ORLANDO, Fla — Gail Reed opened her garage door on a Friday late in the afternoon to two deputies enquiring about a person who was threatening to kill themselves. Reed, surprised, said she believed that person was her son, who was in his room with the doors closed.
“He has a mental illness,” Reed is heard saying in the body camera footage released by the Orange County Sheriff’s Office. “He’s been off his medication for about a month.”
Antonio Scippio was 33 years old and, according to his family, had been battling schizophrenia, paranoia and bipolar disorders for years. On Feb. 21, Scippio was shot several times by Orange County deputies after he made a 911 call himself, saying “I’m about to kill myself.”
“It’s still very hard for me to step back into this house, and every time I step, I see him lying there in a pile of blood that was uncalled for,” Reed said.
Orange County Sheriff John Mina said right after the shooting, which was recorded on a body camera, that this outcome was unusual.
“He continued to walk toward the deputies with the knife, including refusing several commands,” Mina said. “We respond to a little over 3,000 calls for service involving people who are having a mental crisis, and very rarely they get to this type of ending.”
This is one case highlighting why mental health advocates with the National Alliance on Mental Illness say Florida should require training for all law enforcement officers, saying the consequences of not doing so are too severe.
“It’s important to make sure that we are getting people trained to properly deal with mental health because it’s not going away,” said Freddie Morello, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, or NAMI. “I say mental health is the one thing in this world that doesn’t discriminate, and it’s always going to be there. So, we need to handle it better.”
The Orange County Sheriff’s Office said it’s trained nearly 1,000 of its deputies in crisis intervention training to better respond to mental health calls since it introduced the Behavioral Response Unit in 2020.
Meanwhile, the Orlando police chief said it requires this and said all patrol officers are trained.
“Every call is different. As you said, there are multiple mental health issues people go through,” said Orlando Police Chief Eric Smith.
According to a police report from 2023, Rachel Ellis was threatening to hurt herself and others when her boyfriend called 911. A grand jury review of the 2023 case later found that Orlando police should, when possible, dispatch a crisis intervention team officer involving a confirmed or suspected mentally ill person in crisis, which is why the agency now has a co-responder model, which includes a mental health expert and a program in which only officers respond.
However, while all Orlando police officers are trained, Smith says there will always be challenges.
“I know a lot of people think that an officer couldn’t use Tasers and all those kinds of things,” Smith said. “But they have to understand that when somebody’s charging with a knife, that’s deadly force, and if you mess with the Taser, you mess with any other kind of less than lethal munition. The person going to you may lose your life.”
The sheriff’s offices from Flagler, Brevard, Orange, Sumter, Seminole, Marion and Volusia counties all told 9 Investigates that crisis intervention training is mandatory for their deputies. In Osceola County, however, the training is encouraged but not required. In Lake County, the sheriff’s office requires a de-escalation training.
NAMI partners with law enforcement agencies to help train its officers on how to best respond to calls involving a person experiencing a mental health crisis. Their training includes learning how to identify different mental health conditions and de-escalation techniques. For example, law enforcement officers wear headphones, with loud voices speaking at them, to understand how a person with schizophrenia feels.
Just in the past two years, NAMI trained about 1,500 in Orange, Osceola, Brevard and Seminole counties have gone through the training to include scenarios they might encounter when called to de-escalate a real-life situation, just like the case of Scippio.
“When they call for help, it should be a protocol at that point when they are calling when they get to the house,” Reed said. “Protocol, training, extensive training put in place.”
The National Alliance on Mental Illness is pushing – and hoping – for Crisis Intervention Team training to be mandatory across the state of Florida.
Do you have a story for WFTV’s 9 Investigators?
Click the banner below to submit a tip.
©2025 Cox Media Group
