Last week, I attended the Contra Costa County
Coroner’s inquest into the death of Anthony Banta, Jr., the hairdresser who was
shot and killed by Walnut Creek police during a confrontation in his Creekside
Drive apartment December 27, 2012.
In their testimonies, the four officers involved in
the confrontation testified and presented a scenario in which they fired on Banta
in self-defense. As I reported for the news website News 24-580, the officers
had heard 911 calls that Banta had suddenly burst into his roommate’s bedroom
just after 3 a.m. and starting choking him.
“I think maybe he’s sleepwalking,” the
roommate’s girlfriend told dispatchers. In subsequent exchanges between the
girlfriend and dispatchers, officers learned that Banta was armed with a knife
and was trying to break down a bedroom door, behind which the roommate and the
girlfriend had barricaded themselves. The girlfriend later told police Banta was looking "like a zombie."
When officers entered the apartment, they
found the 22-year-old Banta at the top of the stairs, “agitated,” “wild-eyed.”
He refused repeated demands to throw down a large 10-inch knife officers saw him
holding, at one point saying “Just shoot me,” before leaping or hurling himself
down the stairs. Police opened fire in self-defense, they said. An 11-member jury found Banta's cause of death to be "accidental."
What’s been perplexing to Banta’s
family and friends, and even to authorities, is that the 5-foot-4 inch Banta was
known to everyone, including his roommate and the roommate's girlfriend, as a polite,
non-violent, hard-working young man. He had no history of mental illness or emotional breakdowns and
never displayed the kind of behavior witnesses said he displayed that morning.
Forensic pathologist Andy Josselson, testifying at the
coroner’s inquest, offered the interesting theory that Banta’s behavior was
either the result of an undiagnosed mental illness or of marijuana psychosis. Evidence presented at the inquest showed that
Banta had a small amount of THC, the main, mind-altering ingredient in
marijuana, in his system, and that there was “moderate marijuana use” in the
apartment.
The marijuana psychosis theory is
interesting. And, as noted by Josselson, there is much in medical
literature about a possible connection between the use of marijuana and the onset
of psychosis—the mental state in which someone loses contact with reality.
However, there’s much debate about this
phenomenon, especially as it pertains to teens. Health writer Alice G. Walton, writing on Forbes.com, says marijuana has been found to reduce anxiety in some people—an effect we're all pretty much aware of, through personal experience or otherwise. In others, though, in can induce anxiety and psychosis, she says. There is also debate over whether pot-smoking actually causes people to develop schizophrenia. In another post, she sums up the debate:
The connection is especially important to understand in young people, whose brains are still wiring themselves, a process that continues right up through one’s 20s. Some researchers have framed the issue as a chicken-or-egg conundrum, wondering whether pot smoking leads to psychosis or whether underlying psychosis makes one more likely to smoke pot.
In this post, she cites a Dutch study in which researchers,
after following more than 2,100 teens, found “a bidirectional relationship.”
After teens were questioned about their pot use over the years and questioned
about their social relationships, feelings of loneliness, attention, and thought
problems, the team found that kids who at 16 smoked pot were more likely to
have psychotic symptoms at 19. At the same time, kids who at 16 showed psychotic symptoms were more likely
to smoke pot. Walton says:
So researchers conclude that the “self-medication” and the “damage” (that is, brain damage) hypotheses both hold water – and they both make sense intuitively. For example, the authors say that a person with psychotic symptoms might use marijuana to “improve their mood or to control one’s feelings, boredom, social motives, improving sleep, anxiety and agitation.” … On the flipside, pot smoking could also damage the developing brain, since the teen-age is a “particularly vulnerable period for the effects of cannabis."
Of course, who really knows whether any of this
applies to Banta? Toxicology tests couldn’t be conclusive about when he
ingested the marijuana, Josselson said. One screen suggested as few as five hours before his
death, but another could only determine it was within 30 days of his death. The sophisticated tests performed on Banta also couldn’t show
whether he had newer classes of designer drugs in his system.
One Banta family member agreed it’s possible he had
some underlying health issue that caused his behavior that night. That family
and friends never saw any signs of mental illness doesn’t necessarily mean he
didn’t have something like that going on. Some people with mental illnesses
have a hard time reaching out because they are ashamed or they
themselves have trouble making sense of thought disorders or breaks with reality.
It should also be said that the early 20s is the age at which symptoms of disorders, such as
schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. first reveal themselves. Or the symptoms may start earlier, but this is the age at which
people are first diagnosed.
The position of the Banta family, as explained by
their attorney, Larry Peluso, is that even if Banta suddenly began acting the way police said he did—and for whatever reason—he didn’t have to die. They have filed a federal lawsuit, alleging
that police panicked and could have handled the confrontation
differently.
