Colin Jennings’ favorite thing to do with his hands was make a mini-heart gesture involving two fingers — the Korean symbol for love.
It’s one of the things his mother, Yolanda Jennings, remembers most about her 26-year-old son.
“He was a very sweet, kind, funny guy who struggled with mental health issues for a very long time,” she said in an interview Monday. “He wanted to hurt himself, but he never wanted to hurt anyone else.”
Colin Jennings died in a police shooting Thursday after a Columbus police officer shot him outside an apartment building in the 500 block of North Nelson Road.
Columbus police released body camera footage of the encounter Monday that showed the shooting. In the footage, Jennings can be seen with a large knife raised in his right hand as he advances toward an officer. One officer deployed his stun gun, after backing up and tell Jennngs to drop his gun, while the other fired his weapon three times, striking Jennings at least once.
The 911 call that brought police to the complex around 9:30 a.m. Thursday, which is nearly 10 minutes long, is one of the sticking points in the entire painful situation for Yolanda Jennings.
“In the call, the person told them repeatedly that he was in crisis, that he had a history of being suicidal,” Jennings said. “He said in the call that (Colin) had tried a couple of times in the last couple of weeks. There was plenty of information that they had to have known, that they should have known and should have been passed on to the police before they got there. There would have been enough time, that if the correct mental health task force would have been in place, to possibly help my son.”
Jennings’ mother lives near Philadelphia and said she was aware of one prior incident with her son in crisis but was unaware of others until hearing the 911 call made Thursday by Jennings’ boyfriend.
Advocates respond to Columbus police shooting of Colin Jennings
Chana Wiley, an advocate with Columbus Safety Collective, said Colin Jennings’ death is a failure by the city to protect its most vulnerable residents.
“It has not been their child or their family or their loved one. We need to push forward, and we need our program staffed immediately. We could have saved his life,” Wiley said.
Columbus Safety Collective has been advocating for years for a better non-police response to mental health crises. In February 2023, the City Council approved $1.2 million in funding for a pilot program that would have no police response. However, that program is not fully operational.
The city’s Right Response Unit, which includes specially trained clinicians to take 911 calls that involve mental health crises in instances where there are no weapons involved or violence, and several other alternative response programs have been allocated more than $7 million in Mayor Andrew J. Ginther’s proposed 2024 operating budget.
‘He was in pain himself’
Police said Monday that Jennings’ boyfriend called 911 to say Jennings had a knife and was threatening violence. Within 45 seconds of the 911 call beginning, the caller told dispatchers Jennings had attempted to punch him, would not let him leave the apartment and was threatening him.
Ken Coontz, support services administrator for the Department of Public Safety, said Monday the Right Response Unit has fielded nearly 7,000 calls since it started in 2022 and almost 2,000 have been resolved with no police response.
Coontz said because of the threats of violence, both by Jennings toward himself and toward the 911 caller, a police response was required.
Yolanda Jennings said in watching the body camera footage from the shooting, she recognized her son was in crisis.
“It was obvious he wasn’t trying to hurt them. He was in pain himself,” she said. “He was a person who loved everybody, and he just wanted to be loved as well. Everywhere he went, he spread love.”
Jennings’ mother also said she felt the officers who responded, who are not being identified by Columbus police, did not wait long enough after a stun gun was used before shooting her son.
“They didn’t even give it a chance. They shot him, like it was simultaneous,” she said. “If you’re going to use non-lethal force and you don’t even let it take hold before you start shooting, that’s a problem.”
Wiley said the city needs to be more responsible in how it handles calls like Thursday’s. That includes being more proactive in reaching out to apartment communities like the one where Jennings lived, which is sponsored by the Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Board of Franklin County so that officers know where they are going before an incident.
Coontz said Monday that an internal review showed the Nelson Road apartments were not flagged internally before Thursday’s shooting as being home to many residents with mental health needs. He said the Department of Public Safety does not proactively review its system for other potential lapses, saying the department will take its cues from individual organizations and communities.
“We want to be respectful and take that from their cue and not our own,” he said.
For Wiley and other advocates, that answer isn’t enough.
“It’s on the city to do the work. If our program was staffed and up and running, we would absolutely do that, and we would love to do that,” Wiley said. “We would love to take it out of the police’s hands and let them handle more violent crime.”
“It’s beyond training at this point, and it just needs to be taken out of their hands,” Wiley said.
Yolanda Jennings has retained Columbus attorney Sean Walton, who represents other families who have lost loved ones in police shootings, including Casey Goodson Jr. and Ta’Kiya Young.
Walton said his firm is beginning its investigation into the shooting and evaluating all options, including potential litigation.
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