BY BETH VELLIQUETTE

bvelliquette@heraldsun.com; 918-1042

CHAPEL HILL -- Questions still revolve around the 911 tapes involving the death of UNC student Courtland Benjamin Smith at the hands of an Archdale police officer.

Some people have interpreted Smith's statement that he was trying to kill himself, not as a suicide threat, but as a statement that he was out of control and was worried he might accidentally kill himself.

Some believe that Smith, who claimed to have a gun but apparently did not, may have been setting the stage for an "officer-assisted suicide," more commonly known as suicide by cop.

"I e-mailed anything that anyone needed to know to my parents," he said after he told the dispatcher he was driving drunk, speeding, trying to kill himself and had a 9 mm pistol in his back pocket.

Officer-assisted suicide means that a person provokes a law enforcement officer into using lethal force, sometimes by drawing a weapon on the officer or, possibly in this case, making an officer believe he was reaching for a gun.

In one of the 911 tapes, a voice that appears to be Smith's repeats that he has to get something out of his car, and on a concurrent tape, an officer tells the dispatcher that Smith is getting back into his car. Within just a few seconds, the officer shouts that the subject was down and shots had been fired.

Suicide is the third leading cause of death of males between the ages of 10 and 24, said Jane Ann Miller, who studies suicides for the Violence Prevention Program at the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services.

Alcohol is often linked to officer-assisted suicides, Miller said.

Miller said she listened to the 911 call Smith made and said it was difficult to know what Smith was thinking, although he did mention some type of correspondence.

"It would be telling to see what he said in that," she said.

In an interview with The Chapel Hill Herald, Chancellor Holden Thorp said Smith's father, Pharr Smith, indicated the pressures of college and "to be a leader and a friend were great."

Thorp referred to Smith's death as a suicide, and said that is how police reported it to university officials.

Jim Huegerich, director of the crisis unit at the Chapel Hill Police Department, is considered an expert statewide in dealing with police shootings, whether it's a police officer who shoots someone or a police officer who gets shot.

He is often dispatched to communities that have had a shooting to help the various people, whether it's dispatchers, police officers, or families of the victims.

He has not been contacted about the Archdale shooting, he said.

From listening to the 911 call, it appeared Smith said things to make law enforcement officers believe it was a dangerous situation, he said.

"You're going in knowing you have a volatile situation," he said. "Typically drugs or alcohol are involved."

An officer is trained to negotiate with someone who is suicidal, but sometimes an officer has only a fraction of a second to make a life-or-death decision, he said.

For police it begins with tactical training to make an automatic response.

Even without a report of Smith claiming to have a gun, the officers likely would have conducted a high-risk felony stop with their guns drawn when they pulled Smith over, Huegerich said.

"If somebody is saying they got a gun, I'm going to believe that," he said.

Matt Sullivan, another crisis counselor at the Chapel Hill Police Department, teaches officers about mental health issues. He said North Carolina is starting an officer-training program that came out of a shooting in Memphis in which an officer shot and killed a mentally ill man.

Wake County was the first in North Carolina to provide the 40-hour training program for its officers, and it's expected the training will be provided to officers in Orange County, he said.