Family's questions remain about death of Walter Wiemann
The family of the late Walter Wiemann is still trying to find out what led state police to shoot and kill the 73-year-old patriarch three years ago, and wants to help protect other people with Alzheimer's disease from a similar fate.
Wiemann's daughters, Tammi Kaufman and Kimberly Wiemann, and his widow, Karen Wiemann, are working to keep their federal lawsuit against state police alive, so they can obtain reports to find out if the 30 troopers that surrounded his Forward Township home on Sept. 18, 2018, followed procedure, and, if so, to change that procedure.
“I don't feel they had the right to be judge, jury and executioner that day,” Kaufman said.
She said she feels guilt and remorse over calling 911 that day and asking police to assist with having her father undergo an involuntary medical evaluation.
She said the police response was a “full-scale military-style assault and siege, complete with helicopters and armored vehicles, in order to execute an involuntary psychological commitment warrant,” according to an amended complaint the family filed in U.S. District Court in Pittsburgh. “My phone call led to that to happen to him,” Kaufman said.
The amended complaint was filed Oct. 1 after Judge W. Scott Hardy dismissed the original suit the family filed in September 2020.
Hardy had dismissed the suit without prejudice giving the plaintiffs until then to file an amended complaint.
In his ruling, Hardy said the 11th Amendment bars federal suits seeking monetary damages against a state and its agencies, and the suit did not provide facts to suggest the troopers committed the other allegations in the suit, which included assault, battery, intentional infliction of emotional distress, wrongful death, loss of consortium and violation of the Fourth and 14th amendments.
County District Attorney Richard Goldinger cleared the officers involved in the shooting in December 2018.
Kaufman said the family hasn't been able to obtain police reports about the incident because it related to an officer-involved shooting. Efforts to obtain copies through the state Right-to-Know Law have been denied, she said.
If the court had accepted the original complaint, the family could have obtained the reports through a subpoena, Kaufman said. She hopes the amended complaint is accepted, so the family can get a look at the reports.
“If the case gets dismissed, I will not get to see any of those reports,” she said.
The family has many questions about what happened Sept. 18, 2018.Wiemann was a Vietnam veteran who volunteered for service at the age of 20. He was an airplane mechanic in the Air Force from 1962 to 1966.After his military service, he worked 39 years in maintenance at Calgon Carbon Corporation in Moon Township.He'd also develop post-traumatic stress disorder and Alzheimer's disease. His ailments caused him to believe he still was in Vietnam and become forgetful and agitated due to his lack of recall, according to the amended complaint.The incident leading to his death on Sept. 18, 2018, began to develop two days earlier on Sept. 16, when he became upset and confused after he discovered the bee hives he kept in his barn didn't contain any bees. He forgot that he and other family members cleaned the hives and burned the remains during the summer due to a mite infestation.Karen Wiemann tried to calm him down, but he believed the bees had been stolen, and the thief was going to return to take the hives.The next day, Kaufman called his neurologist to get medication to keep him calm, but wasn't able to reach him, so she left a message with a nurse.After he grew upset about the bees again that day and refused to eat or take medication, Kaufman arrived and found him to be extremely angry, but was able to calm him down.That evening, his mood fluctuated between calm and agitated.On the morning of Sept. 18, 2018, Karen Wiemann informed Kaufman that he was asleep, but had been awake until about 4 a.m. watching from the rear deck of his house the hives that he moved to his yard.The doctor's office told Kaufman that a prescription for her father had been called into a pharmacy. Before she could pick up the prescription, her mother called and said he was upset again and managed to open a locked gun cabinet and remove an unloaded hunting rifle.Kaufman said she told Karen Wiemann to leave the home with the intention that both of them could calm down and she could find a way to get professional help for him.While Karen Wiemann drove to Connoquenessing Park, Kaufman called 911 and told a dispatcher that she believed she needed for her father to have an involuntary medical evaluation. She explained he had a rifle, and that she and her husband attempted to remove all ammunition from the home earlier that year.The dispatcher connected her with state police and the Center for Community Resources Crisis Center. She explained the situation and told them he had Alzheimer's disease, PTSD and other medical issues. She agreed to meet police and representatives from the crisis center at the park, which is about a mile from the home.At the park, Kaufman and Karen Wiemann explained the situation to a trooper and became concerned as more troopers kept arriving.Police denied Kaufman's request to go to her parents' house to talk to her father and told her the road near the house was being blocked to prevent vehicles from driving in front of the house, according to the complaint.A representative from the crisis center told Kaufman and Karen Wiemann how to fill out the involuntary commitment form. Kaufman then helped her mother fill out and sign a warrant for an involuntary mental health evaluation. Karen Wiemann included information about her husband having Alzheimer's disease, PTSD and his combat service in Vietnam.
