anybody should want them for an officer in their community,” Shaw said. “There are certain behaviors that are beyond the pale.”
The main officer involved in Moore’s detention, Jason Behr, wasn’t disciplined due to the incident but was promoted to sergeant in 2023, according to city personnel records obtained by MPR News. There are no disciplinary actions associated with his license, according to the Peace Officer Standards and Training Board.
According to public personnel records, Behr, who had been with the department for about two decades at the time of the incident, had not received crisis intervention training before the 2019 detention of Moore, although he did attend multiple mental health trainings in the previous year.
‘He was already under control’
Police Chief Todd Milburn denied a request to talk about the city’s policies in general on dealing with people in mental health crises through an Edina city spokesperson.
The Edina Police Department policies include a requirement that officers use de-escalation techniques. Their policies also require officers to intervene when a colleague is breaking the law.
In a policy revised in 2018, a year before Moore was restrained, the department outlined how officers should engage with people in crisis, with the goal being to “keep the public and officers safe while accessing resources that will assist the individual in crisis.”
Although the department’s policy explicitly states that officers aren’t limited in their ability to use force, it recommends that officers prioritize de-escalation, use crisis intervention techniques or leverage mental health resources like COPE, Hennepin County’s mobile crisis response team.
Shaw said it doesn’t appear that the city or department ever investigated what happened to Moore or whether departmental policies were followed.
“It seemed like the city just wanted this to go away, hope no one does anything about it, hope nobody finds out about it, sweeps it under the rug,” Shaw said. “That seems to be what they’ve been doing, and again, if they’re doing something different, I’m all ears — but I don’t think so.”
David Thomas, a former police officer and professor of forensic studies at Florida Gulf Coast University, taught officers defensive tactics for two decades.
Thomas said he didn’t see any attempts to de-escalate in the videos of the incident: “What should happen is that there should be some sort of dialogue that takes place to try to get the person to do this willingly.”
Thomas admitted that it can be challenging for officers to get a person’s limbs under control, but that he has never seen officers taught to lie on top of a person.
“What I didn’t understand though, is that as more officers started to arrive, they all started to pile on and grab different parts of the body, and he was already under control,” Thomas said. “That didn’t make any sense to me.”
Thomas also noticed that none of the officers checked whether Moore was breathing or had blood flowing to his limbs, which would have been something they were trained to do.
He said the amount of time that Moore was restrained, more than 13 minutes, was also unusual. Normally, he said, officers are trained to roll someone over so they could breathe and then handcuff them.
In instances where officers are going too far, Thomas said someone in the department’s leadership should step in.
“Officers get so wrapped up that nobody is paying attention,” Thomas said. “It’s incumbent on somebody who is a supervisor or senior officer to check, pull back from that and look at it and see what the hell is going on, and make an assessment because you can always adjust.”
‘They almost killed my son’
Moore’s father, Bob Moore, has spent the past few years going over videos and documents associated with his son’s incident. He said he doesn’t understand how the situation escalated so quickly.
He said it looks in the video like officers disregarded all their training and hunted his son down “like a dog.”
“There was no threat to himself or others? Why did officer Behr totally disregard his observations, the information provided by Kyle’s mom and go after him regardless of knowing she would be there within 15 minutes?” Bob Moore said. “What de-escalation technique did officer Behr use besides hollering at Kyle and chasing him with tasers drawn? What kind of training do the police department [have] for responding to those who suffer mental illness?”
Lisa Moore notes that her son was anxious but wasn’t in need of de-escalation. It was police officers who unnecessarily escalated the situation, she said.
Sue Abderholden, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness Minnesota, watched the videos and read the police reports. She can’t figure out why officers chased someone who wasn’t a threat.
“To myself, I kept asking, why? Why are they chasing him? He’s not doing anything wrong,” Abderholden said. “They know he was seeking out help. That’s not what you do when you’re wanting to help someone.”
As someone who has advocated for better law enforcement responses to people in mental health crises, Abderholden said she didn’t see the officers use any de-escalation or engagement techniques that officers are taught. She said Hennepin County’s Cope mobile crisis team could have been contacted at any time to help Moore if he needed it.
Abderholden said the administration of ketamine to Moore was a “misuse” of the medication.
Moore was injected with ketamine a year after the city of Minneapolis was embroiled in a controversy over officers asking paramedics to administer the drug to suspects – ultimately banning officers from requesting the drug.
Dr. Paul Nystrom, medical director for Edina Fire and EMS and a licensed police officer for the Plymouth Police Department, was one of a handful of medical professionals pushing back against criticism of ketamine use in crisis situations in a June 2018 editorial in the Star Tribune. They argued that the drug is a “safe and effective option for sedating patients in a crisis state.”
