FAMILY BELIEVES SON'S SUICIDE PARTLY CAUSED BY LAW ENFORCEMENT'S
CONSCRIPTION AS AN INFORMANT

In the days leading up to his suicide, Colton Peterson assumed a free
fall of self-destruction. Caught in the jetstream of drugs, violence
and legal trouble, the 21-year-old Missoula native fought to right
himself, but only spiraled into a sharper nosedive.

The more he struggled, the faster his world spun off its axis and with
no one willing or able to intervene, his life ended in tragedy.

It's a story that's all too common in Missoula and across Montana,
that of young people taking their lives. Montana ranks second in the
nation for its suicide rates, and has been among the top five for 30
years. Suicide is the second leading cause of death for Montana youth
ages 10-24, and experts agree that substance abuse, as well as
underlying mental illness, contribute to the high rate of youth suicide.

While Peterson fits that picture, the involvement of law enforcement
lends a deeper shading to his case.

Peterson's family concedes a succession of poor decisions on his part,
but they say Missoula police, who knew of his suicidal tendencies,
also bear responsibility. There's no better argument for mandatory
crisis intervention training for law enforcement, they say, than the
way their son's case played out.

In quick succession in the week before his death, Peterson was
assaulted by two men after reportedly brandishing a gun to collect a
drug debt, was busted for growing pot, recruited as a confidential
informant, and pressured to provide a list of other growers' names by
5 p.m. on July 27.

He didn't make the deadline.

At about 3:30 p.m., he shot himself.

A relatively small number of Missoula police officers have completed
advanced crisis intervention training since its inception in Montana
in 2004, according to Missoula Police Chief Mark Muir.

"All officers receive mental health training at the law enforcement
academy and establish the ability to recognize mental health
symptoms," Muir said. Beyond that, such training "is not something
that you just put everyone through and then expect them to put it into
practice. It's advanced training that not everyone is well suited for."

Missoula's participation in a more basic course wins high praise from
Jerry Williams, the risk management trainer at the Montana Law
Enforcement Academy.

The 16-hour course called Mental Illness Intervention training covers
police interactions with mentally ill people and teaches them how to
de-escalate crisis situations.

"We've done more Mental Illness Intervention training in Missoula than
in almost any other city in Montana," Williams said.

Williams also facilitates weeklong Crisis Intervention Team training
sessions around the state. The training has been praised as a best
practice model by the National Alliance of Mental Illness, a mental
health advocacy program.

At the end of this month, Williams is bringing the CIT training to
Missoula for two sessions, which will be taught by mental health and
other experts in the community; Muir says he has officers enrolled in
both classes.

But Peterson's mother, Juliena Darling, and father, Frank Peterson,
say that's not enough, particularly given the way police handled their
son's case.

They object to law enforcement's conscription of Peterson as an
informant in an ongoing drug investigation, despite their repeated
attempts to explain that his mental health was at a tipping point.

"I'm really upset with those guys that they didn't heed our warning
and instead just used him," said Frank Peterson. "They're going after
them like they're drug cartels from Bolivia and these are
nickel-and-dime pot sellers."

"The bottom line," said Darling, "is that the police are not trained
to know if someone is suicidal. They should have called me in to talk
with Colton when they had him. They should have called a mental health
professional. But they didn't because they wanted information, and I
don't think he had any."

Police say Peterson got on the wrong side of the law in July working
as a medical marijuana caregiver. He was licensed by the state to grow
six marijuana plants for a single patient, and six plants for himself,
but a tip to law enforcement from an informant allegedly revealed a
larger grow operation at his apartment.

That tip led to a raid on July 26 and an eventual agreement between
Peterson and detectives on Missoula's High-Intensity Drug Trafficking
Areas task force - he would work as a "cooperative defendant,"
gathering string on potentially more serious drug dealers in the area,
and in exchange police would tell prosecutors he had cooperated with
the investigation.

There was no promise of immunity to Peterson, according to Chief Muir,
though he was neither jailed nor charged with a crime.

But jail is exactly where his parents thought he should
be.

After hearing Peterson threaten suicide and seeing his behavior turn
increasingly erratic, his parents, who are divorced, thought jail was
probably the safest place for their son. They had been trying to get
him help for days, and viewed the pot bust as an opportunity for an
involuntary commitment to the hospital and a mental health evaluation.

Records indicate that Darling relayed her concerns to police on at
least two occasions in late July - first on July 24 when Peterson
called police to report that his parents had stolen his gun (Darling
and her husband, Bill, confiscated his 9 mm gun because they were
worried for his safety) and again after the July 26 pot bust, when she
told a detective outside Peterson's apartment that he needed to be
forced to get psychiatric help.

"I wanted them to arrest Colton because we were terrified he was going
to kill himself. We thought that if he was arrested he could finally
get a mental health evaluation and get some help," Darling said last
Tuesday, on what would have been her son's 22nd birthday. "In my
opinion, they didn't get him help because they wanted to use him as an
informant."

"He was obviously stoned out of his mind, playing Hollywood with the
gun and the pot," said Frank Peterson. "We should have gotten him help
sooner and we failed. But in the end, we had nowhere else to turn but
the police, and they let us down."

Police maintain they did everything in their power to assist Peterson,
even offering him a ride to St. Patrick Hospital during a July 26
interview after the drug bust. In Missoula, St. Pat's is the principal
point of entry, besides jail, for someone in crisis who requires
immediate mental health services.

