Miami Police Cleared in Shooting of Mentally Ill Man Brandishing Screwdriver

The Miami-Dade State Attorney's Office (SAO) has cleared a City of Miami police officer in the shooting of a mentally ill Black man armed with a screwdriver.

The state attorney's office found that City of Miami police officer Kassandra Mercado acted lawfully when she fired six rounds of bullets into then 47-year-old Donald Armstrong, who was reportedly high on ecstasy and experiencing a mental health crisis when officers surrounded him on his Liberty City porch last March.

While the SAO's eight-page closeout memo (attached at the bottom of this story) states that Mercado fired her weapon at Armstrong after he began "advancing directly towards Officer Mercado" and was in "close proximity," body-camera footage shows that Mercado began shooting Armstrong as he fell to the ground as a result of being tased.

"I feel like when the police are called in our neighborhoods, they come to hunt...they're not there to de-escalate the situation...they're there to blow it out of proportion," Armstrong, who survived the shooting but was reportedly left paralyzed, told WPLG Local 10. "And my case is a prime example of that." On March 7, 2024, Armstrong's mom called 911 to report that her son was having a mental breakdown outside their home at Northwest 58th Street and 7th Court near Liberty City, a neighborhood home to nearly 50,000 residents and a majority Black population.

Officers arrived and saw Armstrong walking in the middle of the street, waving his arms in the air and yelling at nobody in particular, according to the SAO's closeout memo. Upon noticing that he had a "sharp object" in his hand, officers began to give loud, repeated commands for him to drop it.

The officers' body camera footage shows Armstrong standing on his home's front porch holding a mangled, handmade screwdriver as nine officers surround him and demand that he drop it. (While the closeout memo describes the object as "some kind of makeshift homemade weapon that appeared to be constructed from a screwdriver," Armstrong said he didn't see the item as a weapon, describing the roughly 13-inch object instead as "a little wand.")
According to the memo, Armstrong's mom tried several times, unsuccessfully, to remove the screwdriver from his hands, while Armstrong could be heard repeatedly telling her "No" and yelling "Shoot! Shoot in the heart," before an officer pulled his mother away.

As Armstrong continued to behave erratically, at one point pulling up his shirt to expose his torso and raising his hands above his head, with the screwdriver still in his right hand, one officer discharged his Taser, striking Armstrong's torso. Armstrong responded by yelling, "I am God," and removing the prongs from his body.

However, while the memo states that Armstrong "began moving forward towards the officers" when the officer deployed his Taser a second time, body-worn camera footage shows Armstrong falling to the ground from the shock of the Taser and Mercado immediately firing ten rounds of shots and striking him six times.

"I just keep hearing these, these loud shots and I'm not even realizing I'm being shot," Armstrong previously told CBS News. "I have an officer on the ground with me. I'm looking at him in his eyes and I'm saying, 'why, why, why' I said, 'man, y'all trying to kill me.'"

Armstrong's case is part of a troubling pattern of officers in Miami-Dade County meeting civilians in mental distress with deadly force.

Following the shooting, community groups including members of the Healing and Justice Center (HJC), a collective made up of the Circle of Brotherhood, Dade County Street Response, Dream Defenders, and Touching Miami with Love, denounced Miami police officers for their handling of the situation, arguing it could have been handled better by the Freedom House Mobile Crisis Unit, a civilian group that urges residents suffering similar crises to Armstrong to call it instead of police.
While police arrested Armstrong for aggravated assault on a law enforcement officer and resisting an officer without violence following the encounter – in a move his attorney, civil rights lawyer Ben Crump, previously called "smoke and mirrors" – the SAO dropped all the charges more than six months later.

"This is a man who was having a mental health crisis, so why would you charge him for a crime of any type, unless you're trying to cover up for the wanton, willful excessive use of force that we saw exhibited on that video," Crump said.

Crump said that incidents like this happen too frequently in the Black community, particularly in Armstrong's Miami neighborhood.

"We've experienced this in the Black community far too often, especially in the greater Liberty City area of Miami," Crump previously told WLRN, "where blacks are routinely profiled, and then have their constitutional rights violated in the most egregious ways."