A transgender man was in mental distress. Police wound up killing him

This struggle would continue into early adulthood, when he began telling people that he was transitioning. He took the name Jasper Aaron Lynch, or Aaron, as he liked to be called.

Friends, loved ones, teachers and neighbors said Aaron was an exceptionally smart youth, capable of using logic to outargue almost anyone. He was widely read in philosophy, theology and spirituality. He wrote poetry, was a straight-A student and made friends easily, his family said.

But people not recognizing his gender brought on bouts of extreme sadness, his family said. He was diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder, a condition often brought on by trauma that can cause a person to feel disconnected from their sense of self, a feeling that their external presence is not them, experts say. He regularly saw a therapist and participated in mental health programs.

Then, on the evening of July 7, 2022, his family said, Aaron, 26, experienced a psychotic episode — which they think was the culmination of his years of mental health struggles — and was fatally shot by a Fairfax County officer who had been called to help.

“When you’re misgendered,” his mother, Kathy Lynch, said in April in the family’s first interview since the shooting, “it becomes a daily trauma of not being seen.”

When Fairfax police officers arrived at the family home that night, Aaron, 5-foot-5 and about 140 pounds, ran toward them inside the house, wielding a wine bottle “like a hatchet,” according to an investigative report released in April by the Fairfax County commonwealth’s attorney. The report says that one officer tackled Aaron while another fired four shots at him. When Aaron got off the floor, the officer fired a shot point blank into his neck, killing him, police body-camera footage shows.

In releasing an account of the shooting nearly two years after it occurred, Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve T. Descano said his office had determined that the deadly force was justified. Fairfax police are returning the officer to duty. The department said it has given all officers additional training on handling calls for help involving mentally unstable people and has improved the availability of mental health clinicians to assist with such calls.

Descano’s office declined to comment on the shooting beyond the investigative report.

The sudden loss of Aaron devastated his parents. Kathy Lynch and her husband, Patrick, a retired energy and finance lawyer, said they are preparing to file a lawsuit against the county over their son’s death.

“I know he’s sitting here, like, ‘Mom, do something,’ and I don’t know what to do,” Kathy said. “The only thing we have is a lawsuit. But what else?”

“If we can wave a magic wand,” her husband said, it would be to have mental health clinicians available to help police around-the-clock. “To know that somebody in our situation … can get somebody qualified,” Patrick said. “If somebody said, ‘You can get that,’ that’s all I want.”

“So other families don’t have to face this,” Kathy said.

‘Tremendous shame and anger’

Fairfax police said they have improved their mental health training and staffing since the shooting. The entire department has now been trained in a program called Integrating Communications, Assessment, and Tactics, or ICAT, which teaches officers how to deal with volatile situations in which a person in crisis does not have a gun, Capt. Joanna Culkin said.

About one-third of the department had such training as of March 2023, according to an independent report. In addition, 44 percent of officers have received crisis-intervention training, which provides more in-depth guidance on handling people who are experiencing mental health problems, Culkin said.

Also, Fairfax police now have eight officers on call around-the-clock, one of whom is supposed to join a mental health clinician from the county’s Community Services Board as a “co-responder” team for emergency calls. No clinician was available when the Lynches made the second of two 911 calls on the night their son was shot, and none of the three officers involved in the incident had received ICAT training, according to a report by the Police Executive Research Forum, a policing think tank.

Fairfax responded to 14,653 calls for mental health service in 2023, according to police statistics, but the department did not track how many of those had a clinician accompanying officers.

Aaron and his fraternal twin sister were born in March 1996. Their older brother, Will, had been born nearly three years earlier. Aaron wore boys’ clothes, short hair and baseball caps and dressed as Batman for Halloween, his mother said.

His parents didn’t know about his exchange with the nanny when he was 3, but he later told his mother that he remembered “tremendous shame and anger because he was laughed at.” The nanny told Aaron he was being silly, but the moment stuck with him, and Kathy said that Aaron later thought he “slowly just started to dissociate” from his male identity.

Aaron graduated from the Potomac School in McLean and went to Wesleyan University in Connecticut, experimenting with drugs and struggling in school, which stunned his parents, Kathy said. He took a year’s leave, then transferred to Smith College, enrolling in a gender studies class and meeting other transgender and nonbinary students.

His family supported Aaron and found him a therapist who was familiar with transgender issues. At age 20, his parents said, he began transitioning by having top surgery, which involves removing breast tissue and creating a masculine or nonbinary appearance to the chest. But he remained unhappy at home and eventually moved to Boston, where his brother lived. There, he began a relationship with a woman that, his parents said, ended after several months.

“He felt connected,” Kathy said of that relationship, “and, for the first time in his life, seen for all that he was.”

In spring 2022, Aaron moved back in with his parents and attended college remotely. Patrick had recently retired, and in July that year, he and Kathy planned to drive to Colorado for a vacation. While they were traveling, they learned that Aaron’s former romantic partner in Boston had died, and they offered to come home. “I do not want you to turn around,” his mother recalled him saying. “I’m fine. I’m grieving.”

“He was adamant,” she said.

On the morning of July 7, with his parents away, Aaron didn’t show up for his therapy session. The therapist, who was very concerned, notified the Lynches. Aaron’s twin sister, Tory Lynch, who lives in New York, said she texted Aaron, and “I got some type of nonsensical text. I was like, this is bad.” She booked an Acela train ticket to D.C. with her boyfriend and then spoke with Aaron by phone.