“The decision to use ketamine in a crisis to stabilize an individual is a medical one that is made by the paramedic to prevent injuries and even save a person's life,” according to the editorial. “Sedation is not, and should never be, used as a consequence of a perceived crime.”
Nystrom declined to comment about Moore’s case through a spokesperson for the city of Edina.
The administration of the drug to Moore also happened just about a month after 23-year-old Elijah McClain died after being detained by officers in Aurora, Colo., when paramedics forcibly administered ketamine to him. Both paramedics associated with McClain’s case were later convicted of negligent homicide.
‘They betrayed him’
Moore was initially charged by the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office with assaulting a police officer for spitting blood and an alleged bite during the struggle, but his family said he was involuntarily spitting blood because he had blood in his mouth and couldn’t breathe.
Charges were later dropped against Moore “in the interest of justice,” according to the filing. Moore was initially represented by the Hennepin County public defender’s office run by Mary Moriarty, who is now chief prosecutor in Hennepin County. A spokesperson for the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office said records indicate that the office offered to drop the charges against Moore if he successfully completed mental health treatment.
Moore’s family said dealing with the charges from the county as he was physically recovering caused Moore trauma. Abderholden said filing charges in this case was “like rubbing salt in the wound” for a family that was already suffering.
One of the details that really grates on Moore’s family is officers’ disdain for Moore’s religious beliefs. Behr’s reports repeatedly reference Moore speaking to someone who wasn’t there as he prayed, and another described his prayers as “religious gibberish.” Abderholden said it’s common that people will look to their faith during difficult times, and that “it’s not at all a symptom of psychosis.”
Moore’s family also takes issue with some claims in police reports. For instance, Behr wrote in his report that Lisa Moore told him she didn’t know if Moore had weapons and was “somewhat afraid of him.” She vehemently denies saying that, and said her family has never owned weapons.
Behr also wrote in his report that he spoke to Lisa Moore after her son was taken to the ambulance and that she “was thankful for her son getting treatment.”
“Thankful? They almost killed my son,” Lisa Moore said, noting that she wasn’t sure her son was alive when officers refused to let her board the ambulance with him. “They confused the fact that I continued to be respectful with support. That was really hard to read back, but I was horrified by what they had done.”
‘They’re the good guys’
Lisa Moore grew up in Edina and always taught her sons to respect law enforcement. When her sons were little, every time they’d have to pull to the side of the road for a passing emergency vehicle, they’d pray for the officers’ safety.
In February, she stood outside in freezing weather to honor two Burnsville officers and a paramedic-firefighter who had been killed in the line of duty. But hearing a siren now makes her a little panicked. She worries about her son, who has become increasingly distrustful and fearful of police.
“My job as a mom was to protect them from the bad guys, and to help them discern the good guys from the bad guys, and I always taught them that the police are at the top of the list — they’re who we go to, they’re the good guys,” Lisa Moore said. “For this to happen, it just shatters your faith in police.”
As Moore and his family fought the criminal charges and tried to get the city of Edina to address their concerns about what happened, they felt brushed off. But they said the police reports they received as part of the court cases were shocking.
“To actually see a police report, it was so filled with lies, that was mind blowing to me. It solidified what my eyes had seen,” Lisa Moore said. “All of the sudden I’m reading it, and it’s filled with so many things that are not true. My world was very shattered.”
Moore tells his family that he’s in pain every day due to the incident. In the lawsuit, Moore’s attorney describes a litany of health concerns caused by Moore’s restraint, including “PTSD, acute hypoxic respiratory failure, atelectasis, aspiration pneumonitis, acute toxic metabolic encephalopathy and acute kidney injury.”
Before the incident, Bob Moore said his son was physically healthy but had struggled with his mental health. Still, his parents said he was a “free-spirited young man” who was friendly and full of curiosity.
“He judged no one and cared about everyone,” his parents said in an email to MPR News. “We admired his fearlessness, his complete trust in people, and his silly sense of humor.”
But since the incident, Kyle Moore has struggled with chemical dependency and finding his place in the world. Lisa Moore said her son now deals daily with depression, anger, hostility and debilitating anxiety. Bob Moore said his son now freaks out when he sees or hears police.
“The difference between that kid that day and four or five years later is night and day,” said Bob Moore. “They robbed him of his youth.”
Lisa Moore said her son, and the rest of their family, are private. She hopes that holding the people who hurt her son accountable will help her son heal. She hopes no one else will have to go through what Kyle Moore has.
“He already lived in a world that hurt him and lacked trust, so it took a lot of courage for him to call 911 that day,” Lisa Moore said. “It was not an easy thing for him to do, and he did it — and they betrayed him.”