Family seeks answers after police kill mentally ill K-Town man

Before Yong Yang was fatally shot by Los Angeles police at his parents’ Koreatown home last week, his mother tried to get help from mental health officials for two days in a row.

Her 40-year-old son was experiencing a severe bipolar episode, Myung Sook Yang said, and she deliberately contacted the district mental health department (DMH) before the shooting to avoid law enforcement involvement.

Just hours after the call, her son was dead — killed in his family’s living room while holding a kitchen knife, police said.

On Tuesday, LAPD officials released the department’s annual use of force report, which showed an increase in the number of times officers opened fire from 31 in 2022 to 34 last year – more than any other major U.S. department.

Officials attributed the increase in part to the number of people shot who, like Yang, were holding sharp objects while experiencing a mental or substance-related crisis – a trend the agency has struggled to curb for years.

At an emotional news conference Thursday at the Korean American Federation headquarters in Los Angeles, Yang’s family and their lawyers demanded answers about the DMH’s decision to pursue criminal prosecution.

Pausing at times to sob into a tissue, Myung Sook Yang said, “There’s a reason I called the mental health department, not the police; It was so they could help, not so they could shoot him.”

“I thought they were going to help him and take him to the hospital,” she said. “Instead they shoot him and we want an explanation as to how this happened.”

As she spoke, her husband Min Yang squeezed her shoulder comfortingly.

Yong Yang’s family said he had long struggled with his mental health. Although he has never been violent, authorities previously placed him in a so-called 5150 detention center, a sentence of up to 72 hours for people deemed a threat to themselves or others.

In recent years, his mother said, he has learned to keep the symptoms at bay through “prayer, playing tennis, yoga, exercise, hiking.”

Still, his family said, he had occasional episodes, like the day he was shot. Concerned that they would no longer be able to care for him, the family contacted the DMH twice within 48 hours to ask for help.

Yang’s father told reporters that his son’s behavior was not threatening on May 2 when a DMH representative appeared at the family’s home in the 400 block of South Gramercy Place for an evaluation.

Min Yang said the doctor spoke to Yang for less than two minutes before deciding to call the police.

When officers arrived, he said, they told him and his wife to wait outside while they tried to contact Yang, not telling them until much later that their son had been shot.

Robert Sheahen, an attorney for the family, said that based on the information he had, police did not use less-lethal weapons to subdue Yang, despite having “extensive knowledge of the son’s mental health history.”

“The LAPD sent nine officers into the house in a military maneuver to execute a 40-year-old mental patient,” Sheahen said. “It actually gets worse: After the cold-blooded killing, the officers did not inform the mother that they had shot her son.”

An LAPD spokesman said body camera footage of the incident would be released by mid-June and declined further comment.

The Department of Mental Health said in a brief statement that it could not comment on the incident but that its “on-site response teams are generally trained to de-escalate mental health crises without law enforcement involvement.”

“However, this is not always possible,” the statement said. “In cases where de-escalation through clinical means is not possible and the individual in crisis continues to pose an imminent threat to themselves or others despite DMH’s efforts, law enforcement will be contacted to ensure safety and attempt to to keep the peace.”

Sheahen said the family is calling for an independent investigation.

He said officers failed to provide Yang with immediate medical care and “destroyed all physical evidence at the scene.”

“They destroyed every speck of blood, every hair follicle, every scrap of physical evidence that might tell us what those officers did in the apartment to kill the boy,” he said.

He said the family was preparing to file a state lawsuit against the city, the usual precursor to a wrongful death lawsuit.

An LAPD press release issued the day after the shooting portrayed the incident significantly differently. It says officers were called to the scene after Yang attempted to attack the DMH employee.

The police statement said the DMH employee told the first arriving officers that Yang posed a threat to others, which led to the decision to request more police and notify the department’s mental health unit. According to the news release, officers decided to enter the home after several failed attempts to convince Yang to go outside alone.

