Newport firm closes amid alleged embezzlement
Relax & Co., which provided an array of services to property owners in the Lake Sunapee area, had already been forced to lay off workers earlier this month.
AG: Use of deadly force justified against Gilford teen on New Year’s Day, 2023
Mischa Fay was a teenager in a mental health crisis
The officers who responded to a Gilford home more than a year ago were legally justified in using deadly force against Mischa Fay, a teenager in a mental health crisis, the attorney general’s office announced on Thursday.
Sergeant Douglas Wall, who shot Fay, “reasonably believed that deadly force was required to defend him and others around him from what he reasonably believed to be the use of deadly force by Mischa,” said Benjamin Agati, chief of the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office Homicide Unit.
On the evening of Jan. 1, the Fay family dialed 911 for assistance for their 17-year-old son, who was armed with a knife that he had taken from the kitchen. Within two minutes of arriving at the house, Officer Nathan Ayotte deployed a Taser and Sgt. Douglas Wall shot the teenager almost simultaneously in the chest. Fay was pronounced dead at the Laconia branch of the Concord Hospital.
Mischa Fay was killed by police a little over a year ago. (Courtesy)
“I say near simultaneously because it is almost impossible to discern the difference,” Agati said.
The body camera footage revealed officers using flashlights as they approached Mischa inside the house. Officers made contact with him in the dining room with Mischa holding an 8-inch kitchen knife.
The knife was pointed out and downward.
The autopsy result revealed that Fay’s cause of death was a single gunshot that struck him in the chest just below the collar.
This was not the first time officers from the Gilford police department were called to the Fay residence for Mischa’s mental health emergencies. Records from the Gilford police department show that police were called to their home six times in the year before the shooting. Officer Nathan Ayotte and Wall had both previously responded twice to calls involving the teen’s mental health.
Despite investments in training, including an Axon virtual reality simulator that included a scenario dealing with a schizophrenic individual, the Gilford police department does not have a policy in place to respond to mental health calls.
“We don’t have a specific policy directly dealing with a mental health call,” Gilford Police Lt. Adam Vansteensberg said previously. “It’s pretty vague.”
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