“It was like he was kind of aware that he was losing his mind,” she said. “You could see the decline basically as the day went on.”

Tory asked a friend to go check on Aaron. Patrick and Kathy, in the Rocky Mountains by then, decided to head home. Tory’s friend arrived at the Lynches’ home in McLean, and when Aaron slammed a phone charger into the ground, the friend called 911.

Kathy was also on the phone — it was the first time, she said, she had to involve authorities over Aaron’s mental health. She said she told a Fairfax 911 call-taker: “I can’t have just regular police officers. I need people who really understand mental health. I think what’s happening to my son is he’s having a mental breakdown, like a psychotic break.” She recalled, “He’s asking for help, and I just said he’s never been like this before.”

Transgender people are more than twice as likely as the population at large to have experienced serious mental health struggles such as depression, according to a Washington Post-KFF poll conducted in 2022. Medical providers say this is likely a product of the social stigma.

Around 7:25 p.m., three officers and a mental health clinician arrived at the home, in the 6900 block of Arbor Lane, but Aaron had vanished. The Lynches gave police permission to enter the house, but officers couldn’t find him inside or in the neighborhood, which was searched by Officer Edward K. George, then a 10-year member of the force. The police and clinician eventually left.

About 8:30 p.m., Tory and her boyfriend arrived at Arbor Lane. By then, she said, Aaron had taken framed artworks from upstairs and thrown them to the downstairs foyer. Her brother was asking about people from high school, and “he just seemed completely gone. And I backed out the door. … And as I’m leaving out the door, Aaron calls out to me, and I turn around. And the last words he ever said to me were, ‘Call 911.’ And I said, ‘That’s what we’re going to do.’”

Tory said her brother seemed scared, and “I think back to when we were in preschool and you’re just told, ‘When you’re in danger, call 911.’”

‘Are my parents here?’

From the family RV in Colorado, Kathy reached the clinician who had visited the house earlier that evening and declined to return. She said the clinician told her that officers trained in crisis intervention would be dispatched.

Officers Nicholas J. Kirsch and Kyoung S. Pak, along with Officer George, were sent to the Lynches’ home, and they met with Tory outside. The three officers discussed possibly taking Aaron into custody and having him committed to a mental health facility. Tory agreed, saying she hoped her brother would voluntarily go with them.

The officers entered the darkened foyer shortly before 9 p.m., and almost immediately, Aaron appeared, holding a decorative wooden mask and a wine bottle, police body-camera footage shows. The officers didn’t approach Aaron but called out to him. “Are my parents here?” Aaron asked. The officers told Aaron that he wasn’t in trouble and reminded him that he had asked for 911 to be called, the video footage shows.

Pacing back and forth, Aaron slammed the mask on a table, causing two of the officers to unholster their Tasers. The officers repeatedly told Aaron to put the mask down, but instead, he hurled it at them. Pak fired his Taser at Aaron, but it either didn’t completely strike him or had no effect, the body-camera video shows.

Next, Aaron raised the wine bottle and started to make a chopping motion, the video shows. Then he ran toward the front door, where Kirsch was standing. Kirsch fired his Taser, but Aaron kept coming.

“He came running straight toward the front door,” Kirsch told a supervisor minutes later, according to his body-camera footage, “at which point I lowered my shoulder into him and tackled him to the ground.” In his report, Descano, the commonwealth’s attorney, said that repeated viewing of the incident revealed that Aaron dropped the bottle before making contact with Kirsch, but in the darkness, the officers couldn’t see that.

George, standing to the side of Kirsch, told investigators that he thought Aaron posed a danger to his fellow officer, so he fired four shots as Aaron neared Kirsch. George had left his Taser in his cruiser, a police auditor report stated. When Aaron started to stand up and move toward the door, the video shows, George shot him in the neck at close range.

The auditor’s report said George’s failure to have his Taser on him “was identified as a clear policy violation” by the internal affairs unit, but the auditor did not say what, if any, discipline George received for that. Fairfax police declined to make George, Kirsch or Pak available for comment, and the department did not have further comment on the shooting. The head of the Fairfax chapter of the Southern States Police Benevolent Association, a union that represents Fairfax officers, did not return a call seeking comment.

Descano described the collision with Kirsch as “a struggle” and said it was “not unreasonable” for George to think that Aaron still held the wine bottle and could have bludgeoned Kirsch with it, or broken the bottle and stabbed Kirsch. “I conclude that Officer George acted in an objectively reasonable manner,” Descano wrote in April.

The Lynches said that they met with Descano in December 2022 and that the prosecutor told them he would review the case closely. Then, the couple said, they didn’t hear from him again until April, when he called to say he would be clearing George of any criminal liability. The Lynches said Descano told them he had hired an outside use-of-force expert to review the case, which delayed his ruling for 21 months.

At a memorial service, mourners recalled Aaron’s sense of humor and brilliant intellect.

“Aaron taught me much more than any therapy books ever have,” his therapist, Cara Segal, said. “Aaron taught me that if we are not telling the truth — the deepest and hardest layers of our own personal truth — then what version of oneself is being loved, anyway?”