Her family called her Baby Sis.
A quiet, gentle woman, Pytorcarcha Brooks couldn’t have weighed more than 100 pounds soaking wet. On June 25, 2025, the 70-year-old was deep in a mental health crisis that had been pulling her away from her family for a long time. Her son tried to get her help in the courts, with no luck. So when she slashed a knife at him from inside her house on Mosher Street on that sweltering summer day, he called the police.
Within an hour, Brooks was dead, shot and tased by police officers who forced their way into her house without calling for a specialized team that deals with mental health emergencies.
“There has to be a better way,” said Bishop Jaron Spriggs, Brooks’ brother.
Spriggs spoke to Baltimore Beat a few days after the Maryland attorney general’s office announced it would not pursue charges against the officers who killed Brooks.
“There is insufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the subject officers committed a crime under Maryland law,” the office wrote in its report.
Spriggs disagrees with the decision not to charge the officers with a crime. But even more, he wishes that Baltimore’s crisis response system had treated his sister like a human being rather than a threat to be neutralized with a gun.
The officers who responded to the call were supposed to de-escalate the situation under Baltimore Police Department policies, which advise officers to use the “least intrusive response” possible in a behavioral health crisis. A new policy that BPD began training officers on in April 2025 recommends “strategic disengagement,” or leaving the scene with a plan to return later, when a person experiencing a mental health crisis barricades themselves from police. Not all officers had been trained on the policy by the time police went to Brooks’ house, according to the AG’s report.
Two of the officers on the scene had also received voluntary Crisis Intervention Team training, which is supposed to ensure the police have “specialized skills in de-escalation and community referrals.” Police had received about 20 calls for behavioral health issues at Brooks’ house in the preceding six months.
But when officers arrived on June 25 and found Brooks barricaded inside her home with a knife, they deliberated for half an hour before deciding the best course of action was to kick down two doors and confront her.
Brooks wouldn’t drop her knife as an officer pushed forward into her house, and she didn’t react when he tased her. When the officer tripped over a piece of furniture and fell, Brooks raised her knife as if she was going to stab him; instead, another officer shot her four times, killing her.
“They stood by and allowed something to escalate that they were trained to de-escalate,” Spriggs said. “That is unacceptable.”
Brooks had a lifelong fear of the police that likely made her troubled mental state even worse, Spriggs said. She had also been suffering from a mental health crisis for months or longer, he said.
Brooks’ son, who could not be reached for comment, tried to petition for guardianship in Baltimore City circuit court last May, but a judge rejected his request for a fee waiver. An emergency petition, which allows for forced hospitalization of someone who is considered a danger to themself or others, had also been obtained for Brooks earlier in 2025, according to the attorney general’s report. The outcome of that emergency petition is not clear. Brooks had also tried to stab a relative who dropped off groceries a few days earlier, the attorney general’s office wrote.
By June 25, the police had been called to the house on Mosher Street many times. A social worker with the Maryland Department of Human Services tried to speak with Brooks at around 1 p.m. that day, according to the report. When Brooks did not answer, the social worker called Brooks’ son and contacted emergency services for a wellness check. Brooks’ son also called 911, telling police his mother was experiencing a mental health crisis and barricaded inside her house with a knife.
The responding police officers and Baltimore City Fire Department medics debated how to approach the situation and ultimately decided to intervene because of the extreme heat that day and the “smell of ‘death’” emanating from Brooks’ home. When Brooks blocked access through the back door, swiping at responders with a knife, the officers decided to go in through the front door.
Spriggs questioned why armed police were sent to deal with a situation that involved a person in crisis. Why didn’t anyone call for help from mental health professionals?
The Baltimore Police Department does have a Crisis Response Team that pairs officers with mental health clinicians, but the department, with a budget of more than $600 million, has only one team for a city of more than 550,000 people. That team was responding to another call when police shot Brooks.
“There has to be some better training for these officers,” Spriggs said. “Or do not even send the officers. Maybe send counselors and have the officers just outside to stand by.”
Baltimore has struggled to implement such a process. A 988 diversion program launched in 2021 to send mobile crisis teams that do not include police to behavioral health calls. At a hearing last year, however, city officials shared data showing that the vast majority of behavioral health calls are never diverted to 988, and that mobile crisis team response times averaged between one and a half to two hours.
Since that hearing, the issue has received little public attention. Spriggs said he has not heard from anyone at City Hall since last year. In April, city leaders and U.S. Rep. Kweisi Mfume announced $1 million in federal funding to expand the 911 diversion program to include other types of calls beyond behavioral health, but it’s not clear that the problems with the existing program have been resolved.
There have also been no moves to implement a coordinated, in-house system for handling behavioral health calls like some other cities. Those programs include nonpolice response teams that can be dispatched directly through 911 rather than having to be diverted through another system like 988.
Spriggs is not alone in calling for a system that diverts mental health emergencies away from the police. Last month, the Citizens Policing Project, which helps community members get involved in police reform efforts, released a formal assessment of BPD’s 2026 Use of Force policy.
The lack of nonpolice options in behavioral health emergencies poses a “critical risk” to the community, the group wrote. Instead of working toward a public safety system where mental health crisis is met with treatment and services, the 2026 policy focuses only on police actions and does not mandate diversion as CPP recommends.
“The 2026 policy remains strictly focused on police action and completely fails to address protocols for diversion or community-based crisis response,” wrote Ray Kelly, the CPP’s executive director. “By failing to guide officers on when not to be the primary responders, the policy misses a critical opportunity for systemic harm reduction.”
Madeleine O’Neill is a freelance journalist based in Baltimore.