Parties have settled in a lawsuit claiming police used unnecessary SWAT-style measures on a Fairbanks man amid a mental health crisis in 2023.
Fairbanks judge Thomas Temple approved the final judgment on Thursday in favor of Philip Wrobel, 59, who sued the Alaska Department of Public Safety and multiple individual police officers last September. The deal, which was offered by state attorneys, is worth $500,000 and comes about nine months after the suit was first filed.
The original complaint alleges that officers recklessly escalated force when they deployed tear gas and pepper spray inside the plaintiff’s home, beat him and fired less-lethal rounds at him in October 2023. His wife of about 35 years, Heidi Wrobel, said in an interview that some of those rounds caused serious injuries.
“He was shot at close range in the face – fractured his orbital socket, fractured his jaw. I don’t know how he survived it,” she said.
Photos from after the encounter show her husband with bloodied eyes and continuous bruising that stretched from his forehead to chest.
Heidi Wrobel told KUAC she watched the incident from outside the home that night because Troopers wouldn’t allow her to intervene and held her down the street. She said officers broke down their front door, and she recalled finding smashed windows, taser barbs and lights that had been shot out.
Photos also show flashbangs near their home, and Heidi Wrobel said their family is still living in a rental because the damage to the house was so severe.
“The officers that were there were in tactical gear, so it looks like the military is storming your house. And you’re dealing with somebody who is in a mental health crisis,” she said. “This is just not the way that it should have been handled.”
According to his wife, who works at a mental health clinic in Fairbanks, Philip Wrobel has bipolar disorder and was in the middle of a manic episode at the time. She said she’d been concerned because he hadn’t eaten or slept for about a week, but that he wasn’t acting violent. Online court records also do not show that her husband was charged with any crime in connection with the incident nor any event leading up to or following it.
Heidi Wrobel said she never requested police presence and instead had contacted the Fairbanks Mobile Crisis team in hopes of receiving more specialized support.
But she said Alaska State Troopers (AST) became increasingly involved: The crisis team obtained a court order to transport Philip Wrobel for an evaluation, and she anticipated them to follow up, but Troopers brought an armored vehicle and lined the street that night instead.
She said the response was completely inappropriate and seemed more like a movie scene than professional policing.
“It’s like they brought the entire arsenal with them [to] try everything out,” she said.
Anchorage-based attorney Jeff Barber is one of the lawyers representing Philip Wrobel, and he said the state made the final judgment offer soon after releasing incident reports to the plaintiffs earlier this summer.
“We didn’t know who did what until they released it, and then all of the sudden we’ve got incident reports from all the different people involved,” he told KUAC Monday.
Originally, the lawsuit didn’t identify specific officers, instead calling them John Does. Now, an amended complaint names nine members of law enforcement who plaintiffs believe participated in excessive force.
The identified defendants are AST Captain Eric Spitzer, AST Lieutenant Michael Roberts, AST Trooper Trevor Norris, AST Trooper Brian Hibbs, University of Alaska Fairbanks Police Department Officer Kelly Copeland, Fairbanks Police Department Officer Cody Taylor, DPS Deputy Fire Marshal Kyle Carrington, AST Sergeant Lucas Altepeter and AST Investigator Nicholas Sailer.
In addition to claims against the police, the original and amended complaints contain allegations about standards at the Department of Public Safety. The suit says officers were inadequately trained and were following outdated procedures that discriminate against people suffering from mental illness.
The two parties are at odds about whether their agreement resolves the allegations against the state department and the individual officers, or just the state.
“Our position is that we can still persist and maintain those claims against the officers involved in the incident,” Barber said. “There’s some things that the state’s liable for and some things that the officers, individually, are liable for.”
A spokesperson for the Alaska Department of Law didn’t respond to a request for comment, but court documents indicate that the state takes the opposite position, arguing that the judgment concludes the claims against both the state and members of law enforcement.
In their settlement offer, state attorneys wrote that the judgment is a compromise and “not to be construed as an admission of any negligence or breach of any duty or any fault or liability.”
For the Wrobels, that wasn’t a dealbreaker. Heidi Wrobel said the $500,000 may not feel like justice, but that it’s still some sort of result for the family.
“They didn’t have to verbally admit to it. They made the offer. They agreed to a half a million dollars. They were wrong. What they did was wrong,” she said.
She said she also hopes the suit continues against the police officers separately. As of Tuesday afternoon, online court records suggested that the case is still open, though Temple – after signing off on the final judgment – deemed moot Barber’s amended complaint that named the individual officers.
AST spokesperson Austin McDaniel declined to answer questions about claims in the case or internal investigations, saying that he was unable to offer information outside of the legal process and that “[a]ll personnel information is confidential.”
McDaniel wrote in an email that the department provides eight hours of in-depth mental health response training to new Troopers at the academy in Sitka and “regularly provides recurring and more advanced training to Troopers throughout their career.”
This story has been updated to reflect that Heidi Wrobel found the damage to the windows on her and her husband's home rather than seeing that damage happen.