‘Objectively reasonable’: State Attorney won’t charge West Palm cop in man’s death at Dreyfoos School
One year ago, a former theater student crashed his van through the security gates at the Dreyfoos School of the Arts and ran inside before a police officer shot him on the same stage where he used to put on shows and do lighting.
In a letter to the West Palm Beach Police Department Wednesday detailing the events of that day, the Palm Beach County State Attorney’s Office concluded that it would not pursue charges against the officer who killed Romen Phelps, 33.
“The evidence in this case indisputably shows that Phelps’ behavior created an extremely unsettling and dangerous situation at a public school, during school hours,” Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg wrote in the May 3 letter to Chief Frank Adderley. “…the officer’s use of deadly force was objectively reasonable under the circumstances.”
The officer’s identity was redacted from the report under Marsy’s Law, a 2018 constitutional amendment that allows crime victims to withhold their names from the public. Police officers often use the amendment to shield their identities after use-of-force incidents.
Phelps’ friends and family, who have waited a year for more information about what happened that day, believe that Phelps was having a mental health crisis that did not have to result in his death and the officer should be held accountable.
“I know Romen,” his best friend, Skyler Meany, told the South Florida Sun Sentinel. “I know he would never in a million years have any intention to harm anyone at that school. He loved that school with all of his being.”
Related Articles
Meany was a year below Phelps at Dreyfoos, Palm Beach County’s top performing arts magnet school, in 2008. Since Phelps’ death, he has remained a close friend of the family. Through Meany, Phelps’ mother, Robbin Jackman, declined to comment Friday.
Phelps was a poet who often burst into song, Meany said. He dreamed of putting on a show where he read poems while his friends played bass, saxophone and strings. He had returned to Dreyfoos many times after he graduated in 2007 to do lighting and stagecraft for shows. The theater was where he felt safest.
But when Phelps broke into the theater during lunch period that day, police officers saw a large, mentally unstable man who defied orders and posed a threat to the students — and rightfully so, according to the letter from the Palm Beach County State Attorney’s Office. The office declined to comment beyond what was written in the letter.
State Attorney: Phelps was “manic” and “high,” a danger to students
Just before noon on May 13, 2022, Phelps crashed his van through the school’s security gate and into a large palm tree, hitting it so hard that it fell onto the car, according to the letter. A school aide saw Phelps get out of the van and run inside, then radioed school police.
An officer who was the first to respond encountered Phelps and tried to block him from entering the school’s main campus, but he pushed past her. Witnesses said that he began skipping down the campus walkway where students were eating lunch, trying to take off his shirt and yelling “indiscernible speech,” according to the letter. Students described him as “high,” “manic,” “out of it,” and “defiant.”
Related Articles
The officer and employee called in a “Code Red” lockdown over their radios and began to evacuate students. Teachers said that they saw scared students running away from Phelps, according to the letter. Some students told the South Florida Sun Sentinel at the time that they didn’t know what was going on but saw others running and began to run too.
The officer, seeing Phelps as “mentally ill and possibly dangerous,” tried to handcuff him, but said that he resisted her with such strength that he “nearly threw himself to the ground,” according to the letter. Phelps then ran to the theater, bursting through the locked doors before “galloping” towards the stage, where surveillance footage depicts him punching lockers.
The officer joined him on the stage, where he “oscillated between screaming profanities” and “singing Broadway musicals,” the letter said, kicking over music stands and sweating profusely, his speech jumbled. The officer said she held Phelps at gunpoint multiple times, telling him that she would put the gun away if he remained calm, but she couldn’t fight him.
Then, an off-duty officer who was nearby at the time of the call entered the theater and got onto the stage. He wore a West Palm Beach police shirt and had his off-duty gun on him, but no body camera.
Phelps took the officer to the ground in a struggle, according to a witness account, gaining the upper hand before the officer shot him once in the chest. Paramedics tried to save him, but he succumbed to his injuries.
The officer later told fellow officers that Phelps had tried to take his gun during the struggle, according to the officers’ body-camera footage reviewed by the State Attorney’s Office. Investigators later found Phelps’ DNA on the gun.
A coworker of Phelps also told investigators that Phelps had attacked him in the van earlier in the day, before the school incident, and he had jumped out to escape, according to the letter.
A mental health crisis
To Phelps’ friends and family, his death is evidence of a broader problem when it comes to handling mental illness.
The night before Phelps died, he was at Meany’s house in Palm Beach Gardens when he began acting strange, Meany recalled, “basically not being himself.”
Meany called the police. When they arrived, Phelps tried to instigate them, he said, perhaps because in his mental state, he was hoping they would hurt or kill him, but “they wouldn’t bite.”
Instead, they sent him to a local hospital, but not one that was equipped to handle someone with a severe mental illness — a “huge mistake,” Meany said. Within a few hours, Phelps was released.
He stayed up all night, sending Meany a string of feverish text messages where he talked about the performance they would someday do together, Meany playing bass.
The next day, Phelps went to the school, where Meany wonders if he again hoped to be killed by police. On stage, he played out a twisted version of their performance, Meany said. A witness who was there at the time told him that Phelps asked, “where’s my strings, where’s my bass, where’s my horns?”
Phelps’ mental state, Meany said, was not something that law enforcement could handle with force.
“It required a Crisis Intervention Team,” he said. “It required precision, not a hammer.”
When asked about Phelps’ DNA on the gun, Meany said that he thinks the officer should not have been in a position where Phelps was reaching for his gun in the first place.
A report by the Police Executive Research Forum recommends that officers dealing with possible “suicide by cop” situations keep their distance and avoid pointing a weapon at the person. If possible, they should call in a supervisor and a Crisis Intervention Team.
But they must also “make themselves safe and ensure public safety” before doing anything else.
Police and the State Attorney’s Office both say that the officer’s response was justified because Phelps could have hurt him or the students.
“This officer stopped a violent intruder on a school campus and his life was in danger, as stated in all the investigations,” said Mike Jachles, a spokesperson for West Palm Beach Police.
He added that Phelps “would have shot and killed the officer, no question,” and “this officer was a hero.”
The officer was placed on administrative leave for several weeks while the Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigated, Jachles said, standard protocol after any officer-involved shooting. He has since returned to full duty.
Now that the FDLE and the State Attorney’s Office have concluded their investigations, the West Palm Beach police department will conduct an internal-affairs investigation “to marry both reports,” Jachles said.
Meanwhile, Meany and Phelps’ friends and family will continue to use the nonprofit Remember Romen to help people with mental illness find an outlet through art and music, while working to ensure that all police agencies have Crisis Intervention Teams, Meany said.
Though he thinks that some part of his best friend may have wanted to die that day, he says he knows another part wanted to live.
Even in his texts the night before, Phelps told Meany that he wanted to manage his music career. He had been looking forward to putting his lighting experience to use at a new job doing electrical work for Florida Power and Light, something that may not seem beautiful to others, but was to him.
“Romen had a way of finding the art in everything,” Meany said.