Kaufman provided all the medical information she had and encouraged the police to contact her father's physicians for advice on his Alzheimer's diagnosis and other medical issues, including diabetes, gastrointestinal issues and cataracts. His physician later told Kaufman that he had not been contacted by police or other responders.Police asked Kaufman and Karen Wiemann to describe the layout of the property and neighborhood, and told them officers were surrounding the home to secure the perimeter, according to the complaint.They relayed that the police also asked them for the phone number of the home, but they had said Walter was not able to use the phone and the ringer was disabled because the ringing sound agitated him.Kaufman also said that police said they could throw a phone in a case through a window, but Kaufman said her father would interpret it as an attack and he would not be able to open the box or know how to use the unfamiliar phone. She said she feared her father would think the phone was a bomb.A trooper told the women that a Specialized Emergency Response Team with special negotiators was being summoned. The trooper said some of the officers in the team lived in the middle of the state and it would take time for them to arrive.Kaufman said police never made contact with her father.As hours passed, Kaufman and Karen Wiemann became increasingly concerned that he wasn't receiving medication and his memory fluctuations and paranoia would make him confused about the large police presence at his home.“He wouldn't have understood why the property was surrounded,” Wiemann said.Karen Wiemann's repeated requests to return to her home to talk to her husband were denied, according to the complaint.“I was begging,” Wiemann said.After hearing helicopters in the area, Kaufman told a trooper that the sound of the helicopters would remind her father of his service in Vietnam. The trooper told her the helicopter was from a media outlet. The complaint cites a Butler Eagle article saying that Cpl. Timothy Morando said police helicopters had been summoned.Two state police negotiators arrived at the park and told Kaufman they would use a loudspeaker to try to communicate with her father, but she asked if she and her mother could record a message that troopers could play through the speaker.Police agreed and appeared to have made recordings from Kaufman and Karen Wiemann, but they were told later by Trooper Randy Gui, the investigating officer, that neither recording was used, according to the suit.While Kaufman and Karen Wiemann were at the park, the barn on Wiemann's property was set on fire at two places. An outside fire investigator ruled the fires as arson. No fire departments were called to extinguish the fires, according to the complaint.After the incident, Kaufman found a boot print on an opened side door to the barn. The door is near an area that a trooper had been positioned, and the print appeared to match boot prints found in the mud on the property, she said.The complaint said police never reported seeing Wiemann leave the house and go to the barn during the incident.“They never explained why the barn burned that day,” Kaufman said. “Did they set the fire to flush him out?”After the incident, she said she also found a torch directed at a roll of burning tar paper inside the barn. She said fires were set inside the barn near the front and rear doors.Police also haven't explained why the side door was kicked in when the back door to the barn was open, Kaufman said. Television news footage taken from a helicopter showed the back barn door open, she added.Kaufman said police told her they saw her father in the garage, but didn't try to approach him because they couldn't determine if he was armed.After police deployed a BearCat armored vehicle and drove it about 150 feet up the driveway and into the yard around 3 p.m., police saw Wiemann leave the house with a rifle and assume a defensive position. The complaint said that was the first sign of aggression Wiemann showed even though his home had been surrounded by police for hours, police and news media helicopters circled above and his barn was set on fire.Police fired 12 to 14 shots at Wiemann, striking him three times and the house with the other bullets, according to the complaint. The rifle, a .30-30-caliber that he had, was found about 10 feet away from him in his yard.
“I don't understand why they created a situation to kill him instead of help him,” Wiemann said. “He had a terrible disease. I thought we were getting help.”An inventory of property police seized from the scene did not include ammunition for the rifle Wiemann had.The complaint argues that police violated Wiemann's Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures and his 14th Amendment protection against deprivation of life, liberty or property without due process.The suit requests a judgment to enjoin state police from permitting a military-style response and seeks damages for wrongful death.Kaufman said she believes it was the aggressive response from police that caused her father to walk out of the house with the rifle after four hours of being surrounded and circled by helicopters.“They knew he had Alzheimer's, PTSD and was a Vietnam vet. If their actions were justified, changes are needed. They caused him to come out of that house to defend himself,” Kaufman said.She said she should not have told police that her father initially became upset because he believed a neighbor had something to do with his missing bees.“What we needed was a mental health expert to evaluate the situation,” she said.
