Maine news, sports, weather from Waterville Morning Sentinel

Cop justified in shooting suicide risk, says Attorney General

By Scott Monroe smonroe@mainetoday.com
Staff Writer

SKOWHEGAN — In the darkness of an October night, Kemp Lybrook held a handgun and cradled a semi-automatic rifle.

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Kemp Lybrook in a family photo.

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The suicidal Skowhegan man was surrounded by a Maine State Police tactical team and local police outside his home. He then made a move that ended the five-hour-long standoff.

A state police detective shot Lybrook, wounding him severely.

Based on newly disclosed information, state investigators and Lybrook remain at odds about what actually happened last year during that moment in the darkness, when guns were drawn and uncertainty hung in the air.

In a report released late Friday, Attorney General William Schneider said his office’s extensive investigation into the Oct. 4 incident concluded the police shooting was justified. Detective Mark Sperrey, who shot Lybrook, watched the distraught man load the rifle and walk toward him and state trooper Todd Stetson, according to the report.

“At a point when Mr. Lybrook turned the rifle toward Sperrey and Stetson, trooper Sperrey fired four rounds at Mr. Lybrook. It was later determined that one of the rounds struck Mr. Lybrook in the lower torso, seriously wounding him,” the report states.

Schneider concludes it was reasonable for Sperrey “to believe that deadly force was imminently threatened against him and trooper Stetson, as well as other officers in the immediate area,” and that the detective’s use of deadly force was reasonable “to protect himself and other officers from the imminent threat of deadly force posed against them by Mr. Lybrook’s actions.”

However, Lybrook, in his first public comments about the shooting, said Saturday he disagrees with the attorney general’s version of events.

“I didn’t pull a gun on anybody; I didn’t even see anybody to point a gun at. It was very dark,” Lybrook said. “Yes, I had two guns; but they weren’t pointing at anybody.”

Lybrook conceded he was suicidal at the time, but he disputes the attorney general’s assertion that he had spoken in the past about ending his life by committing “suicide by cop.” The report says family members provided that information to a police negotiator.

“I don’t ever recall telling anyone in my family or anyone I wanted to commit to suicide by cop; I don’t really know where that came from,” Lybrook said. “I just kept telling them (police) — all I told them was to leave me alone, and they wouldn’t leave, and so finally they shot me.”

Lybrook, 29, said he returned to his Skowhegan home about a month ago. After the incident, he spent 20 days at Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor, where he underwent surgery. Then he spent months going to physical therapy and stayed with his mother, Jeannean Taylor, in Aroostook County.

Lybrook said he worked as an electrician before the shooting and is hoping to get back to work soon, but lingering nerve damage in his leg is giving him a “hard time.”

“I’ve been dealing with that, but internally I’m 100 percent better,” Lybrook said. “It’s just that nerve that it (the bullet) hit; I don’t know if it’ll ever heal.”

Lybrook said he wears a brace around his foot to help him lift his ankle. He also takes several pain medications.

The standoff

It was about 4:30 p.m. Oct. 4, 2010, when Taylor called Skowhegan police. She was worried about her son, who she said was outside his home, armed with a gun, despondent and expressing suicidal thoughts. Taylor had relayed the same information to a local crisis hot line.

Earlier, Lybrook also had expressed his despair to his former girlfriend, who was a neighbor and a friend, the attorney general’s report said. It goes on to detail how police made attempts to diffuse the situation, but to no avail.

Skowhegan Officer Don Avery called Lybrook on his cell phone, but Lybrook twice hung up on the officer, saying he didn’t want to talk with police. Lybrook denied having a gun and stated to the officer that “life is not worth living.”

Avery and officer Stanley Guilmette soon arrived at the entrance to Lybrook’s home, about 150 feet from the house, and used a public address system to speak to him, asking him to come to them. There was no sign of Lybrook.

A neighbor arrived and said Lybrook was in the woods somewhere, armed with a handgun, and another neighbor was out looking for him. Lybrook didn’t want to speak with police and wanted them to leave, the neighbor said.

That’s when Skowhegan Police Chief Michael Emmons called for the Maine State Police tactical team, whose members arrived with police negotiators. They continued asking Lybrook, now by calling his cell phone, to come out and submit to protective custody and a medical evaluation.

About 7 p.m., State Police Sgt. Rod Charette called Lybrook and asked him to relinquish his handgun and walk to the driveway entrance, but Lybrook refused, saying “his gun was the only thing keeping the police from him.”

Lybrook didn’t return calls made by a police crisis negotiator until 7:30, when Lybrook sounded “quite agitated” and said he was armed with a .40-caliber pistol. Meanwhile, tactical team members saw Lybrook using a cell phone while pointing the handgun at his head.

The negotiator also confirmed the un-named neighbor who had gone searching in the woods was now with Lybrook, and the neighbor initially refused to leave “out of fear that Mr. Lybrook would shoot himself.”

The negotiator thought Lybrook sounded intoxicated, while other officers said Lybrook had trouble maintaining balance and at one point dropped the handgun. The negotiator then received information, from family members, that Lybrook had talked recently about ending his life by committing “suicide by cop.”

The back-and-forth between Lybrook and police continued for another two hours. He was seen going into his house, returning outside drinking a beer and holding the gun to his head. He got into a vehicle and started down the driveway but was stopped by a police blockade. He went back to his house and continued going in and out.

At 10:30, Detective Sperrey and trooper Stetson were about 85 feet from Lybrook and saw him insert a magazine into a AK-47 semi-automatic rifle.

That’s when, the officers say, Lybrook walked toward them and “turned the rifle toward” them. After one of Sperrey’s bullets hit Lybrook in the stomach, a tactical team medic immediately attended to Lybrook, and he was taken to Redington-Fairview General Hospital in Skowhegan and later by helicopter to the Bangor hospital.

Several other guns were inside Lybrook’s house at the time of the incident, the investigation later found.

Shooting investigation

In its report, the attorney general said the investigation of the shooting was limited to determining whether the police’s use of “self-defense or the defense of others” was justified by law.

Such justification comes from the officer reasonably believing that imminent deadly force was threatened against the officer or someone else, and from the officer reasonably believing that deadly force is necessary to counter the threat.

Detective Sperrey met both of those requirements in firing on Lybrook, the attorney general concluded.

Lybrook and his family are critical of the police response.

Lybrook’s grandfather, William “Bill” Lybrook, of Fairfield Center, has asserted previously that his grandson was shot without proper negotiations with police. William Lybrook couldn’t be reached for comment Saturday.

Kemp Lybrook said he remains frustrated with how police treated his mother, saying they initially promised to use “less-than-lethal techniques” to diffuse the situation. After Lybrook was shot and in custody, police wouldn’t answer his mother’s questions and treated her poorly, he said.

While he was suicidal at the time, Lybrook said he realized that he “couldn’t do it.”

Kemp Lybrook’s father, Kenneth “Jock” Lybrook, of Concord Township, said Saturday that he had not yet heard about the attorney general’s report, but he was not surprised to learn its conclusion. He declined to comment further, except to say that he sees his son nearly every day and his son “is coming along” in his recuperation.

Scott Monroe — 861-9239
smonroe@centralmaine.com