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GREENSBORO — When Christian Rook, 17, felt a manic episode blow in like a storm front, family members say, he looked for shelter.

Either he would get himself arrested, as he did in December, spending 12 days in jail, or committed for treatment as he did in November, at Moses Cone Behavioral Health.

But on Feb. 2, his plan backfired, with tragic results. 

“Let’s see if we can make the news,” family members heard the teenager say, as he grabbed a 12-inch knife from the kitchen drawer.

Within minutes of that ill-conceived challenge, the bipolar teen lay dying in the afternoon sleet in front of his house, shot in the chest by a Guilford County Sheriff’s deputy answering a domestic call from the boy’s grandmother.

With autopsy results and an SBI inquiry pending, the key question for family, neighbors and law enforcement is how the scene escalated so fast, with such irrevocable results.

“Literally, from the time the officer arrived on the street to the time he fired the shots was 34 seconds,” Sheriff BJ Barnes said. “That’s not a lot of time.”

Barnes said the deputy had no options: he told investigators that Christian lunged at him with the knife. But the two family members who witnessed the shooting gave a starkly different version of events.

“You call the police hoping that they’ll help you,” said Christian’s grandmother, Diane, who placed the 911 call, and said she then watched her grandson walk toward the deputy’s car.

“Not destroy your family.”

The morning of Feb. 2 was busy for dispatchers, but inside Rook’s home off Alcorn Road near Piedmont Triad International Airport, it was another restless snow day.

Christian was the oldest of four, and both he and his 14-year-old brother were diagnosed three years ago with bipolar disorder. Their father, a Marine Corps captain, is assigned to a base in Monterey, Calif., where he is completing his master’s degree.

Christian’s parents describe their son as a charming, affectionate boy, but tormented by his illness. In California, the only psychiatrist available to the military family specialized in treating attention-deficit disorder.

Determined to find proper treatment for the boys, their mother, Christina, temporarily moved in with her mother-in-law in Greensboro last November.

Here, Christian at last had a doctor and a therapist, was adjusting to medications that made his weight fluctuate drastically.

“He had his good days and his bad days,” his mother said, “but it was like night and day from California as far as care.”

After he and his brother Chase got into a fight in December, Christian was arrested and jailed, his mother said, as the older of the two. His mother said he seemed better when he returned home, and was scheduled for a GED placement test when the snow days came.

But on Feb. 2, Christian awoke irritable, and quarreled with Chase. He then sought a confrontation with his grandmother. The boys, Christian told her, had stolen $400 from her and spent it on drugs.

“What are you going to do about it?” Christian demanded. “You just need to call the police.”

Christian wanted an argument, the grandmother could see, and she was reluctant to engage. But he then cursed at her, finally getting his wish: She called 911 to report the stolen money, but was told by the operator that she would have to see a magistrate “if there was no violence involved.”

Hearing that response, Christian upped the ante: “They want violence? Fine,” his mother recalls him saying. “Let’s see if we can make the news.”

On the second 911 call, he can be heard shouting over his grandmother’s voice, cursing for the police to come before he “cuts” someone.

Chase takes him outside, away from the two women and the two younger siblings, ages 9 and 6. He tries to calm him, but fails, goes back inside, locks the door, and leaves Christian alone.

The Sheriff’s Department dispatches Deputy Barry Glosson, a civil process server who according to Barnes is not a patrolman but has received the same training.

Glosson’s marked Crown Victoria, not using a siren and not equipped with a dashboard camera, pulls into Moutline Drive within 3 minutes. The dispatcher tells him there is a suspect with a knife threatening family members, but that the suspect is now outside the house alone.

Diane Rook meanwhile tells a dispatcher she sees Christian walking down the driveway. This is where the two accounts — the deputy’s and the family’s — differ significantly.

According to Glosson’s statement, Christian refused to drop the knife, lunged at him, and was only 12 feet away when Glosson drew his .45-caliber Smith & Wesson and fired four shots in rapid succession, hitting Christian once in the upper left chest and missing the other three times.

Chase Rook, who watched from the living-room window,  said Christian stopped in the middle of the road and held his hands above his head. At that point, Chase said, he saw his brother stumble and fall.

As Chase, Diane Rook and neighbor Melissa Smith describe it, the distance between where Christian landed and where the cruiser was parked measures 24 feet.

Smith and her father both heard the shots, and looked out a front window immediately, but did not see the shooting itself. At that point, Smith said, the deputy was walking around the front of his cruiser toward Christian, who was on the ground, shot.

On the 911 tape, the deputy tells the dispatcher immediately after the shooting that he is rendering assistance, and Barnes said the officer gave first aid. Smith, the neighbor, disputed that statement. Rook’s mother said the deputy took the teen’s pulse, but gave no first aid. Once the other units began arriving — Smith said she counted 27 police and sheriff’s cars — Glosson was taken away in an SUV and then to an ambulance with chest pains.

According to the Smiths and the Rook family, Christian was left lying on the ground unattended. He sat up once and complained of trouble breathing, his mother said.

On the 911 tape, a dispatcher is heard advising deputies that an ambulance cannot reach Christian because of the roadblock at Alcorn and Moutline. Barnes said the youth died en route to the hospital, and a trauma nurse who spoke to the family told Christina Rook that Christian died from internal pressure.

His father, a pistol sharpshooter and rifle expert, questions the deputy’s training.

“How come this officer didn’t give my son any kind of chance?” Chad Rook asked. “There was no talking. Just, 'Shoot now, ask questions later.’ ”

Barnes declined a request for an interview with Glosson, who has worked for the department for 10 years, because he is considered a witness in the ongoing SBI investigation. As to the father’s question, Barnes said Glosson had no choice.

“The officer challenged him (to stop) the whole way up the driveway,” Barnes said. “He could have followed the officer’s command and dropped the knife. It was all in his hands.”

The family argued that because Christian was outside by himself — neighbors say the street was deserted in the cold rain — he posed no threat except to himself.

Barnes counters that officers cannot allow armed suspects who have reportedly threatened people to escape. Simply waiting in the cruiser for backup to arrive, Barnes says, was not an option.

Out of 26,721 calls last year, he observes, 337 involved armed suspects, and in most cases, the arrival of the officer was enough to de-escalate the situation and disarm the suspect.

Nevertheless, the case renewed calls by mental health advocates for Crisis Intervention Training for law enforcement in Guilford County, the last large county in North Carolina to lack such training.

Though Barnes said he has been assured by the Guilford Center that current training is sufficient, one sergeant has completed CIT, and two more officers will attend in March.

Widely considered “best practice” by law enforcement nationwide, the 40-hour course teaches about de-escalation tactics and mental illness.

“These are proven methods. It’s certainly not an anti-police program,” said Mike Weaver, a state board member of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. “It can mean the difference between someone dying and not dying.”

At Christian’s funeral service, in contrast to the troubled teen seen on the news, a picture emerged of a boy loved by his younger siblings and friends, struggling mightily against an illness that is inscrutable and unpredictable.

His mother went to special parenting classes, drove him 120 miles each way to residential treatment programs, and sat with him at a 2½-hour GED orientation, the only parent there. He was to have taken a placement test Feb. 1, but it was postponed by snow. A day later, he lay dying, and his mother never got to say goodbye.

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn@news-record.com