After Yang refused to come out, officers used a key to enter the apartment and said they found Yang with a knife in his hand. Within moments, “he advanced toward the officers and an officer-involved shooting ensued,” the release said.

Paramedics were called to the scene and pronounced him dead, according to the news release. No officers or bystanders were injured.

James An, president of the Korean American Federation, said that just weeks earlier, the DMH held a community presentation in Koreatown to inform families of people with mental illnesses about the resources available to them. Participants were told they could call the DMH instead of the police for nonviolent emergencies, he said.

An said he spoke with acting LAPD Chief Dominic Choi, who assured him that a thorough investigation into the incident would be conducted.

Community members had met with Choi – the city’s first Korean-American chief – and Mayor Karen Bass days before the shooting to discuss recent attacks in the area. Most in attendance left satisfied that city officials were listening to their safety concerns and hoped the meeting was a step toward “rebuilding” their relationship with the police department, An said.

But Yang’s death, which was widely reported in Korean-language media, left the community with “a lot of questions,” he said.

The Korean-language newspaper Chosun Daily LA released a statement saying, “The Korean community and its neighbors are paying close attention to this incident, which has deeply saddened everyone.”

Thursday’s news conference came amid renewed scrutiny of the LAPD’s use of deadly force. Statistics released by the department this week show that Los Angeles police have had twice as many on-duty shootings as their counterparts in Chicago, a city with nearly 4,000 more officers and 1.3 million fewer residents than LA

According to the report, more police shootings resulted in fatalities in Los Angeles than in any other comparable county, including New York City, which had four fewer incidents overall despite being a larger city and a larger police force.

The numbers sparked concern among several members of the Los Angeles Police Commission, the department’s civilian oversight agency, at their weekly meeting Tuesday. Commissioner William Briggs asked whether the department could do more to address encounters with people with sharp weapons such as knives and swords, which are responsible for a significant number of shootings.

In response, Choi said the department needs to explore new technologies such as drones, which could give police time to develop a plan of action and potentially avoid unnecessary confrontations between officers and people in crisis.

The department has expanded its training on how to deal with people in emotional distress, although its leaders have acknowledged that not all mental health emergencies require the presence of armed police.

They have pushed for more of these non-criminal calls to be referred to a Systemwide Mental Assessment Response Team (SMART), which pairs officers with county mental health clinicians trained to resolve standoffs with mentally ill people who may not respond well to yelling. Peaceful de-escalation commands and flashing police lights.

Last year, SMART responded to about 6,534 emergency calls, a fraction of the nearly 43,000 calls for service involving people with mental illness or those in a behavioral health crisis, according to department statistics. Calls involving weapons or threats of violence are still almost always referred to the police.

Police officials have previously attributed gaps in coverage by mental health co-responder teams to the county’s staffing shortage, although Choi told the commission Tuesday that the county has made progress in hiring more clinicians in recent months.

Earlier this year, city officials launched a pilot program that sends trained but unarmed civilians to specific mental health emergencies in three police districts, with plans to evaluate performance after a year and potentially expand it citywide.

Modeled after the announced Bend, Oregon-based Cahoots program, the initiative consists of two teams of mental health professionals available 24 hours a day, seven days a week to respond to non-violent situations normally the responsibility of police, such as conducting Welfare checks and calls for public drunkenness and indecent exposure.

Department officials have repeatedly said that despite increased crisis intervention training and new, less-lethal weapons designed to incapacitate rather than kill, officers are not always equipped to handle most mental health calls. At the same time, police say there is the potential for such calls to quickly lead to violence.

Los Angeles was among major U.S. cities that committed to developing and investing in new emergency response efforts that deploy trained professionals to provide assistance to homeless people and people with mental health and drug problems. But similar efforts failed in cities like New York.

Activists argue that such efforts remain woefully underfunded and, in some cases, still too closely tied to law enforcement.

Some initiatives have had difficulty implementing alternatives to crisis intervention at scale. Earlier this year, the Los Angeles Fire Department recommended ending a pilot program after officials said it didn’t actually free up first responders and hospital emergency rooms.