Met with resistance from Peterson, however, the officers opted to
continue with the drug investigation. They released Peterson to his
mother after the interview, with an agreement that he would re-contact
the investigators with information the next day at 5 p.m.

"They followed up on the mother's concerns that he was suicidal,"
Chief Muir said. "They spoke directly to the issue with him, and said
there was help available. Colton Peterson denied that help, denied
that he was even thinking about killing himself or that he had made
specific threats to his family about killing himself. He said he just
wanted to go home with his family."

The next afternoon, on July 27, police received information that
Peterson was retrieving "items" he had stashed after being tipped off
to the previous day's bust. A receipt of the property seized from
Peterson's apartment indicates that police recovered "two live budding
plants (marijuana)" and "15 cut marijuana plant stems," but officers
suspect he harvested dozens more before their arrival.

"The concern was that he had potentially gone and recovered marijuana
or something to do with his marijuana operation and that he was
getting right back into dealing," Muir said. "There was an
understanding that he was not to be engaged in those
activities."

HIDTA Detective Dave Krueger, the police department's lead
investigator on the case, immediately got word of the report and
called Peterson on his cell phone, asking him to meet at Willard
Alternative High School, which is near the Missoula HIDTA office.

The meeting took place at about 1:25 p.m.

Statewide suicide prevention coordinator Karl Rosston says the
extended Crisis Intervention Team training is exactly the kind of
program that could benefit all first responders in Montana, including
law enforcement, emergency room personnel and EMTs.

"Suicide in Montana is part of our culture," said Rosston, of the
Department of Public Health and Human Services, which funds more than
a dozen suicide prevention programs statewide. "We have 180 to 200
suicides every year. We need to talk about suicide the same way we
talk about heart disease or the dangers of smoking, and we need to
coordinate our resources."

The 2007 Montana Legislature spent roughly $400,000 on a bill to fund
suicide prevention, and principal among those measures was hiring
Rosston, who said he hopes to one day make the CIT training program
part of the curriculum at the Montana Law Enforcement Academy.

"CIT covers all mental health issues and disorders and delves heavily
into suicide," Rosston said. "It trains officers to recognize warning
signs, how to intervene, and what resources there are around the state."

Williams said offering CIT through the academy as part of its regular
curriculum would be a challenge, given that the course is 40 hours and
draws on the expertise of a wide range of professionals who vary from
community to community.

It's also not a magic solution, and no one pretends that better
training and resources would have guaranteed another outcome for Peterson.

The two accounts of what happened during the July 27 Willard meeting
differ, and because the encounter was not recorded, it's unclear
exactly what occurred.

Peterson's one-time girlfriend, Shanen Johns, accompanied him to the
meeting and waited inside Peterson's pickup truck with the engine
running while he spoke with Krueger. She says the detective's
"aggressive body language" indicated a heated conversation, and when
Peterson got back in the car he was shaken, saying Krueger still
wanted him to provide names of other drug dealers by 5 p.m.

"They were pressuring him that he needed to give more names. They were
pressuring him with [jail] time," said Johns, who was the last person
to see Peterson alive. "Colton was panicking because he was trying,
but he didn't know any big drug dealers. He was really stressed out by
the detective."

Muir and his investigators say Johns' account is inaccurate, and that
she has no way of knowing what was said, or even the tone of the
conversation.

"We don't know how she therefore gets her information," Muir said.
"From our perspective, there were no specific threats or ultimatums,
other than for him to stay in contact with the investigator."

Whatever the exchange between Krueger and Peterson, it was less than
two hours later that a man found Peterson's body slumped against a
pine tree in a grove near the O'Brien Creek trailhead, the butt of a
hunting rifle cradled at his feet, a baseball cap lying on the ground
beside him.

He was pronounced dead on July 27 at 4 p.m., one hour before he was
scheduled to re-contact the detective.

"It was somewhere in that time frame that Colton, in my opinion,
really came unhinged," Darling said. "To me, the fact that he killed
himself an hour before he was supposed to meet with the detective is
telling."

Muir said it's easy to view the handling of Peterson's case with the
benefit of hindsight, but having listened to an audio interview
between Krueger and Peterson after the pot bust, he is certain the
investigator did everything in his ability to get Peterson help at the
time.

"I can say with a fair degree of confidence that had they forced him
to go to St. Pat's, based upon what I heard in the audio of his
interview and the way that he answered questions with respect to his
ideations of suicide, I suspect that Colton would have been back out
of the hospital before the investigator had even finished his
paperwork," Muir said. "And that happens all of the time."

Muir said Peterson's suicide and the family's concerns have prompted
city officials, including Missoula Mayor John Engen, to begin
assembling a panel of experts from the community to address the criticisms.

Darling would like to see juveniles and young adults whose mental
health is questionable be treated differently by law enforcement,
especially when called upon to assist in drug investigations.

"That is one of the things the family is seeking as an outcome of
Colton's unfortunate death," Muir said. "The mayor and I have begun
efforts to bring together a group of individuals who have worked with
each of the various facets of the issues revolving around mental
health. We are going to all put our heads together and figure out if
there is something we can suggest to legislators to make use of this
hindsight."

"Certainly, Colton is not the first young person to commit suicide in
Missoula," he continued. "I don't think for a minute that this is
something law enforcement can solve on its own. It is a much bigger
problem than just having a run-in with the law and killing yourself."